Eastern York officials say McGraw Hill will send technical team after teachers cite assessment errors

District administrators told the Eastern York School Board that McGraw Hill has acknowledged multiple technical problems in a district pilot and is preparing to send product and technical staff to meet teachers on site. Administration said teachers reported assessment-item tagging errors, scoring mismatches with the gradebook, drag-and-drop usability problems in K–5 items, and robotic text-to-speech output that impedes student comprehension. McGraw Hill representatives committed to fixes and to bring a team to Eastern York on March 17 to observe issues firsthand and work with teachers.

The district’s academic leader summarized steps already taken: gathered teacher reports, met with McGraw Hill executives (including the company president), and asked teachers to prepare specific examples by unit so the vendor can reproduce and repair item-level problems. He said McGraw Hill was working on two larger enhancements—a mathematical-equivalence engine for grading numerical answers and improved fuzzy matching for misspellings—and expected a text-to-speech software update within days.

Board members asked for a contingency plan if the fixes are insufficient. Administration said it will give the vendor “a couple more months” to implement corrections while preparing a plan B to evaluate alternative products, and will not commit to a full adoption until the technical issues are resolved. Several trustees urged that teachers receive a clear way to log and escalate errors; administration said it will provide unit-by-unit submission templates for errors and follow up with teachers before the next board meeting.

The superintendent emphasized the district will not rush a purchase: the pilot remains under review and, if problems persist, the district will begin evaluating other math programs and teacher-facing tools. The district will report back to the board after the vendor visit and earlier if significant progress is made.