The 23-person panel tasked with designing a replacement for the ISTEP testing system set a vision for standardized testing in Indiana at their meeting this month.
The vision statement says, “Indiana looks to design an assessment system that is student-centered and provides meaningful and timely information to educators and parents on both a student’s on-grade proficiency level and growth toward Indiana’s College and Career Ready standards.”
The panel agreed on a vision statement, but there’s still a lot of “professional disagreement” about how to put it into practice, said Chrisney Elementary principal Julie Kemp.
“The big sticking point right now is that some members of the committee don’t seem to be able to give up the need or to sort and grade schools (based on test scores),” Kemp said.
Kemp was appointed to the panel by Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz and is the only local school official on the panel.
Kemp said it seems like Indiana wants to have it all — a test that offers timely assessment of and information on students’ progress and skills and an assessment that can be used to evaluate teachers and schools. The issue is that those goals require different kinds of tests.
To assess skills and get educators timely information, Indiana needs a formative assessment, which tests students at increments throughout the year to measure development and gives educators immediate results. To evaluate teachers and schools, Indiana needs a summative assessment, which is what ISTEP is. A summative assessment is a one-time test that looks at the outcome of a school year. A summative assessment can’t help educators improve student instruction while the students being tested are still in class. By the time the students take the test, the year’s instruction is complete, and by the time the educators get the test results, the students who were tested have already advanced to the next grade level. This year, for example, most Indiana schools have been back in session for a week or two, but schools still don’t have access to the data from last year’s ISTEP test.
“The end-of-year tests don’t help me as a teacher,” Kemp said.
Kemp said experts on the panel have shown models that would give Indiana a test that offers the information of both a formative and summative test, but it would increase test time, which already takes seven to nine hours and spans at least one week.
“We can test students two hours a day, max,” Kemp said. “They just don’t have the attention span for more than that.”
The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act allows states to stop tying teaching and school evaluations to test scores, and some members of the panel have suggested severing the tie. Other members are worried about how teachers and schools would be evaluated without using the test, the Associated Press reported. Kemp said there hasn’t been discussion of how to evaluate teachers without test scores.
“No one wants to touch that,” Kemp said. “The big question for me is, have we created a better education system because we tied teacher evaluation and pay to test scores? There’s no proof.”
The one thing all panel members seem to agree on is that standardized assessment is important, and Kemp said Indiana’s College and Career Readiness standards themselves are good.
The panel has until December to come up with a proposal for the legislature. The Indiana Legislature then has the option to make the panel’s suggestion law, come up with something different or do nothing.
“I’m very worried about where this going to end,” Kemp said.
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