Not a single area school corporation was happy about the spring 2015 ISTEP results released this past January.
Changes made to the state exams pushed back grading, McGraw-Hill Education CTB President Ellen Haley told the State Board of Education in August of last year. State lawmakers killed ISTEP seven months ago because of such problems with test administration and technology.
Wednesday we learned legislators anticipate a long delay before introducing ISTEP’s replacement test.
ISTEP replacement study committee chairwoman Nicole Fama told her members Tuesday they won’t be able to recommend a new standardized test for the 2017-18 school year, The Associated Press reported. Senate Education Committee chairman Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, said the Legislature likely will have to require schools to use ISTEP for “a few more years.”
In an op-ed we published in February 2015, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz assured readers she remains “a proponent for strong teacher and school accountability,” but she has “concerns regarding school and teacher accountability based upon these new assessments.”
She should. Just 53.5 percent of Hoosier students passed both the math and English/language arts sections of ISTEP in the spring of 2015.
For our money, the real measuring stick for a school or teacher is not the overall passing percentage on an exam such as ISTEP, but how individual students are performing on the test compared to how they performed a year ago.
It’s good to know whether more students passed the test than passed it last year, but the real measure of success should be whether individual students are making progress.
Those at the top of the scale should be climbing ever higher, and those at the bottom should be inching closer to the passing rate.
The goal of our public education system, after all, is to make certain every student gains the knowledge needed to achieve his or her potential.
Focusing only on the passing rates of standardized tests such as ISTEP can lead educators to concentrate on students near the threshold, pushing as many as possible over the top.
What we need instead is to focus on every student, to make sure that, truly, no child is left behind.