Persistence paid off for Greg Parsley, superintendent of the Vincennes Community School Corp., who this week finally got the Indiana Department of Education to acknowledge that something was amiss with the sixth- and seventh-graders' scores on the math portion of the ISTEP.
Recall that when results from this spring's testing were finally released the scores for some Clark Middle School students just didn't add up: they didn't match up with what school officials had expected they'd be given either the previous year's scores or the results of earlier tests intended to predict likely ISTEP outcomes for the students.
And the worst scores came from students in the classroom that experienced the most-extensive computer glitches during the test taking.
Given the evidence, Parsley began lobbying state officials to take a look at what happened at Clark and make some adjustment.
For a good while it didn't seem anything was going to be done to redress what was seen to be by just about everyone except those in charge a legitimate grievance.
Somewhat unexpectedly (and perhaps even inexplicably), this week the state announced that Parsley was right, that results for those Clark students didn't square with their past performances, and the grades where raised to square with what Parsley and other school officials thought they should have been in the first place.
Which means that whereas Clark Middle School had been awarded a D under the state's (also inexplicable) grading system, it should now receive a more-respectable grade of C.
To outsiders that may not seem like a big deal — to be told your school is merely average — but given where the school was not that long ago (failing and on the verge of being taken over by the state) and all the hard work that's been put into improving it, a C grade truly is something to celebrate.
This whole matter just highlights the problem we have with staking so much on the outcome of a single test.
There's a kind of winner-take-all-approach to this system that to us only serves to skew what education should really be about: all emphasis is placed on doing well on ISTEP and nothing else really matters — for the school and especially for the student — but success on this one test.
When the scores tuen out not to be high enough then students, schools and even whole communities are seen to have failed.
Whole curricula have been developed aimed at doing well on ISTEP, with pretty much all else that goes on in the course of the school year subjugated to that one week of testing.
Schools even hold pep sessions to fire up their students for taking the test, to rally them to go out there and bring honor to themselves, their school and their community — TO WIN!
And yet, come test day, bad things can happen, completely outside the control of school officials and especially the students themselves — outbreaks of flu and other illnesses, events outside school that disturb the community's usual equilibrium — which can undermine all the prior preparation, reducing the relevancy of the test score as an accurate indication of a student's academic abilities.
We're not sure a student's worth can be accurately measured by the results of a single test; we don't believe a student's worth should be measured by the results of a single test.
Nor do we believe a school's "value" can be assessed based in large measure on a single year's test scores.
And here's where we're likely to remain for some time to come.