Indiana legislators taking steps which they hope will fix ISTEP

One measure, House Bill 1003, would prevent the 2015 ISTEP scores and A-to-F accountability grades from being used as factors in teacher performance evaluations. The second, Senate Bill 200, specifies that a school's A-to-F accountability grade for 2014-15 cannot be lower than the school's grade for 2013-14.

Both measures now move to the full House and Senate for consideration where they appear likely to be approved.

Rep. Terri Austin, D-Anderson, a member of the House Education Committee, said Friday that fast-tracking these proposals is a good first step in overhauling Indiana's testing system, and praised Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz for working to "correct what is wrong with ISTEP and its place in our educational system."

"The facts have proven her to be correct, and now it is not a question of if reforms will take place, but when," Austin said.

One of the significant challenges, she said, is the pace of change over the past five years. Austin said there have been 111 significant policy changes that have affected public education in Indiana.

"What we really need to do is stop making changes every year and give people time to understand and implement those changes," Austin said. "We should monitor how they are working, only take action when absolutely necessary, and leave things alone for awhile."

To understand how Indiana got to this point of utter frustration over how students, teachers and schools are evaluated, it's helpful to look back five years to the debates over national Common Core State Standards.

Remember Common Core?

It's the set of national standards a council of state governors crafted to ensure that students graduating high school are ready to enter college or begin careers.

With strong support from former Gov. Mitch Daniels and then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, Indiana adopted those standards in 2010. The idea was to implement them slowly by grade level over 12 years.

The following year, Indiana adopted new "college and career ready" standards. That commitment with the U.S. Department of Education allowed Indiana to be released from certain accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

During this period, concern about Common Core was growing. Opponents argued states risked losing local control over education.

After Daniels left office and Ritz upset Bennett in the 2012 election, Common Core lost its champions. The General assembly in 2013 passed a law "pausing" the implementation of Common Core standards. In 2014, lawmakers scrapped Common Core entirely in favor of Indiana-specific education standards.

Those changes upset the state's timetable for creating a standardized test tied to the new standards, leaving little time for teachers to receive the training they needed to understand and implement the new criteria. Indiana also still had to comply with the "college and career ready" standards to keep its federal waiver.

All those factors lengthened the test and contributed to last year's perfect storm of testing that frustrated parents, educators charged with administering the tests, and students taking it.

"Everything that is happening (now) on this issue is very disheartening for those of us who have pointed out the minefields that have come with constant experimentation with the educational systems," Austin said.

When ISTEP test scores were released on Wednesday, the number of students who passed the much more difficult language arts and mathematics portion of the test dropped more than 20 percentage points from 2014.

Moreover, test results were released five months later than the previous year, meaning educators have no time to work with students who struggled with the new standards. The 2016 ISTEP is scheduled to be administered in about six weeks.

Anderson Community Schools Superintendent Terry Thompson earlier this week said he has instructed staff not to use the ISTEP data to evaluate performance.

Instead, he wants them to continue relying in the district's eight-step process to evaluate students, and the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress, NWEA standardized test.

Thompson and other local educators think that test would be a better model for the state to adopt because it measures student growth, which they argue is a better measure of student achievement.

Chris Daughtry, the new Elwood Community Schools superintendent, said the results were so flawed that he wouldn't even review the test results of his own four children.

"To me as a parent, these were meaningless results," he said.