As students in Indiana schools chew on their pencils and try to do their best on ISTEP, let us pause for a moment and cheer them on. Let’s urge them to do as well as they can. Let’s praise them for their preparation and undergoing the stress of taking a standardized test.
And then let’s cheer that ISTEP will be no more.
It’s been time to get rid of the test, to throw it in the trash and move on.
Indiana lawmakers have finally seen the light and are following through on plans to do away with the test. We don’t have to know what comes next, we just need to know that it won’t be this bad test.
Ever since it was introduced in the late 1980s, ISTEP has been a political beast. It was changed by the whims of lawmakers. The good ones, like the late State Rep. Phil Warner of Goshen, fought for ISTEP being useful and good, but over time, that fight was lost. The 2015 exam shows how broken the test is.
CTB/McGraw-Hill wasn’t fired soon enough. The way the test was administered, the way computers crashed as students took the test, should have indicated it was time long before it happened. Grading problems and delays in reporting results should have shown long ago that the company wasn’t the right fit for the job.
The SAT has changed over the years, but slowly and with care. ISTEP, on the other hand, became like the car in the 1976 song “One Piece at a Time” recorded by Johnny Cash, where a car is built with pieces from parts over 25 years.
It’s right and good to take a test that somehow measures how Hoosier students stack up year over year and with other students in the country. ISTEP made that impossible because it was an Indiana test, but eventually it lost the ability to compare students within this state’s borders.
ISTEP grew to include open-ended questions and tested students for as much as 12 hours each time. “Teaching to the test” became not just a commonly heard phrase, but a means of survival for Indiana teachers.
ISTEP results were not only used to label students as good or bad, but also schools and thus communities. This year’s school grades, based in large part on ISTEP, were issued in a meaningless way where last year’s grade and this year’s grade were somehow co-mingled and whichever was higher was your grade.
Indiana Republicans leaders, even those like Gov. Mike Pence who helped engineer the state leaving Common Core State Standards, are criticizing the test. “We test too much in Indiana and we ought to let our teachers teach,” he said this week. Last year, he said the test was too long.
In 2001 as a member of Congress, he voted against No Child Left Behind and has called for state and local control of education.
If that’s the case, it’s time for Indiana to fix how it tests students and how it holds them accountable with the teachers and schools who work to educate them. It’s time for Indiana to use a test that works to measure its students and those who educate them.
The Senate bill that would create a panel of 22 people to study the next test is a good start. There’s talk on federal and state levels of more flexibility, which is good.
What’s clear is that ISTEP is broken and it’s time for a new test. For the sake of its students, educators and the future of the state, it can’t happen soon enough.