Vigo County School Corp. Superintendent Chris Himsel doesn’t put a lot of stock in the statewide ILEARN test scores that were released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education.
“My initial reaction to the test results is, I had no reaction,” he said Thursday morning. “The test scores are irrelevant; they don’t really mean a whole lot. They are one piece of a puzzle — that’s all it is.”
Further, he said, “State testing is a waste of time.”
Students in the Vigo School Corp. performed in the top half of the state’s ILEARN test pass rates among the state’s 10 largest districts in terms of enrollment, the district said Thursday.
Likewise, it’s 11th-grade students performed in the top half of percentage pass rates for the SAT test within the same 10 largest districts.
But Himsel said there’s a bigger picture.
“We don’t judge ourselves on test scores,” he said. “All that standardized tests do is compare one kid to another kid.
“But it is a piece of the puzzle that we use in combination with AP (Advanced Placement) results, in terms of our career technical, in terms of our dual credit, in terms of our graduation rates, in terms of what we do internally in our assessments — those are also things we pay attention to. State testing is a waste of time.
“I can’t get caught up on how our kids compare to other kids in the state because kids across the state all started at a different point,” Himsel said.
Himsel said he focuses on “Are we making progress getting people across the stage for graduation? Are we laying the foundation so that when they get to high school they can earn dual credit, they can earn CTE (career technical education) certifications, that they can do AP tests, that they can do all those things.
“Education is not 13 one-year events — education is one 13-year event,” Himsel continued.
“When they come to us in kindergarten, we have their baseline. Our job is to figure out where they are in kindergarten and hopefully by the time they leave as a senior, they have the tools and the capacity and the skills to go off into adulthood and either get a job, go in the military or go to post-secondary education. That’s what our focus is.”
IDOE focuses on standardized test scores, Himsel said, because “It’s an easy number. and they’ve been doing it for 25 years.”
He added, “Kids don’t learn in a linear way. If they did, our jobs would be easy. It would be very easy to predict, if kids responded the exact same to every instructional technique that we used. Our jobs are not easy. We’re dealing with humans.
“Humans learn at different rates and in different ways,” Himsel said. “What our teachers do is spend time trying to figure out which techniques work best with which group of kids and where are they starting and how do I pick them up at that moment and how do I help them progress as far as they can.”
“Learning is personal,” the superintendent said. “Learning is much more nuanced and personal and every individual learns in a different way and at a different pace.
“We have to use a variety of metrics to take a look at that and look at if we’re making progress every day in terms of understanding where they start and where we need to get them to by the time they’re seniors.”
Himsel touted student achievement locally in both AP testing and attaining GTE credits.
Out of 900 AP tests, twothirds received a score that qualified for college-level credit, and CTE students accrued the equivalent of nearly 5,100 college credits and 264 industry recognized credentials.
Students in socioeconomically healthy areas tend to get a better start in school than others. In Vigo County, Himsel said, “Our poverty, we’re dealing with 13 of our 15 elementary schools qualifying for Title 1 services, which is an indication of high poverty.”
Other figures released Wednesday revealed that Vigo County third-graders had the second highest performance in those 10 largest urban districts, while grade 11 students had the second highest performance in SAT percentage pass rates in the state in the reading and writing category.
Overall, the test scores reflect stagnant progress among Hoosier students in grades 3-8, and 41% of Indiana students who were tested were at or above proficiency standards in English and language arts. To avoid academic stagnation, Himsel said Vigo County’s educational strategy is similar to that in Bartholomew County.
“The progress that I’m most intrigued by is being made by Bartholomew County schools, which is a similar sized population,” he said. “I know that they have previously put in some of the inputs and supports for learning that we are also in the process of implementing.
“So when I see some of their progress, it gets me excited that we’re on the right track because we’re doing things they did previously,” he added. “Their progress gives me hope that we’re doing the right things and we may in the future see some of those same results.”