At a glance
The Indiana Growth Model is a mathematical tool that marks progress made by students on standardized tests over the course of an academic year. It’s one of the tools being considered for measuring teacher “effectiveness.”
Indiana Department of Education officials already have begun posting growth model results for individual schools and districts on its website. Information on individual students is kept confidential.
To find out how your schools or districts are doing, go to https://learningconnection.doe.in.gov/GrowthModel/Search.aspx
You’ll see that student growth is summarized for each school and school corporation. All are displayed on a chart that places then into one of the four categories:
• High achieving/high growth
• High achieving/low growth
• Low achieving/high growth
• Low achieving/low growth
You’ll see lengthy explanation for it all at www.doe.in.gov/growthmodel, but in essence, high-achieving means students/schools with high standardized test scores, while low-achieving means students/schools with low standardized test scores. The “growth” is progress made over the course of a year. So you could have a school with students who are testing well, but the students haven’t made progress from year to year. That would be a high-achieving/low growth school. And you could have a low-achieving/high growth school, with students who produce low test results, but who have shown improvement on those scores from year to year.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has put merit pay for teachers high on his legislative wish list when state lawmakers convene in January. “The state should reward its best teachers by paying them more,”
Daniels said in kicking off his legislative platform.
It’s an idea likely to get warm reception from his Republican colleagues, who now will control both the Indiana House and Senate.
But the idea of rewarding the best teachers may be easier to sell than the details, as opponents of merit pay note. Their question:
How do you decide who gets rewarded?
The answer to that is evolving. On the federal level, the Obama administration has made changes to teacher pay, evaluation and training a key part of its education agenda. In response, some states have passed laws that tie teacher evaluation and pay to how well students perform academically.
Current Indiana laws limit school administrators from using student test scores to evaluate teachers. Daniels wants to change that, but it won’t be easy. Public school teachers currently operate under contracts forged with local school districts that base teacher pay on a salary ladder built on seniority and degrees attained.
Indiana State Teachers Association President Nate Schnellenberger says that salary ladder “protects teachers” from the subjective whims of school administrators.
But Daniels has argued that it fails to offer incentives for teachers to get better at their profession. Other states that have begun to make the shift to merit pay measure teacher effectiveness in several ways. But key to those measurements is how well a teacher is able to help students move up in their test scores from one year to the next.
In Indiana, the state Department of Education already has introduced the tool to do that. It’s called the Indiana Growth Model.
State education officials say it measures teacher effectiveness by looking not just at standardized test scores, but also at how each student “grows” in those test scores over the course of an academic year.
The complex model sorts students into “academic peer groups” to allow for students who’ve achieved low test scores to be compared with other students performing at the same level. High-scoring students also are categorized with other high-scoring students, as are students whose test results fall in the middle. Each student is then measured for progress made from one year to the next.
Proponents say it’s designed so it’s not punitive to teachers who begin a school year with students who are behind in their grade level, nor does it favor teachers who inherit a classroom full of high-scoring students.
Indiana Public School Superintendent Tony Bennett has traveled the state in recent months meeting with parents and teachers to explain the Indiana Growth Model. His theme, repeated often: “It’s time to make teachers and schools accountable.”
There are critics, including those who say the growth model is based on flawed standardized tests. Others, including the state’s teachers unions, fear that it fails to take into account factors outside a teacher’s control, from poverty to parental involvement.
Bennett would concede that there are still some practical issues to work out. For example, the state’s standardized tests don’t cover all subjects or all grades. As it currently exists, it can’t be used to measure the effectiveness of an art teacher or to measure progress of high school students, who only take the ISTEP standardized test in the 10th grade.
But neither Daniels nor Bennett are willing to wait for a measurement model to be perfected before they push the Indiana Legislature to clear the path for performance-based pay for teachers. “I’m tired of hearing all the reasons why something may not work,”
Bennett said recently. “What we’re doing now isn’t working,” he said.
“It’s time to try something different.”
© 2024 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.