EDITORIAL: Put student needs first in testing

The recent track record has not been encouraging. This year, lawmakers mostly are trying to mend their mistakes of the past.

They’ve already passed two laws essentially saying the 2015 test doesn’t count, despite its cost in the tens of millions of dollars.

Students took a drastically revised ISTEP test last spring, and this month we finally learned the predicted outcome — drastically lower scores.

Legislators and the governor scrambled to pass laws to keep teachers and schools from being penalized for this year’s test results.

Under normal circumstances, schools could have received lower “quality grades” on an A-F scale if their scores slipped. Teachers could have been denied merit pay increases.

During this one-year pause in consequences for ISTEP scores, it may be worth asking if schools and teachers should be penalized in any year based on test results.

It’s time to step back and think carefully about why Indiana spends millions on a statewide achievement test. The simplest answer is that it’s required to qualify for more than $1 billion in federal education money.

Beyond that, testing should be aimed at helping individual students improve. On a broader scale, results might show that an entire classroom has missed some major points, so a teacher can re-emphasize them.

In the name of accountability, we’ve added new uses of test scores — rating the effectiveness of teachers, entire schools and school districts.

Basing these judgments on a single test makes teachers and school administrators nervous. If some “teach to the test” to try to improve scores, who can blame them with their reputations on the line?

Add in the factors that educators don’t trust the reliability of ISTEP, and that state leaders keep changing it, and we come to the mess we’re in today.

Despite the huge sums we pay them, the companies Indiana hires to run the ISTEP test suffer from technical problems every year.

Political leaders decided Indiana should have its own, unique set of educational standards, requiring a custom-made test for 2015. That led to many of this year’s problems and delays.

Even if the new test had succeeded, we still might be unable to compare the scores of Indiana students to the rest of the nation.

As it turns out, the 2015 test was a complete waste of time and money. Educators don’t put any faith in it as a tool to evaluate students. Most area schools use separate tests — at additional cost — for that purpose.

At best, the 2015 test served as a baseline to judge future results. But it may not be useful even for that. The state is changing test providers for 2016, which puts comparisons between 2015 and 2016 into question. For 2017, legislators are considering a bill that would abandon ISTEP for a different test.

It may be time for Indiana to admit that we’ve been testing students for political reasons as much as educational goals.

In one of those political purposes, Hoosier leaders set out to base teacher pay on performance instead of seniority. But ISTEP has failed at measuring teacher effectiveness. It’s questionable whether any test can replace the observations of a qualified principal.

We’ve reached a point where the state is paying millions for the ISTEP test while Indiana educators completely disregard the results.

Legislators should pass a bill to replace ISTEP with something better, hopefully cheaper, and stop using it as anything more than one out of many indicators of student achievement.

It’s time to quit testing for the wrong reasons and put Indiana students’ needs first.