Hoosier students took the high-stakes ISTEP test this spring, but the results won't be available until December at the earliest.
That delays schools' A-F accountability grades for the 2014-2015 school year until at least 2016. More important, though, is the delay in getting assistance to students based on the test results.
What’s the point of standardized tests if not to improve instruction?
The delays can be blamed on politics — on state lawmakers overruling the Indiana State Board of Education and rejecting the Common Core State Standards for Education. That meant creating new standards and a new test in a hurry, and the result is problematic — as in problems with scoring math problems.
Ellen Haley, president of test vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill told the ISBOE the new online test requires students to not just solve the problem correctly, but also how they arrived at their answer. The test scoring allowed 10 possible ways to arrive at each answer, but students seem to have outsmarted the test. They used additional ways to solve the problems, and their correct answers were counted wrong.
Now the company scorers have to add these new methods to the programming for the test results and run the scores again.
"This is the nature of switching so dramatically," Haley said. "There's nothing left over from the previous test. We can't use the scale. We can't use the weighted formula. You started over again."
The test also can't be used to compare Hoosier students with their peers nationally.
Parents, students and teachers need to know how well students are being prepared for college or careers. But without that peer comparison, there's no easy way to compare scores.
Teachers in Indiana are disgusted with the whiplash education policy in Indiana that changed standards, and standardized tests, in recent years. That came through loud and clear in a series of roundtable meetings with a cross-section of teachers from throughout the region.
One more change, though, is now needed. Indiana needs to return to a national set of standards and standardized tests to show how students compare with their peers elsewhere.
The standards already exist; they won't need to be redrafted. Use a standard, reliable test that can be scored quickly and results provided to teachers in a useful way.
Give teachers detailed information about areas where children did well and where they need additional assistance. There's no need to go through all the remedial material for children who already mastered many skills but struggled in others. And provide that information in time to help students before they fall further behind.
Tests are an essential way to determine whether students are learning what they should. But the tests must be written well, scored well, and results delivered in a timely fashion so students who need to be caught up can get the extra help they need.