The long-awaited, widely-disputed 2015 ISTEP results were made public today by the Indiana Department of Education, showing that just over half of Hoosier students are proficient in both math and English language arts.
Last spring was the first time students were tested on Indiana’s new college and career ready academic standards, which were implemented for the 2014-15 school year. Testing vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill developed a new version of the standardized test to correspond with the new standards, and some drop in scores is expected any time students take a new assessment.
While the IDOE emphasized the 2015 results from the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress cannot be compared to results from previous years of testing, the sudden, dramatic drop in pass rates is hard to ignore. Educators across the state – including all five Howard County superintendents – have voiced concerns with the validity of the 2015 ISTEP and taken issue with the late release of the results, which came months after students in third through eighth grade completed the test last spring.
In 2015, 67.3 percent of students statewide passed the English language arts portion of ISTEP, 61 percent passed the math section, and 53.5 percent passed both sections. On the science section, 69.2 percent of the fourth and sixth graders who took the test passed it, and 70.4 percent of fifth and seventh graders passed the social studies section.
On the 2014 ISTEP, 74.7 percent of Hoosier students passed both the math and ELA sections, with 83.5 percent passing math and 80.7 percent passing ELA; the 2014 pass rates were an improvement over 2013.
Even as the IDOE released the most recent ISTEP results, state Superintendent Glenda Ritz called for Indiana to move away from the “costly, lengthy, pass/fail ISTEP+ assessment.”
“The one-size-fits-all high stakes approach of the ISTEP+ needs to end,” Ritz said in a statement. “Instead, Indiana should move toward a streamlined, individualized, student-centered assessment that provides students, families and educators with quick feedback about how a student is performing and how they have grown during a school year.”
Ritz pointed to the 2015 ISTEP results as a benchmark for future improvement as Indiana teachers continue to incorporate the state’s more rigorous career and college ready academic standards into their instruction. She said she would like to work with the General Assembly to oversee the development of an assessment that better serves individual students’ needs.
The release of the 2015 ISTEP results comes less than one month after the Indianapolis Star revealed that a computer glitch while CTB McGraw Hill scored the test resulted in potentially faulty scores on some assessments. Later in December, an independent panel of three experts reviewed that claim and found: “there does not appear to be a discernable impact of this scoring glitch on overall scores given to students’ responses.” The panel’s report also stated individual students’ tests may not have been scored accurately.
ISTEP scores are important not only for providing feedback on students’ academic performance, but also because those scores are factored into schools’ letter grades assigned by the state and many schools include state letter grades and student performance as a factor in their teacher evaluations. ISTEP scores can have implications on state interventions for “failing” schools and whether teachers are eligible for raises based on their evaluations.
From the time the 2015 ISTEP was unveiled, educators had concerns with the length of the test and new question formats in the online version of the test that would potentially be confusing for students. While taking the test, students at some schools had issues with the online version crashing or not operating correctly. When the preliminary results came in, a testing expert found that the paper-pencil version of the test was easier than the online version, so the Indiana State Board of Education had to figure out how to take the differing degrees of difficulty into account when determining the cut scores for the test.
In December, Howard County superintendents called for the state to suspend letter grades for this year and not require them to be used in teacher evaluations, or at least allow schools to keep their 2014 letter grades if they were higher.
State Sen. Mark Stoops (D-Bloomington) introduced a bill in the legislative session that started Tuesday that would accomplish half of what the superintendents asked – adopt a “hold harmless” approach for the letter grades, but still use ISTEP results in teacher evaluations. State Sen. Dennis Kruse’s (R-Auburn) bill addresses only the state letter grades, also advocating for the “hold harmless” approach. Ritz issued a statement in support of Kruse’s bill.