Not a single area school corporation is happy about the spring ISTEP results released this past week.
Changes made to the state exams pushed back grading, McGraw-Hill Education CTB President Ellen Haley told the Indiana State Board of Education in August. Schools and parents weren’t expected to see ISTEP results until at least mid-December, The Associated Press reported.
And they shouldn’t expect widespread improvement, locally or statewide, the State Board of Education was told.
In an op-ed we published in February, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz said this year’s ISTEP is based on the state’s new college-and-career-ready standards and not the Common Core State Standards, first championed by Gov. Mitch Daniels but eventually dropped by Gov. Mike Pence early last year.
Ritz explained that for Indiana to retain its waiver from some aspects of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the state had to test students to the new Indiana Academic Standards. Federal officials granted Indiana a three-year waiver in July.
In February’s op-ed, Ritz said history tells us, both in Indiana and across the U.S., test scores usually “dip as a result of new and more rigorous expectations, giving the appearance of a decline in achievement.”
Ritz assured readers she remains “a proponent for strong teacher and school accountability,” but she has “concerns regarding school and teacher accountability based upon these new assessments.”
She should. Just 53.5 percent of Hoosier students passed both the math and English/language arts sections of ISTEP last spring.
For our money, the real measuring stick for a school or teacher is not the overall passing percentage on the ISTEP exam, but how individual students are performing on the test compared to how they performed a year ago.
It’s good to know whether more students passed the test than passed it last year, but the real measure of success should be whether individual students are making progress.
Those at the top of the scale should be climbing ever higher, and those at the bottom should be inching closer to the passing rate.
The goal of our public education system, after all, is to make certain every student gains the knowledge needed to achieve his or her potential.
Focusing only on ISTEP passing rates can lead educators to concentrate on students near the threshold, pushing as many as possible over the top.
What we need instead is to focus on every student, to make sure that, truly, no child is left behind.