“Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.”— Benjamin Franklin
When the state dropped the controversial Common CoreState Standards, schools were forced to adopt new, more rigorous college and career-ready standards. A new school year was looming, so educators had to move quickly to incorporate the new standards into their lesson plans so students could be versed enough on the material to pass the ISTEP.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough time. Scores from the 2015 ISTEP were released Wednesday, showing that schools across the state recorded sharp declines in testing scores from earlier years.
Not that we’re surprised.
As the French playwright Moliere so aptly noted, “Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.”
“We did not expect to start the school year in 2014-2015 and find that the state standards that we teach changed just before students walked through the door. To expect that teachers can somehow change what is taught on a moment’s notice is not realistic,” Phil Storm, assistant superintendent for Mitchell Community Schools, wrote in an email to the Times-Mail.
Looking back, lawmakers should’ve built in a transition period of at least a year to allow schools ample time to convert curriculum. Perhaps, it would’ve been prudent to administer the ISTEP as a practice module that would test the merits of the curriculum schools put in place to meet the new standards.
That didn’t happen. Instead, we’re looking at steep drops that have the ability to affect school funding and teacher pay if not properly dealt with by the General Assembly.
A quick fix is in the works.
The same legislators who made the hasty and drastic change to education standards are looking to balance the results of the most recent ISTEP exams. Senate Bill 200, introduced for this session of the General Assembly, provides that a school’s category or designation of performance for the 2014-2015 school year may not be lower than the grade assigned to the school by the state board of education for the 2013-2014 school year.
It’s becoming clear a permanent fix to what is becoming a continued ISTEP debacle is necessary.
Gary Conner, superintendent of North Lawrence Community Schools, says a hybrid model of testing would be more beneficial in measuring students’ growth, progress and learning needs throughout the school year.
“I believe teachers are the best evaluators of instruction,” Conner said. “I believe blending teacher assessment with state assessments could provide a value-guided plan to determine achievements. … I would encourage the assessment tool to be as simple as possible to maximize effectiveness. If the SAT and ACT can be a predictor of college admission and success, it would appear that a state assessment tool could be generated with a similar format to be a predictor of achievement.”
The current bill making its way through the Statehouse should be looked upon only as a Band-Aid to remedy the problem lawmakers created almost two years ago, but it cannot be where the discussion on standardized testing ends. Educating our young people is far too important to accept sub-par solutions based on partisan politics.