ISTEP glitches return for second and final round of testing for this school year

The state’s window of time for administering the second round of testing begins today and runs through May 15.

Mitchell Community Schools will begin testing Monday at Burris Elementary School and Tuesday at Mitchell Junior High School.

Mark Vice, director of curriculum for NL schools, described Wednesday’s experience as “minor disruptions” in the testing process. Given that the complications were minor, Vice said, “We’re going to push forward.”

MCS Superintendent Steve Phillips said problems plagued Mitchell schools during Wednesday’s practice. He is eager to see the glitches eliminated.

Phillips said teachers and administrators are concerned about how the lingering problems are affecting students.

“If it is a high-stakes test like this, you don’t want the students to be anxious or frustrated,” he said. “Hopefully everything will go fine next week.”

In the NL system, only Bedford North Lawrence High School and Parkview Primary School are unaffected by the testing, which is administered to all students in third through eighth grades.

“We had five of our elementary schools that didn’t’ have problems at all with the practice test,” Vice said Wednesday. However, he reported that other schools did experience issues “such as disruptions where maybe a computer might get kicked off. … For the most part, the testing the state asked us to do today went smoother than it has in the past.” He described what he called “screen reader issues” during earlier practices, but said the problems seemed to have cleared. “The state may have fixed some of those concerns,” Vice said.

Phillips said students ran into several familiar problems there with computer screens freezing. Students could not move on to the next questions in the test.

“We had a number of disruptions, especially at the junior high. There were more issues at the junior high than at Burris (Elementary School),” he said. “All of these are at the state’s end. It’s not our computer technology.”

Daniel Altman, press secretary for the Indiana Department of Education, said today that many — not all — of the school districts in Indiana were part of Wednesday’s test run, and his office fielded calls related to glitches the schools experienced.

“We heard some, but I wouldn’t say there was anything out of the ordinary,” Altman said. “There wasn’t anything that I would call widespread.

“One of the reasons we do a practice is to obviously find any issues beforehand. ... We ask schools to submit what’s called a disruption report. They submit it. We take a look at it to do what we can to fix it.”

Altman said that, as far as he knows this morning, no schools received DOE directives not to administer testing on their scheduled dates. “I don’t know of any off the top of my head that we told not to proceed,” he said.

ISTEP requirements and procedures have posed problems for state and local education leaders throughout the school year. The practice runs that took place at many schools in January revealed glitches in the testing system. North Lawrence and Mitchell students experienced problems during that round, as well. Altman told the Associated Press that a Feb. 13 statewide test run had gone better than the initial practice in January and he said at the time the system would be ready to go before the arrival of this month’s online portion of testing.

Also, earlier in the school year, amid complaints that the amount of time students were to spend taking the test was too long, the Indiana House and Senate approved legislation to reduce the time, and Gov. Mike Pence signed the bill into law. The test had been projected to double in length this year to as long as 12.5 hours for some students. It was shortened by a minimum of three hours.