A new set of state standards and a standardized test that no one has seen have Indiana teachers scrambling to keep up.
K-12 education standards were approved April 28, but educators first laid eyes on the new expectations just weeks before the start of the school year, said Karen Combs, associate superintendent for Lafayette School Corp.
“When you just release the information, it’s hard for testing companies to catch up and then allow teachers time to catch up,” she said.
The state standards put into effect on July 1 are for math and English in each grade level. Classroom textbooks and curriculum are set by individual school districts.
New standards come after Indiana became the first state to ditch national Common Core State Standards, which some conservatives saw as an intrusion on local control and as less rigorous than Indiana’s previous guidelines. Indiana was one of the early adopters of Common Core in 2010.
With expectations just released, teachers are nervous, Combs said. How students perform on Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress exams, or ISTEP, in the spring will affect how teachers are evaluated and how schools are graded by the state.
“We will be given a test that is still being written, textbooks that are not written and standards that we just got,” she said.
There is concern that low scores will make it look as though successful schools in Greater Lafayette are now failing.