Interested in hearing about what lies ahead for your future
teaching career if you decide to stick around in Indiana? I found a reliable and up to date
website that does an outstanding job summarizing many of the important
decisions that have and will affect standardized testing in Indiana. Seriously, everyone should check out this
website and see what is actually going on right now in the profession! You will not be disappointed! For example, the link below gives us the “Ultimate” guide
to Indiana’s standardized tests.
I originally started my searching by trying to figure out
exactly how assessments affect school funding.
Since we talked about how standardized test affect teacher pay and how
schools are funded, I wanted to actually get down to the bottom of it and share
it with the rest of you. However, I
stumbled across indianapublicmedia.org and found and article that struck me.
The article dealt with Indiana’s decision to withdraw from
the Common Core Standards and create their own state standards; therefore,
having to create an entirely new test for schools. The article can be viewed by Clicking Here. Questions immediately popped into my mind
such as, what are the Common Core standards?
What all was the state replacing?
Was ISTEP+ to be thrown out completely?
To fully comprehend what exactly this all meant I had to do some
digging. Before 2010 each state had its
own set of standards. There was such a
wide disparity between state standards that the federal government pushed to
nationalize standards with the Common Core.
States that implemented the Common Core would then be given extra points
towards Obama’s Race to The Top program.
You can obviously see a money trail being strung about but that is a
whole other story. Indiana along with 45
other states adopted the Common Core standards. The idea was to measure student progress from state to state from a
similar set of standards and a similar nationalized standardized test. It is
kind of like having every state take the ISTEP+ test. However, Indiana’s general public spoke out
against the Common Core in early 2014.
In fact, Indiana went so far as to be the first state to drop the Common
Core and decide to write its own standards.
Which is good news right? Not
necessarily. Read the article to
discover Indiana’s race against time to not only draw up its own standards
(that in large part were made to resemble the Common Core by the federal
government), but also to create and implement its own standardized test all by
the end of the current 2014-2015 school year.
The part I found most absurd in the article was the fact that the
federal government required the state to implement its test the first year and
base scores off of that! Not only were
teachers given seven months to adopt yet again a new set of standards but seven
months to try and figure out what they had to cover for the new test. Seven months is barely any time at all. It has been proven that when you switch a
test that test scores dramatically will decrease. Fortunately, State Superintendent of Education
Glenda Ritz decided to freeze scores. In
other words, teacher evaluations and state funding would not be based off of
the test scores for the current year because of the drastically lower scores
that were expected. Ritz’s original plan
was to use the old ISTEP+ to determine performance while phasing in the new
test a little at a time during the spring of 2015. However, the federal government did not have
any of that. What all do you think? Did Indiana make the right decision in
creating its own standards? Should the
federal government have given more time in allowing the state to implement its
new test?
Another great article by the same organization depicts
Indiana’s indecision on accepting the federal governments offer in allowing
states to delay incorporating student test scores into teacher evaluations
until the end of the current school year.
You can find that article by clicking here.
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