Lawmakers prepare to drop troubled ISTEP exam
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Lawmakers, educators and teachers’ unions all seem to agree: Indiana’s standardized ISTEP student exam is a flawed way of measuring student performance.
Many teachers and educators have long had reservations about the test, which has been administered to Indiana students since the late 1980s. But Republican Gov. Mike Pence and GOP lawmakers only recently got on board with plans to ditch the test, which came after they dropped national Common Core standards, resulting in last-minute changes made to state education policy that led to widespread problems with the 2015 ISTEP exam.
As legislation to eliminate the ISTEP moves forward, what remains to be determined is how students will be tested in the future, how to ensure a replacement exam will be fair and what impact the new federal education law will have.
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DEATH OF THE ISTEP
Republican lawmakers have recently used terms like “disaster” and “mess” to describe the 2015 ISTEP exam, which was developed in a matter of months by CTB/McGraw-Hill, a testing vendor the state has since fired.
“We test too much in Indiana and we ought to let our teachers teach,” Pence said.
Key GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate support a provision that would eliminate the test by July 2017, though final details need to be worked out.
A bill passed by the Senate would create a 22-member panel of academic experts, teachers and administrators tasked with finding ways to reduce the testing costs, increase “fairness to schools, teachers and students” and take into account the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
Democratic state school Superintendent Glenda Ritz, who is frequently at odds with Pence, and her teachers’ union allies say they are pleased to see Republicans adopt an argument they have long been making, but remain cautious.
Ritz spokesman Daniel Altman said that for the task force to succeed, it needs to focus on “an education agenda rather than a political one.”
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TESTING FATIGUE
The ISTEP exam has undergone major changes in recent years as federal and state education overhauls have resulted in higher-stakes tests that use student performance to determine school grades and teacher performance pay.