"Last week, Hoosier educators expressed shock at the ineffectiveness of a testing company used by Indiana schools.
CTB McGraw-Hill could not handle the load of tens of thousands of Indiana students taking their ISTEP+ achievement tests online at the same time.
The incident raises a bigger question. Even when the tests work, how effective are they in their intended function — measuring the performance of students, teachers and school systems?
In a response last fall to the debate over testing, the Indiana Department of Education pointed out that students actually spend very little time on state-required tests — between 4.5 and 6.25 hours per year. That adds up to one school day, or less, out of 180 total days of school.
For something that takes so little time, Indiana is relying heavily on those tests to make important decisions about education.
We use test scores to decide the future of students, and now they could affect the pay rates and evaluation ratings of teachers. We make decisions about the competence of school administrators. We’re going to use them to decide which schools and school districts will be the winners and losers in state funding.
We suspect school principals and other administrators have been fired because their schools scored badly on ISTEP+ tests.
Indiana has placed incredibly high stakes on testing that takes up the equivalent of a single school day.
What about the other 179 school days? Maybe they should carry more weight than a few hours of testing.
Last week’s testing fiasco should make us stop and think.
Maybe the best judge of a student’s ability is a teacher who spends 180 days in a classroom with that child.
The most accurate evaluator of a teacher’s effectiveness ought to be the principal who oversees that teacher for an entire school year. To ensure that outcome, every school should be equipped with a principal who has demonstrated classroom ability and can provide sound advice and mentoring for teachers.
Perhaps the true judges of a school or school district’s success should be the parents of its students.
After all the disruption, Indiana should place less weight than usual on the outcome of this spring’s testing.
Under normal circumstances, testing can play an important role. Without it, parents might not realize how their schools and school districts compare to others across Indiana.
Low test scores for students, classrooms, schools and school districts — especially over more than a single year — can serve as a basis for asking questions and looking for remedies.
But we should be careful about assigning too much importance to standardized tests. As last week’s events proved, they clearly are far from perfect."
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