As Indiana goes in a new direction with its curriculum, many wonder if these adjustments will benefit students more than the old system.
Mary Beth Busick, an elementary school teacher in northwest Indiana, has a protocol for when her third-graders break down crying in the testing room. She gives them a hug and tells them the test doesn’t define who they are. She makes sure they know testing isn’t the only element of their success as students. In her 28 years of teaching, Mary Beth has seen students through it all when it comes to testing and curriculum changes.
She was there three years ago, through one of the toughest standardized tests in Indiana: the 2015 ISTEP. The test was long, the questions were difficult, and the stress of it all took a toll on her kids. She remembers when she and another teacher had trouble solving one of the questions, both coming up with different answers. She recalls needing to calm kids down as they grew frustrated and began crying.
The 2015 ISTEP wasn’t just difficult for Mary Beth’s students. Scores that year took a big dip statewide. The test was the first since the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) decided to leave Common Core, the K-12 curriculum created by the National Governors Association in 2009.
Indiana had been one of the first states to adopt these standards in 2010. But just four years later, former Gov. Mike Pence announced the state would create its own curriculum, called the College and Career Readiness standards. In 2015, those guidelines were put to the test as students across the state took the more difficult ISTEP.
The test results that year were so below average that IDOE chose not to consider them when evaluating teachers. Glenda Ritz, former superintendent of public instruction for Indiana, says teachers weren’t given enough time to learn how to prepare their students for the more rigorous, state-centric standards of the test.
Mary Beth doesn’t think testing should be the main focus of education. Constantly preparing students for standardized tests does little to actually help them grow, she says. Mary Beth also believes that basing teacher salaries on test results isn’t the right way to approach education.
But the changes in state education didn’t stop there. Indiana legislators also voted to retire ISTEP, which had been the state’s main standardized test since 1987. This meant starting over. Indiana set out to create a completely new test, one they hoped would be more beneficial to students.
That replacement, ILEARN, is set to begin in 2019.
Charity Flores, director of assessment for IDOE, says ILEARN aims to more effectively assess the growth of individual students. The test will use computer adaptive testing, which adjusts the difficulty of questions based on how students answer other questions. Translation tools will also be available for students who speak English as a second language, and glossaries will help students better understand questions.
Successful curricula must have coherence, says Leland Cogan, a senior researcher for Michigan State University. The lessons in one grade should build from the grades before it, and the material should gradually increase in difficulty.
According to a development report from IDOE, one of ILEARN’s goals is to be more coherent. The test will build off of Indiana standards, taking into account where each student should be based on Indiana’s guidelines.
But after seeing how this same kind of restructuring has played out in a few other states, some educators worry the changes won’t be enough. For example, New York decided to revise Common Core in 2017, but mainly by changing the name of the curriculum to “Next Generation Learning Standards.” In 2013, Arizona also changed the name to “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards” and voted in 2016 to make some minor revisions, but still kept many of the Common Core standards. Opponents of Common Core in these states felt as though nothing really changed besides the name.
In October of 2017, IDOE announced a vendor for the new test: American Institutes for Research. This vendor has worked on Common Core tests before and is using some of the same question banks for ILEARN. The system Indiana worked to get away from might end up playing a big part in the new curriculum.
Flores says the new test is “the best of both worlds” for Indiana. While still using some questions from Common Core, partially to fuel the test’s computer adaptive feature, it will also include questions specific to Indiana. Flores says IDOE is designing those questions by collaborating with teachers and asking for feedback.
But Mckenzii Habeggar, a Grace College student majoring in elementary education, fears all this testing is taking away from the value of a teacher. Mckenzii wants to teach younger kids because of their excitement for learning. However, she’s afraid her students’ excitement could be dulled if they are constantly evaluated by how well they do on paper.
Mckenzii’s perspective on testing is one that many Americans have. The standardized testing of today didn’t start until 2002, when former President George W. Bush implemented the No Child Left Behind Act. The law aimed to provide better education for all students, but many criticized it for placing too much importance on testing. In 2015, the law was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still emphasized testing but was believed to be more effective.
All the pressure put on teachers and students to achieve high scores eventually led some schools to break the law. Frankie W. McCullough Academy for Girls, an elementary school in Gary, Indiana, was found guilty of cheating on the ISTEP in 2017. After students completed the test, adults at the school went back and corrected some of the answers. IDOE invalidated the scores.
Randy Hisner, who taught at Bellmont Senior High School before retiring this year, believes the focus on meeting standards has gone too far. He thinks raising expectations for everyone might actually set some students back. Making the test more difficult won’t inspire students to work harder, he says. Instead, those who already struggled with the old curriculum might end up being discouraged by College and Career Readiness.
Hisner also thinks breaking away from Common Core could have been more political than anything else. Mike Pence believed state government should play a large role in education, so he wanted to get away from the more federal standards of Common Core. But Hisner worries that nothing has really changed, and that the test is a “moving target,” with teachers never quite knowing how to meet the turbulent standards.
Mary Beth agrees.
“Any time you have non-educators making education decisions, you’re going to have a problem,” she says.
She believes those decisions should be in the hands of the school, not the government. In third grade alone, students have to take IREAD (a part of the state assessment) and the NWEA (a national test), as well as practice tests for both. She sees the importance in having standards, but she believes the current system of testing isn’t what’s best for teachers or students.
Mary Beth hopes children might eventually be measured by how well they perform in all aspects of education, not just by the bubbles they fill in on yearly tests. She pictures a future where students are evaluated by how they perform socially or by which styles of learning work best for them. She also hopes to see Indiana invest more money on teachers and schools and less on new tests. Just like she tells her students, Mary Beth wants to see a world where a test doesn’t define who someone is.
