SYRACUSE – State Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz made it perfectly clear Friday morning where she stands on testing. “Of course, you know I’ve been dealing with ISTEP here lately, and you should also know that I do not approve of high-stakes testing in any way,” she told local school district administrators. “We certainly wouldn’t be dealing with these issues if high stakes weren’t attached to them. Yes, we would have interruptions in our testing, but it would not have meant the same if we didn’t have high stakes attached to it.” ISTEP testing began Monday, but technical glitches delayed testing until Wednesday. While the state says the issues have been addressed, the state also told schools to only test half of students at a time to help keep the system from crashing. Fridays are typically travel days for Ritz. Since the legislative session ended Friday, Ritz has started spending about three days a week traveling around the state to find out what’s going on with Indiana schools. She spoke at Wawasee High School Friday to administrators from 15 to 20 area school corporations. Ritz told the administrators, “I just want to assure you that it’s my goal to work with assessments so that we do not have – what I consider a pass/fail assessment – with the high stakes attached to them as they are now. So that’s where I want to head with that.” ISTEP is a pass/fail assessment, she said, “and that’s all it is.” It’s given on a grade-level basis. The test itself is one test, she said, for grades three through eight. “Indiana chooses to give it in grade-level segments, so it really could be used, in theory, as a growth model assessment so that when we give it, we know we have students in fifth grade who are performing at the eighth-grade level or at a third-grade level,” Ritz continued. She said she wants to head toward growth model assessments so that schools know the true performance levels of their students rather than just knowing whether the students passed or failed a grade level. Growth model assessment gives two pieces of information instantaneously, she said. It tells the performance levels of students, and also the number of students who are performing at or above grade level. “I’m on the search and development of college and career readiness assessments that do that for Indiana in the areas of reading, language arts and math. And it’s very important that we separate out the reading,” she said. Indiana does not collect any reading data on students statewide. “I can not tell you today the reading ability of students in the state of Indiana because we don’t have it,” she said. “Reading is probably the most critical thing we should be collecting data on.” IREAD-3 is the annual test given to third-graders in April. If they don’t pass it then or on their second chance in the summer, the students can be held back from moving on to fourth grade. Ritz said she’s working on revamping it. “It’s my hope that by next spring, we will have a growth model assessment that will happen in the spring in place of the IREAD-3 pass/fail. I am hoping to do that (in grades) K-5 to alleviate the money you’re spending on small growth-model assessments in order to gain the very same information that the state of Indiana should be giving to you to use,” she said. With her plan, Ritz said, hopefully schools won’t have to do all the testing they’ve been doing at the local level. She wants the state to collect reading data for all grades kindergarten to 12th. Her plan also will transform special education. “Our secondary folks should not have students walking into their room and not know their reading levels. They should just know it,” Ritz stated. She noted the Indiana Department of Education is doing a huge literacy kick-off May 10 to get families reading this summer. It has partners all over the state to work with them. “We’re going to be reading a lot and hopefully turn down that slide that happens over the summer months. You’re going to see a huge, huge focus on literacy,” Ritz said. Besides literacy, she also touched on math. “Math is a larger concern than reading, believe it or not, because students who leave our 12th grade and go further on, the four-year colleges will not accept them if they need any type of remediation in mathematics. Our two-year colleges are remediating students to a tune of $40 million a year. And those students don’t typically finish the two-year college programs. So we have a 25 percent rate of students in Indiana actually graduating from college and a lot of it has to do with math,” Ritz stated. She plans to have three summits in Indiana with educators invited to have a dialogue on math education. The discussion would start with standards, which she said doesn’t go far enough. “We have a system in place regarding math that is not working, so I want to open up the dialogue and talk about all the unique ways to earn credits in mathematics and how we can support kids and how we can advance kids in a really meaningful way,” she said. In 2015-16, Ritz said Indiana will be transitioning to different assessments that will be “college and career ready.” She doesn’t want Indiana to participate in more pass/fail tests, so the state will be looking to possibly develop its own assessment instead of going with a consortium. On graduation rates, she said she wants to open up dialogue on what it takes to graduate from high school. She said all kids should have opportunities for career and technical exploration, no matter what it looks like. She also spoke on House Bill 1427 that has many items in it, including accountability legislation. It gives Ritz permission to redo the growth model to calculate schools’ grades from A to F, she said. “We will not be using the model we used last year or have to use this year simply because it’s not in place yet. But I’m going to be redoing that growth model by Nov. 1. It has emergency rule-making on it, so I have to have it done by Nov. 1,” she said. She can’t get rid of the A-F labels, however. “What I was not successful in doing was not having labels. I just want to openly say having labels like that is really about market education. It’s not about learning education, it’s about market education,” she stated. “... It’s all about the marketing.” She also is working to change the teacher evaluation system so teachers aren’t assigned a 1, 2, 3 or 4 rating. She wants teachers’ evaluations to be based on growth models.
