Wednesday, January 06, 2016

ISTEP Pass Rates Drop 20 Percentage Points

The ISTEP test results from the past school year have finally been released, and the news is not good. Pass rates plummeted 20 percentage points, but state lawmakers and Gov. Mike Pence promise quick action this month to prevent any negative fallout for schools and teachers. Only 53.5% of Indiana students passed the test, which is down from a 74.7% pass rate the previous year. Despite the tens of millions of dollars spent on the test, education leaders blame the test itself for the poor results and are calling for a new testing system.

According to figures reported by the Indianapolis Star, only 29% of IPS' students passed both exam parts compared to 51.6% the previous year. Some township schools only fared slightly better. Passage rates in Lawrence and Warren Township tumbled to 44.3% and 42.6%, respectively. Wealthier school districts, including Carmel, Zionsville and Brownsburg continued to score high with pass rates around 80%, but those rates were still down from 90% scored in the prior year.

Individual school district results can be found by clicking here to access a database prepared by The Star.

8 comments:

leon dixon said...

Which test more accurately reflects actual student academic achievement? This year's long delayed lying by omission test or last year's politically set cut scores test? E.G. which set of numbers is closer to reality and which set of numbers is a bare faced Pence, Ritz, Long, Bosma Lie? It might help to know that about half of Indiana kids are below average in IQ and that IQ is the main predictor of academic success. It would then be politically incorrect to note that in IPS there is great joy in the Ad building when they come across a three digit IQ score.
Must be an election coming up since we are seeing ISTEP being scapegoated as being the messenger bearing the news about Indiana's version of government schooling. When 15,000 kids per year with Indiana diplomas find out that their education was "damaged goods" and that they will require remediation at the college they were accepted to doesn't anyone think that there is something rotten in Denmark? Well, they were lied to but did find out about their defective diploma. What about those who did not get accepted to college or even apply? They remain lied to by Indiana's elected liars.
Let's not discuss motives of Ritz or Pence or Mitch or the lesser politically correct purveyors of education lies that would include teachers, administrators, school board members. Their motives are what they are and have been. Those lied to, parents, kids, taxpayers, teachers, ought to wake up and smell the aroma of burnt coffee. They have been victims of a long running scam....and scamming is what has actually taken place. I still have the editorial headline where duh Star exclaimed that they would never be taken in by the educational establishment again (or something like it). Pretty funny since, like Charlie Brown's football-they never escape being misled.
The Nation Remains At Risk with the public being sold new lies for old ones. Expecting performance from a socialistic system is the least of the blunders the public puts up with. The Soviet Collective Farms lied, too, about their production and yet, those farms remain a large part of Soviet Agriculture even today. Our Educational Establishment lies to us for decades for similar reasons. One ought not believe much of anything they have to say.....The only benefit I see to Common Core Rebranded is that error of leaving rigor in the cut scores. So, to be plain, the performance of Indiana kids did not decline AT ALL. It was more accurately measured. It could have been much more accurately measured for DECADES but for the connivance and lying of our elected educational morons.
Don't let the opportunity pass by? These test results are a much cleared snapshot of the various educational diseases that afflict Indiana than most anything the public has access to. Doctors don't lie to you about your blood pressure, your temperature, your symptoms. The ISTEP isn't lying either. The tests doctors run enable them to work at a cure.....without test results like these being public the public doesn't even know that their kids are being cheated.

Pete Boggs said...

Leon's comment is on the money- well said.

Anonymous said...

One key question is who sets the cut score for passing? Think about it - if you want the public narrative to be that public schools are failing, the state DOE sets an unreasonably high cut score. Fewer kids pass, and there's your rallying cry! This lets DOE and legislators justify shuttling public education funds to charter schools and private/voucher schools.

Anonymous said...

Public schools can't, won't and don't teach. By law, the teaching profession is locked up for the sole benefit of one college major, Teaching, unfortunately, one of the softest degrees at a university and a credential that scarcely educates its holder in anything substantive, much less allowing one so conferred to impart knowledge to anyone else.

Incapable of teaching, public schools spend their days indoctrinating students in the unintellectual goo of socialization, tolerance, pride, diversity, expression, acceptance, environmentalism, global warming, equality, and the rest of the Marxist ideology. Only rarely and crudely do public schools make any attempt at real education in real subjects.

The results are predictable: Americans are becoming measurably and observably dumber; adolescent identification as homosexual is soaring, and belief in silly ideas has become foundational for youth.

America needs a wholesale overthrow of education. Improvement won't occur with small measures.

Anonymous said...

Cut scores in Indiana are never set high or unreasonably high. In fact, they are always set lower than what the teacher panels recommend. It is possible, of course, that a group of history teachers might have an exalted opinion of the value of their subject matter and the role that history ought to have in the instruction of children. Some other authority needs to hold such back but each discipline does have some level of competence needing to be attained. Indiana has always set much lower cut scores than is academic. One reason why 15,000 kids per year take their worthless diplomas to places like Purdue and find out that they require remediation before they are failed out for not being ready for college level work. They may be capable of same, e.g. high SAT scores but unprepared by crummy instruction and by conniving liars as to their actual student academic achievement.
We all know of courses we took in which accurate teacher grading was a spur to improved effort. If we had constantly been told that we were doing "well enough" we would all have skated a whole lot more? The teacher who assisted us in maximizing our achievements is the teacher we remember as being a value to us.

Anonymous said...

12:02, did you go to school? what do you mean schools don't teach? Now because of gov't intervention they don't teach like they used to. All creativity is gone in how you teach because now it's teaching to a test. But ask yourself this, if you were a student in a class and see all the BS that your teacher has to go through in justifying your progress, and how much that job looks like it sucks, why would you go into teaching? You wouldn't and just look at the numbers, kids aren't going into teaching. It's nearly impossible to get raises, you get blamed for kids failing (who often don't get reinforcement at home), parents square off against you now (when i was in school, even if i was right and the teacher was wrong, my parents still took the teachers side, not anymore), etc... Sounds like an attractive job to me.

What needs to happen is for all the critics of public education and the politicos to actually get in a classroom and see what the teachers are dealing with. You can't see that just by looking at a standardized test result.

Anonymous said...

I'd love to get in a classroom and run it like a Pink Floyd movie, but I'm overeducated. It's illegal for anyone with a good college degree to teach in an Indiana classroom.

Pete Boggs said...

Anon 12:02's comment stands as true; because schools aren't allowed to teach; they're required to indoctrinate. Remove bad government from the pretense of education & enlightenment / education will be possible.