Indiana Is Still Testing Students. That May Be One of the Best Ways to Make Sure They Are Ready

Keep Testing Hoosier Students

By Hoosier Enquirer Staff

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana has spent years debating how much standardized testing is too much, but the more important question may be whether the state can afford to test too little.

Public schools still rely on statewide assessments including ILEARN in grades 3 through 8, IREAD for early literacy and the SAT in high school. Indiana has changed the way some of those tests are administered, particularly by moving ILEARN toward shorter assessments during the school year rather than relying almost entirely on one large spring examination. The goal is to give teachers useful information earlier, while there is still time to help students who are falling behind.

That distinction matters. Standardized testing should not be confused with excessive testing. A poorly designed or repetitive exam can waste classroom time, but an objective statewide assessment serves a purpose that report cards and graduation ceremonies cannot: it tells parents, teachers and taxpayers whether students have actually mastered the material expected of them.

Indiana needs that information because a diploma does not necessarily mean a student is ready for college or the workforce. The state’s own academic results have repeatedly shown large gaps between the number of students who graduate and the number who demonstrate proficiency in core subjects. In the most recent statewide ILEARN results before the redesigned system took full effect, only about 41 percent of students demonstrated proficiency in English/language arts and about 42 percent did so in mathematics.

Those numbers are uncomfortable, but that is precisely why testing matters. An assessment does not create academic weakness any more than a thermometer creates a fever. It identifies a problem early enough for schools and families to do something about it.

The alternative can be much more expensive.

A student may receive respectable grades, accumulate enough credits to graduate and arrive at a college campus only to discover that freshman mathematics, academic reading or college-level writing is beyond what he or she was prepared to handle. At that point, families may already be paying tuition, students may require remedial support and colleges may find themselves teaching skills that should have been mastered in high school.

For parents, that is far too late to learn the truth.

A Common Measure Matters

Classroom grades remain important, but they are not uniform. An A or B in one school does not necessarily reflect the same academic standard as the same grade in another district. Teachers use different assignments, grading practices and expectations, while students can progress through very different curricula.

A statewide assessment provides a common reference point.

That does not mean a test score should define a child or determine every educational decision. Students have different strengths, teachers see things an exam cannot measure and schools have responsibilities extending well beyond reading and mathematics. But none of that eliminates the need for a consistent measure of whether students are acquiring basic academic skills.

Without one, Indiana risks creating an accountability system in which nearly everyone can appear successful because there is no independent standard against which the claims can be tested.

That would not serve students well.

Indiana’s New Approach Could Make Testing More Useful

Indiana’s redesigned ILEARN system is intended to make statewide testing more useful during the school year. Instead of waiting until after classes end to discover that a student struggled, shorter checkpoints can give teachers information while instruction is still underway.

That is a sensible objective if the assessments remain rigorous and comparable statewide. Testing should help a fourth-grade teacher identify which students are falling behind in reading or which mathematical concepts a class has not mastered. It should help parents understand whether a child who appears to be doing well locally is also meeting statewide expectations.

The real test of Indiana’s redesign will therefore not be whether students spend fewer minutes taking exams. It will be whether the results arrive soon enough, are specific enough and are taken seriously enough to improve instruction.

Indiana should eliminate unnecessary duplication. It should not eliminate objective measurement.

The College-Readiness Problem Is Hard to Ignore

Colleges have been warning nationally for years about incoming students who struggle with material traditionally expected to have been learned before graduation. Indiana is not immune from that problem.

That creates an uncomfortable contradiction. A state can celebrate higher graduation rates while simultaneously sending large numbers of students into higher education insufficiently prepared for college-level work. Both things can be true because graduation measures whether students completed high-school requirements, while proficiency testing asks whether they actually mastered certain academic skills.

The distinction is important for families making increasingly expensive decisions about college. Tuition, housing, food and other costs can easily exceed tens of thousands of dollars per year. Students should not discover after arriving on campus that the diploma they earned overstated their preparation.

Standardized testing provides an opportunity to identify those weaknesses years earlier.

A third grader who is not reading proficiently needs help in third grade. A middle-school student struggling with fractions or algebra should receive additional instruction before reaching high school. A junior whose college-readiness scores show major deficiencies still has time to improve before graduation.

Testing becomes valuable when Indiana treats those results as a warning rather than merely another government statistic.

The Answer Is Better Education, Not Less Information

It is understandable that parents and teachers become frustrated when schools appear consumed by tests, test preparation and data collection. No child should spend an unnecessary portion of the school year filling in answer sheets simply because a bureaucracy wants another spreadsheet.

But that criticism should lead Indiana toward better testing, not toward abandoning testing.

There is an important difference.

A good assessment is relatively short, aligned with what students are supposed to learn, comparable from school to school and returned quickly enough to influence instruction. A bad assessment consumes classroom time without telling teachers or parents anything useful.

Indiana should keep refining the first and eliminating the second.

What the state should not do is lower the blinds because the view outside is unpleasant. If statewide assessments show that too many children cannot read, write or perform mathematics at the expected level, the answer is not to stop measuring them. The answer is to improve what happens in the classroom until the results change.

Indiana taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year educating children. Parents entrust schools with some of the most important years of their sons’ and daughters’ lives. Students themselves invest enormous effort and ultimately depend on their education when they enter college, technical training, military service or the workforce.

All three groups deserve honest information about whether that system is working.

A diploma should represent more than attendance and accumulated credits. It should mean that a student leaves high school genuinely prepared for what comes next.

Standardized testing cannot guarantee that result. But without objective testing, Indiana has far less ability to know whether it is achieving it.

And the worst time to discover that a student was not prepared for college is after the tuition bill has already arrived.