by Kelly Hawes
Pharos-Tribune
—
Local educators are voicing frustration over a delay in receiving the results of end of course assessments.
Michele Starkey, curriculum director for Logansport Community Schools, says educators learned this week that they would not get results of the 10th-grade English exam until the end of August. The beginning algebra results, she said, won’t arrive until September.
“We now have the biology results,” she said. “But it’s just a big stack of individual results. We don’t have anything for the school corporation as a whole.”
The frustration, she said, is that getting the results so late gives local educators little chance to place students in the right classes based on their performance.
According to the Indiana Department of Education, a student who fails the course but passes the exam needs to retake the course, which is required for graduation.
A student who passed the class, though, might well end up moving to the next level even though he or she failed the end of course exam. And by the time local educators get that information, the student will already be nearly a month into the new school year.
“It’s a lot more beneficial if you can get the information during the summer, so you can use it in planning,” Starkey said.
The three tests are mandatory, and students are required to pass all three to receive a high school diploma.
Lauren Auld, press secretary for the Indiana Department of Education, said the delay was a departure from the standard procedure.
“This happens every time we get a new test,” she said. “We have to evaluate the test to determine the passing rate.”
She apologized for any inconvenience to local school districts.
“This is really the only time this will happen,” she said. “Next year, the schools will have the results about three weeks after the students take the test.”
Starkey said the Logansport schools had a plan.
“We’ll go ahead and place the students in the next class, and if it turns out they need remediation, we’ll schedule them for that during the second semester,” she said.
She acknowledged, though, that that might not be ideal for students who really aren’t ready for the next class. If they’d had the test results, she said, some parents might have opted to have their kids retake the class.
“Our thought is if you’ve not mastered algebra I, how do you move on to algebra II,” Starkey said.
On the other hand, she said, some students know the material but simply perform poorly on tests.
“For those kids, moving to the next class won’t be a problem,” Starkey said. “They’ll just need some help getting ready to retake the test.”
Making decisions about what classes students should be taking without having all of the information, she said, can be challenging.
“It makes the guidance department a little crazy,” she said.
The goal, Starkey said, is to make the best decisions possible for the students.
“We’re talking about kids and kids’ lives,” she said.
Auld noted that any tutoring did not have to come during the regular school day.
“They can do it before school; they can do it after school,” she said. “It doesn’t have to happen as part of a class.”
Starkey said local school administrators were also eager to hear whether they had made the cut for adequate yearly progress, something else they won’t know until after the start of the new school year.
“If we need to make adjustments in what we’re doing,” she said, “that would be nice to know before we’ve started classes.”
Auld said the timetable for assessing adequate yearly progress wasn’t likely to change. She noted, though, that student performance on Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress was an important part of that assessment.
“They have the ISTEP results now,” she said, “so that should be helpful in making the decisions they need to make.”
Starkey said Logansport administrators would make do with the information available.
“We’ll make the best of it just like we always do,” she said.
