Responding to complaints from parents and educators, Gov. Mike Pence issued an executive order to shorten the ISTEP testing period, which is expected to increase from five hours and nine minutes in 2014 to 12 hours and 30 minutes this spring.
But Pence’s order doesn’t specifically cut out portions of the test but requests that his Office of Management and Budget hire an outside consultant to determine what parts are expendable while still making sure the test is up to federal standards. And it’s unclear if the recommendations would be ready in time to make any difference for the spring exams, which start Feb. 25.
“Doubling the length of the ISTEP-Plus test is unacceptable and I won’t stand for it,” Pence said. “We must take decisive action to shorten this test.”
Parents and educators have been speaking out in public and on social media in recent weeks about the longer testing window. At a Monday afternoon press conference, Pence placed the blame on the Department of Education, which is headed by State Superintendent Glenda Ritz, and said there should have been a pilot exam to discover these problems before the test was administered. Department of Education said the longer test arose from Indiana’s new academic standards, which the State Board of Education drafted to replace the national Common Core standards.
Ritz had called for an emergency meeting of the State Board of Education earlier on Monday. She also suggested that the state postpone any school accountability grades and teacher evaluations based on the ISTEP scores until the test is further evaluated, but Pence rejected that suggestion.
All of this comes amid a backdrop of ongoing discord between Pence, Ritz and the State Board of Education. Republicans are advancing legislation in the General Assembly that would remove Ritz, who was elected as a Democrat in 2012, as chairman of the State Board.
For his part, Valparaiso Community Schools Superintendent E. Ric Frataccia said the testing time issue should have been resolved long ago.
“The first thing school people — administrators, teachers, board members — should do is to answer how will a practice affect kids positively or negatively, and if it’s negatively how can we mitigate that,” Frataccia said.
Pence suggested one fix might be to cut the social studies section offered for some grades.
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“If you could remove it, that easily begs the question, why is it required in the first place?” Frataccia said.
Both Frataccia and Munster Superintendent Jeffrey Hendrix said when so much time is spent on testing, educators wonder whether that effort is really giving accurate results for kids.
“It’s bizarre when you find out we’re testing kids three times as long as people taking the bar exam,” Frataccia said.
Hendrix said that time could be better spent finding better ways to remediate and enrich students by investing in professional development.
“We need to making learning a constant, not time the constant,” Hendrix said. “We need to make sure they get it. Let’s teach kids concepts and make sure they have deep understanding.
“Kids are having to sit there for an hour at a stretch, when especially with the younger kids their attention spans are 15 or 20 minutes at the max. I don’t think that would be very productive.”
Hendrix said the state did a test of the computer-based questions about three weeks ago, and it didn’t go well.
“The drag and drop didn’t work very well, so just from a technical perspective we’re struggling just to make it work on our machines,” he said.
That recalls the 2013 spring ISTEP testing glitches, which led the state to suspend the test for several days while technology issues were fixed.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.