ISTEP and READ 180

One of the key people in Stephanie’s school district – on a tour of all the schools in the district – spoke to a faculty meeting at Stephanie’s school Tuesday afternoon. In the No Child Left Behind world, one of the ways schools and school districts are graded is based on how students in various demographic groups perform on whatever the state’s standardized test is (in this case, the “ISTEP”).

A minimum number of students must be in a school or school district for the state and federal government to count standard test scores from those students – as a group – and Stephanie’s school – like most of the 13 elementary schools in her district – are too small and too Anglo to have many groups. Even with Stephanie’s school’s English as a New Language magnet program, there are not enough Spanish-speaking kids in the school to qualify as a Latino group or enough Japanese kids to qualify as an Asian American group. (For their first two years in Indiana ENL classes, ENL students’ scores don’t count – After that, they do.)

There are also not enough special education students in Stephanie’s school to count as a group.

The only groups in Stephanie’s school – which serves a largely Anglo, working-class student population – are Anglos and receiving free and reduced price lunches (an index of poverty).

This past year students in both of these groups in Stephanie’s school achieved – on average – at least the minimum ISTEP scores, and so Stephanie’s school “passed.” However, there are only three middle schools in the district, and many of these schools DO have enough students in other categories: Latino, African American, special education, etc. A majority of the kids in Stephanie’s program go on to the middle school with the ENL magnet program, Scribner (on the edge of the city of New Albany and the rural/suburban Floyds Knobs area). This middle school passed. But some of Stephanie’s kids and the most other Fairmont kids go on to Hazelwood Middle School, in the city, and this school did not pass (apparently thanks in part to decent sized African American and special education student populations whose average test scores were NOT passing).

Low scores by students in some groups in the middle schools and high schools in Stephanie’s district helped cause the school district to earn a failing grade the past couple of years. That means teachers in all schools across the district have received training in – the strategy the district apparently picked – “curriculum mapping” and have been required to practice this strategy. Ultimately, the state could take over individual schools or the whole school district, probably wiping out the existing school board and superintendent.

The new superintendent dispatched a key lieutenant to make the pitch to teachers such as Stephanie and her Fairmont colleagues: Even though your school passed, the test scores of some of your students who graduated to middle school helped the district fail. This is not only a problem for these students and their families, but also for the district as a whole, even for teachers in individual schools that passed.

(This administrator also assured the teachers that – even though the new Indiana state education chief – who came from their district – is pushing to license teachers with very little education training – people like me with history Ph.D.s should be able to teach middle school or high school social studies even if I’ve taken almost no education classes – that doesn’t mean that schools in their school district have to hire these folks as teachers.)

This year Stephanie is playing a role not only in helping her present and former students pass the ISTEP but also in helping non-ENL students do so. Not only is she working with a mix of ENL and non-ENL kids in after-school programs, but she is also teaching ENL and non-ENL students reading in her 90-minute “READ 180” reading classes (aimed primarily at students who are reading OK but slightly below grade level).

An employee of the company that markets READ 180 was slated to stop by Stephanie’s school this morning to do some additional training of Stephanie and one of her colleagues who also teaches READ 180 classes. This person was then slated to hang around and observe, which Stephanie felt was important enough that she tinkered with her lesson plans for the day. Hopefully this went well. And hopefully this kind of teaching in Stephanie’s schools and other elementary schools in her district will help produce middle school and high school students who will perform well on the ISTEP and help the district “pass.”

-- Perry