Jay and SA test scores drop

As predicted, ISTEP scores dropped significantly statewide in 2015. And that pattern held true locally as well.
The percentage of Jay School Corporation third through eighth grade students who passed both the English language arts and math portions of the test dropped by 21.6 percentage points in 2015 according to numbers Indiana Department of Education released today. For South Adams, the decline was 29 percentage points.
Jay Schools superintendent Tim Long noted at Jay School Board’s meeting in December that scores were “comparable” to past years. “It’s a little bit lower, but we’re not seeing the huge swings that other corporations evidently have been seeing,” he added.
This morning, he said that though there was a decline, it wasn’t as severe as the 40-percentage point decreases seen in some corporations.
“I think we’ll be above state average in almost every category, even though we saw a drop,” Long said. “And we saw a decent drop, but it wasn’t a catastrophic drop.”
State officials had projected that passing rates would drop by double digits after changes were made to the test that made it more difficult. There was also criticism about increased testing time and issues with students being kicked offline during their exams.
Statewide, 53.5 percent of students passed both sections of the test compared to 74.7 percent in 2014.
Both local corporations were above the state average, with 61.2 percent of Jay County students and 56 percent of South Adams students passing both tests. At Jay Christian Academy, 19.4 percent of students passed both tests.
Long noted that Jay County ranked 58th out of 300 school corporations statewide in terms of its percentage of students who passed both tests. Jay Schools was fourth behind Del-Com (Delta), Adams Central and Yorktown among 27 corporations in Adams, Delaware, Randolph, Madison, Wells, Huntington, Blackford, Henry and Wayne counties.
Judge Haynes Elementary had the highest percentage of students pass among Jay and South Adams schools to pass both tests, coming in at 71.3 percent. That’s down 12.1 percentage points from 2014.
Pennville was the lowest for Jay School Corporation at 40 percent, down 30.8 percentage points from a year ago.
Every school in the corporation saw its passage rate drop by double-digit percentage points, with the widest gap at 31 percentage points.
“Everybody wants higher scores and of course I would say I want higher scores,” said Long. “But the reality is in this testing cycle they told us ahead of time this was going to be a different test and this was going to be a more difficult test and to expect lower scores. And that came true.”
Redkey Elementary had the best performance in the corporation on the ELA portion of the test, with 78.5 percent of students passing. Judge Haynes saw 85.6 percent of its students pass the math portion of the test.
For South Adams, 57.4 percent of students passed both tests at the middle school. For the elementary school, the passage rate was 54.4 percent.
Those numbers were down by 23.3 and 34.7 percentage points respectively.
Long said the goal in Jay County will be to look at the test scores in a continuous effort to improve. But he acknowledged that with uncertainty about the future of the test as the state switches from using CTB/McGraw-Hill to Pearson as the administrator and the state legislature considers further changes, preparation will be difficult.
“Until they get their act together with regard to what our testing is going to look like, it’s going to be very difficult for any school corporation to adjust to that,” he said.
The state legislature is considering measures that would place a moratorium on using the 2015 scores for both A through F school grades and teacher evaluations. ISTEP tests are taken by more than 400,000 third through eighth grade students each year.