ITED Time

Today we began administering the Iowa Tests of Educational Development to juniors at the high school at which I teach. Now, my school district, for some reason, only gives this test to juniors. The only reason I can come up with for that is that it saves the school district money. That's really the only explanation that makes sense to me. Anyway, that's not the point of what I am writing about. This morning while driving to work I was thinking about the ITEDs. Much like Homercles, who wrote about the same topic this morning, I too feel that the ways in which this test are used do not make sense.

We, as teachers, are being held accountable for our students' progress, and we should be, to some extent. But, as Homercles asserts, if we are to be held accountable for how well our students do on these tests, they should actually be based on what the state expects us to teach. The problem with that however is that the state does not tell us what specifically is to be taught. Iowa doe not have any specific standards of this type. All under the label of "local control," each school district is left to write its own standards. This seems quite inefficient to me. If we had standards of what specific topics were to be taught, then the state could have a test created to assess these standards, which are after all, what we should be teaching!

Last year, I was part of a group of math teachers in my school district to develop the curriculum for pre-algebra in the school district. One of the tasks we had to undertake was to read through each level of math ITED test, and some of the ITBS levels, and determining which of our school district's standards each item assessed. Some of them didn't assess any of our standards. Quite frankly, the information these items covered don't seem too important. However, since we have to have all students perform at the 40th percentile or better on these tests, we had to add some additional topics to our classes leading up to the tests. Some of these topics make absolutely no sense to be taught in the classes in which they are now taught.

Now on to the topic of having all students scoring at the 40th percentile or better, which is of course IMPOSSIBLE, as a student scoring at the 40th percentile scores better than 40% of the students taking the test. As Homercles points out, 100% of the students taking the test can't do better than 40% of them. I believe however that what actually has to be done is to have all students score at the level which was the 40th percentile when the test was normed in a certain year -- I don't remember which year -- within a certain time period. Now this would be possible, until the test it normed again, but it seems like a goal that is not very realistic.

Another thing that my school district does with this test, which is something for which it was not intended, is to use it as a graduation requirement. Students have to score at a certain level on the math and reading portions of the test in order to graduate. I was told by one of my colleagues last year that we have not had anyone not graduate because of not scoring well enough on these tests, so I guess we must be doing something right. ;-)