Didn’t pass ISTEP?

In his State of the State address, Gov. Mitch Daniels lobbied the General Assembly to pass legislation that will not allow third-graders who do not pass the English/Language Arts portion of the ISTEP examination to advance to the next grade.

Fixing a broken statewide education system without spending too much money is still being debated.

“We must address the single greatest cause of student failure, the inability of so many of our children to read proficiently,” Daniels said. “If a school accomplishes nothing else in a child’s decisive first years, it simply must enable him or her to read and comprehend the English language.”

During the last school year, nearly 75 percent of Indiana third-graders passed the English/Language Arts portion of the ISTEP, a number slightly higher than in the Monroe County Community School Corporation.

The proposed legislation, Senate bill 258, would make exceptions for students who speak English as a second language or who have been held back multiple years. However, the possibility of holding back a quarter of Indiana third-graders could be a financial burden.

According to the Legislative Services Agency, the bill could rack up a $23.5 million price tag for the state in the 2013-2014 school year – the year the bill would take effect.
The bill passed the Senate Education and Career Development Committee last week, but its large cost could stop it in the Senate.

Despite the fiscal ramifications of the bill, some school administrators don’t see holding back students as a positive way to fix education in the state.

“That is not how we operate and not how we feel at Fairview Elementary School,” Assistant Principal Trudy Litz said.

The Bloomington school currently places students who struggle in specific fields into smaller groups to focus on their needs, Litz said. They rarely hold students back.

Litz said the bill could be “devastating” for Fairview, a school that only saw 52 percent of its third graders pass the English portion of the ISTEP exam last year.

The state could improve the education of young Hoosiers by other means, Litz said.
“First of all, Indiana has to make Kindergarten mandatory,” Litz said. “Then we need to make it full-time.”

Some lawmakers agree.

“I think we need to look to ways how we make sure that that first-grader is able to advance to the second grade because he or she knows how to read,” State Rep. Trent Van Haaften, D- Mt. Vernon said. “Not that we have that first-grader in first grade three or four different years.”

Some first-graders who haven’t attended Kindergarten, especially those from poverty, often come into school so lacking in social skills, it’s hard for them to catch up, Litz said.

Still, Daniels said this bill is a chance for Indiana to send a message “to the world.”

“Sending an illiterate child on to higher grades is unfair to the next teacher, damaging to our state’s future, but cruelest of all, disastrous to the young life being blighted by that failure,” Daniels said. “Indiana never gives up on its children. Not one single kid.”