Nearly one in five students enrolled in Marion County schools were proficient in both English and math on Indiana’s newest ILEARN assessment, well below the statewide rate of 31.5%.
The scores come at a pivotal moment because Indiana will use them to assign every public school a new A-F accountability rating for the first time in eight years. The ratings will be the public’s main measure of how well schools serve students.
The school-level results released in September are the first for Indiana’s new testing system, in which schools measure how students are performing on key academic standards in the fall, winter, and spring before the summative ILEARN exam.
Within the boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools, the results could factor into a separate school rating system for district and charter schools created by the mayor-appointed Indianapolis Public Education Corporation. The system may be a factor in school closure decisions.
State officials have cautioned that this year’s ILEARN is not comparable to previous years, since the test was modified to measure fewer academic standards. The Indiana State Board of Education also created new ILEARN cut scores — benchmarks that determine the level at which a student reaches proficiency.
The countywide results, which include students from 11 school districts and 46 charter schools, fall below the 31.5% of students who reached proficiency in both subjects statewide.
Beech Grove Superintendent Laura Hammack said schools need time and multiple years of data before determining the effectiveness of the new ILEARN and school rating system.
“This year's results establish a new baseline,” Hammack said in an email. “What I will be watching most closely is whether the combination of more timely assessment information and a greater emphasis on individual student growth ultimately results in stronger outcomes for students.”
Two Marion districts outperform state average in math, English
Just two school districts in the county — the School Town of Speedway and the Metropolitan School District of Washington Township — exceeded the state average for the share of students proficient in English, math, and both subjects.
Speedway’s rate is nearly 52% and Washington Township is at 32.8%.
Beech Grove became the lowest-performing district in the county this year at 11% proficient in both subjects after launching a virtual school that enrolled over 2,000 students and roughly doubled the size of the small district.
Virtual schools typically have lower achievement levels than brick-and-mortar schools, according to state testing data.
Beech Grove contracted with Stride, a national online education provider formerly known as K12, to run its Indiana Digital Learning School after lawmakers passed a law to close the Union School Corp. in East Central Indiana — which also enrolls thousands of students in its Stride-run virtual schools.
The online Beech Grove school serves a different population than in-person schools, Hammack said. Some students may enroll in the middle of the year, a disruption that can show up in ILEARN results. Others may be coming from homeschool, and unused to the testing environment presented on the day they must take the ILEARN.
Hammack said the district has weekly meetings to analyze student performance.
“It's really been an incredible partnership,” she said. “It just can't be understated how deeply connected we are with their work to ensure that their work continues to improve.”
Racial achievement gaps persist
As in previous years, significant gaps in achievement between White, Black and Hispanic students remain.
In Indianapolis Public Schools, just 5.8% of Black students and 7.8% of Hispanic students reached proficiency in both subjects.
Charter schools, nearly all of which are within IPS borders, had better rates for students of color who performed better as a whole, with 14.7% of Black students reaching proficiency in both subjects compared to the statewide average of 14.2%. About 13.5% of Hispanic students reached proficiency in both subjects in these schools, compared to 19.4% statewide. (The charter school analysis excludes virtual schools not associated with IPS and adult high schools. It also excludes a few schools for which data by race and ethnicity was suppressed due to a low student count).
School grades to include proficiency and growth
The new school rating system is more complex than the previous A-F accountability system, which measured standardized test performance, academic growth and graduation rates.
Instead, the new framework awards points to schools based not only on English and math proficiency on the ILEARN but also on proficiency in science and social studies on the same test. The system also awards points based on the proficiency and growth of students on the third-grade IREAD literacy test, as well as the completion of high school-level coursework in eighth grade and the creation of a graduation plan by the seventh grade.
Although this is the first year of a new ILEARN test, the school ratings will still consider a student’s growth on the test compared to previous years using a statistical method comparing percentiles across the two different tests, the Department of Education said through a spokesperson.
“This has been used before in Indiana as we shifted assessments, most recently when we adopted ILEARN initially in 2019 and when we shifted to the ISTEP+ assessment in 2015,” the department said in a statement.
The A-F school ratings are expected to be released by the end of the year. Currently, the grades do not trigger state action, such as intervention or takeover.
Contact WFYI Education Reporter Amelia Pak-Harvey at apak-harvey@wfyi.org
