INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana will take advantage of a federal waiver on provisions of the No Child Left Behind act to create better education for students, State School Superintendent Tony Bennett said.
In a statement, he said the original act was a “giant step forward” for schools, but it’s since become out of date with how the state measures student success.
The Indiana State Teachers Association says it is cautiously supportive of the state’s plan, as long as it is used to improve schools.
“ISTA hopes that Indiana officials do not use this waiver to mandate further education ‘reforms’ without input from teachers, parents and other public stakeholders,” ISTA President Nate Schnellenberger said in a statement. Schnellenberger attended President Obama’s announcement of the waivers in Washington on Thursday.
Indiana was one of 10 states granted waivers by the White House. The states are getting leeway in exchange for promises to improve the way schools teach and evaluate students.
Gov. Mitch Daniels said in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal’s editorial board that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called him Wednesday to announce Indiana’s waiver.
Daniels said in the interview he appreciated the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise on the bill’s tough requirement for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
“The waiver will make for a fairer system and one that focuses on what matters most: getting the whole system to perform better in terms of student learning,” Daniels said in a statement.
Instead of a national passing-rate mandate, Indiana will use a ramped-up version of its A-to-F school-grading system, which was adopted last summer. But the state Department of Education will use new methods to calculate schools’ grades.
Schools will receive yearly report cards that analyze their students’ progress in key testing areas, such as math and reading.
They will break down how many students passed standardized tests and provide a letter grade for each subject at a school. Those grades will be averaged into an overall letter grade for the school.
The first batch of newly calculated letter grades will be released at the end of this school year.
State Department of Education spokeswoman Stephanie Sample said this is a more accurate way to look at student growth and places emphasis on struggling students.
Since low-achieving students may not start in the same place as higher-achieving peers each year, Sample said the state’s plan makes it a priority to have each student learn a year’s worth of material at any level and improve from there.
“There is a bottom 25 percent of students in every school, whether it’s Carmel or Indianapolis Public Schools,” Sample said. “Every school should be looking to get those students.”
