I am so sick of ILEARN. In my nearly two years of advocating for CCS and Indiana public schools in general, I have probably spent more time looking at and writing about ILEARN nonsense than any other topic. So this page is going to be mostly links.
First, it’s worth noting that with Carmel Excellence, this movement is changing how it talks about ILEARN. This is not surprising, given how poor and easily refuted their analysis was in 2022. If you want to go back and check that out, here are some links.
As for how Carmel Excellence has changed, in public it hasn’t really mentioned ILEARN so far. Maybe that’ll change or maybe they’ve given up on it. Regardless, in private, talking to their supporters, they’ve shifted to criticizing the differences in proficiency rates across our individual schools. And on its face, that seems like a valid critique to an audience who doesn’t have time to keep up with the test. But an aspiring school board member making such an argument reveals either dishonesty or an arguably disqualifying level of ignorance on the topic.
First, each of our schools serves a very different population in terms of how many students qualify for free or reduced price lunches, require special education or are not native English speakers. Just these three factors, taken together, determine a school’s proficiency rating more than every other influence combined. I’m working on a deep dive on that for my Carmel Schools Dad website and will add a link here once I get it finished. For now, here's an extremely simple preliminary graph showing the relationship between schools' proficiency rate and the percentage of students they serve from disadvantaged groups.
Second, ILEARN has a lot of garbage questions. Last year, I spent a huge chunk of time going through every ILEARN question IDOE has made available to the public. A significant number of them either have no correct answer or a number of correct answers that is different from what students are asked to select. To review a whole lot examples, here’s a link.
Lastly, these types of standardized tests are notoriously poor tools of evaluation for many reasons.
Are you wondering why so many of ILEARN’s questions suck? They’re written and edited by committee, with multiple people making changes for what they each individually perceive as any deficiency. By the time the questions reach their final form, many, again, are garbage.
ILEARN was designed with the intent that a certain percentage of kids will fail. As in, the team putting it together picked roughly what scores they thought would constitute approaching proficiency, proficient, etc. A simulation then told them what percentage of kids were expected to pass at that score. They then went back and forth on whether that was the right percentage of failures and moved the score up or down to get closer to what they felt was acceptable.
There’s a big gender gap. Girls do better than boys on English. Boys do better than girls on math. Here are two tables showing just how significant and sustained that is. The first table shows how much higher girls' ILEARN English proficiency rates are than boys'. The second shows how much higher boys' ILEARN math proficiency rates are than girls'.
Whether you believe that has to do with real differences in boys’ and girls’ brains or reflects different rates of maturity or is simply indicative of bias in the tests doesn't really matter. The test is clearly either overreporting or underreporting proficiency rates for both genders, which creates a depression in joint proficiency rates that makes the figure worthless beyond giving anti-public-education groups extra ammo to slander our schools to the uninformed.
We can keep going. These types of tests in general will always produce false negatives, where proficient kids score as not proficient, but rarely (if ever) produce false positives, where non-proficient kids score as proficient. Kids, especially really young kids, can score below their actual ability for a whole host of reasons ranging from being nervous to family issues at home to getting bad sleep the night before to simply being bad test takers.
In short, from my deep personal research into these scores, conversations with administrators and educators, and the experiences of my own kids and friends’ kids, I think the only value ILEARN offers at all is as an indication to take a deeper look.
If an individual kid scores poorly, it’s worth taking a deeper look to see IF there is an actual learning issue, or if it’s simply the result of some other random factor.
If a school’s or district’s overall proficiency rate drops (and there’s been no significant changes to the demographic makeup of its student body), it’s worth taking a deeper look to see IF something has actually changed with where its students are at, or if it’s simply the result of some other random factor.
Beyond that, it’s not good for much.
And even if you just read all of the above and somehow think ILEARN proficiency rates matter, Carmel Excellence is still the wrong choice for you. Robin Clark previously served on the board of Redeemer Lutheran School. The only time it ever ranked higher than any CCS school was in 2014 when it was a bit above Orchard Park Elementary, which no longer exists. Here's a chart of where CCS schools and Redeemer Lutheran School have ranked going back to 2012.
If not Carmel Excellence, then who?
If you're proud to live in one of the top school districts in the state...
If you appreciate and support our teachers...
If your kids have benefited or are benefiting from a world-class CCS education...
If you want our schools to stay welcoming to all students and their families...
I hope you'll join me in opposing Carmel Excellence and voting for Jon Shapiro and Kris Wheeler.
Disclaimer:
As mentioned on the homepage, this site contains both facts and my opinions on those facts. I believe the difference is quite obvious, but if you question which category any particular statement falls into, please reach out via the Contact page and I will be glad to clarify.
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