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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
ITBS: What’s It Good For?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A DeKalb County mother e-mailed me the other day about the latest Iowa Tests of Basic Skills scores for her public school system.
She was interested in them — particularly for eighth-graders — because she’s concerned Georgia’s new math curriculum is hurting kids’ skills.
Turns out, DeKalb’s eighth-grade math scores on the ITBS dropped in about half of the county’s middle schools this year. In the other half, the scores held steady or improved.
So what does this tell us?
The mother took this as evidence that the curriculum was having a negative effect on her sons’ math ability, and she worried that it might be hurting other kids academically, too.
“My sons cannot add and subtract fractions and decimals, which are skills they should have learned in fifth and sixth grades,” she wrote. “And, yes, these skills are required for the SAT.”
Coincidentally, the ITBS came up during a committee meeting for the State Board of Education last week. Glynn County schools officials had asked for a reprieve from giving eighth-graders the science and social studies portions of the tests this year because they needed more instructional days.
This led to a discussion about whether the requirement that systems give the ITBS annually (in third, fifth and eighth grades) should be done away with altogether.
One member said teachers don’t use the data anyway — that it’s worthless in identifying what skills students need to work on; another noted that it doesn’t give parents much information, either.
“Almost every system out there feels the same way,” said board member Mary Sue Murray, a retired teacher. “It’s a waste of five days.”
Now, as I understand it, the ITBS is a test that shows how students stack up against one another across the United States. But, because of the way the test is designed, 50 percent of the students will always score below the average and 50 percent will always score above.
That’s because ITBS simply looks at how your child scored compared to the other scores at that time — not against a set national standard.
So the test isn’t showing how well your kid knows math. It’s showing how well your kid knows math when compared to all the other kids. They all could have done poorly on the exam. But if your son or daughter did slightly better than the rest, he or she would rise to the top percentiles.
So, if that’s true, then why do we need the ITBS?
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