The spring ILEARN results were made public this week, with low proficiency rates seen across the state. At Bremen Public Schools, Superintendent Dr. Jim White is happy they weren’t worse. “Well, you know, even though they’re horrific, I’m doing back flips because they’re better than I thought they were going to be,” he says.
The school corporation as a whole had 34.5 percent of its students proficient in both English/language arts and math, while just over 35 percent were found to be proficient in science.
The assessments weren’t given in 2020 due to the pandemic, and the Indiana Department of Education warns against comparing this year’s results to the 2019 numbers. Still, White says Bremen’s results remained pretty steady, at least in relation to other schools. “We dropped between three and four percentage points of students passing both math and language arts,” he says, “and there are schools surrounding us that dropped well into the double digits, up to 20-percent drops in passing rates.”
He says this year’s results show the value of in-person learning, as well as the efforts of the teachers. “I’m excited because it gives us hope for the future that we can recover over time and eventually get our scores to where everyone would like them to be,” White says.
The Indiana Department of Education’s release of the results came along with the initial findings of a COVID-19 Academic Impact Study. It found significant impacts in math and moderate to significant impacts in English/language arts for elementary and middle school students.
