Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. This week, ISTEP+ results for the 2016-17 school year were released, and the figures are deeply troubling. Consistent with last year, only 51% of Hoosier students in Grades 3-8 passed both the Math and English/Language Arts (ELA) portions of the ISTEP+. The results are far worse in 10th grade, where only 34% of students passed both the Math and ELA portions of the test. While it’s tempting to dismiss these results as the product of a flawed state test, that would be a mistake and a disservice to students, parents, teachers and school leaders. Recall that Indiana recently […]

Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. In 2016, Indiana had a four-year, non-waiver high school graduation rate of 82.4%, and an adjusted graduation rate of 89.1%. This means that more than 10% of students – or a total of 8,626 students in 2016 – did not complete high school in four years. While some of these students may eventually graduate in five or more years, some portion has simply dropped out of high school. Given that most jobs in the 21st century economy require – at minimum – a high school diploma plus some form of post-secondary education or training, dropping out of […]