| Kentucky Education Reform Act |
Article Index for Kentucky |
Website Links For Kentucky |
Information AboutKentucky Education Reform Act |
|
THE GOALS OF KERA KERA was based on six goals: # Students use basic communication and mathematics skills for purposes and situations they will encounter throughout their lives. # Students apply concepts and principles from mathematics, the sciences, the arts, the humanities, social studies, practical living studies, and vocational studies to what they will encounter throughout their lives. # Students develop their abilities to become self-sufficient individuals. # Students become responsible members of a family, work group, or community, including demonstrating effectiveness in community service. # Students think and solve problems in school situations and in a variety of situations they will encounter in life. # Students connect and integrate experiences and new knowledge from all subject matter fields with what they have previously learned, and build on past learning experiences to acquire new information through various media sources. THE SUCCESS OF KERA KERA's deep systemic changes have been controversial since the passage of the reform act in 1990. While the state's own assessment program, called the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System (KIRIS), showed considerable progress in the early 1990s, the state's reading scores remained flat for reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 1992 and 1994. This triggered an audit by the Kentucky Office of Educational Accountability in 1995 that raised a number of serious issues with the assessment program. Continuing difficulties with the assessment program including failure of two of the most radical elements, the "mathematics portfolios" and the "performance events" test element, triggered more audits that led to the demise of KIRIS in 1998. The Kentucky legislature replaced KIRIS in 1999 with the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS). However, this new assessment has also been controversial. Charges were made, with some substantiation, that the changeover from KIRIS to CATS had resulted in a very notable reduction in the academic goals. Not only did school scores suddenly jump upward as a result of the CATS score resetting process, but the effective goal where schools could avoid all sanctions was changed from an end score of 100 in the year 2014, on a zero to 140 point scale, to a score slightly below 80. Kentucky did begin to show improvements in NAEP reading in 1998, but it was quickly pointed out that those NAEP results were suspect because the state had radically increased its rate of exclusion of students with learning disabilities on the NAEP. This controversy continues unresolved in 2006 as the NAEP has never corrected scores for this increasingly severe problem, which now impacts the validity of scores in a number of other states, as well. Kentucky's NAEP math results generally continue to rank below the rest of the nation, and there is ample evidence such as high math remediation rates in Kentucky colleges that the problems are indeed severe. Testimony from the state's leaders admit that there are severe problems with math instruction after more than 15 years of reform effort. Despite these problems, there have been those who claim the program is worthwhile. In 1998, The Ford Foundation and Harvard University awarded Kentucky's education system the ''Innovations in American Government'' Award. However, more recently, interest in Kentucky has waned as the generally unspectacular results have become more apparent. Most educators are now look elsewhere for better performing initiatives such as Tennessee's very impressive assessment program known as the Tennessee Value Added Assessment Program. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|