The End of CATS Testing in Kentucky

If the Kentucky Senate and House can work our their differences, the state testing system in Kentucky will be no more. I've kept quiet about this whole thing, and I may still be talking too soon, but I have to say it now:

I'm glad.

The Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) was passed in 1990, my first year teaching. I remember politicians making big promises then about how education in Kentucky was going to be revolutionized, about how we were going to transform education, how in 2012, when KERA came to full fruition, every student would learn at expected levels and schools would be so different and student learning so much more advanced that people in 1990 could not even comprehend what the school of 2012 would look like.

I was a starry eyed, naive twenty-two year old in 1990, but even I knew what a load of junk the whole line was. I remember hearing that on Opening Day of the very first year I taught, and I remember counting in my head and thinking, 2012, huh? It didn't bother me for three reasons:
1) It was 22 years away.
2) I knew teachers could retire after 27 1/2 years, and if the poop really hit the fan in 2012, I would only have to make it through 5 1/2 more years and then I could retire.
3) I figured that the state would either adjust the scores to MAKE everyone proficient by 2012 or they'd just dump the testing system altogether just before the due date.

We were well on our way to the first part of number three above, but now it looks like we've decided to take the dumping the test route now.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a resistor. I'm not a cynic. I'm just a realist. I always knew the idea that everyone could learn at a proficient level was ridiculous, and I also knew that the kind of revolution in education was not going to happen by just legislating change. Change doesn't work that way.

Let me give you a "for instance" here. In 1990, KERA mandated that grades kindergarten through third grade be eliminated. Studies showed that trying to herd students forward in learning based on the year they were born didn't really make any sense. Some students needed additional help in classes, but "holding a student back" a year had a stigma attached, so KERA mandated that the four grades of kindergarten through third grade be eliminated and replaced with a staggered system of four grades called P-1 through P-4. That's great. But what did most schools do? They just renamed kindergarten P-1, renamed first grade P-2, renamed second grade P-3, and called third grade P-4, and then continued with business as usual. Students who weren't ready to go to P-2 (first grade) at the end of P-1 (kindergarten) were given a P-2 classification the next year but were placed back in a P-1 teacher's room. Thus, they didn't fail. They WERE P-2 students, just in a P-1 class! That's not change. That's just giving something old a new name, like calling a retarded person mentally disabled. Nothing's changed about the student. It's just the label.

There are dozens more examples I could give (In fact, I meant to focus on the writing portfolio, since that was my area of expertise), but I didn't mean for this post to be THIS long, so I'm going to stop now. So I'll just finish up by saying that, though others in my Board of Education office will NOT be happy with this major change, including both of my bosses, I am secretly (at least as secretly as I can be on a public blog) elated.