In Senate Bill 1 Williams seeks to ignore the constitution and throw the baby out with the bath water

According to the Kentucky Supreme Court opinion in Rose v Council for Better Education, the state Constitution requires the legislature to maintain an efficient system of schools. To do so, the legislature must nurture the system with adequate funding while maintaining certain academic goals.

Instead, largely under the leadership of Senate President David Williams, the legislature has preferred to ignore its obligations, overspend the budget on pork-barrel projects, and use the resulting revenue short-fall as an argument for not fulfilling their duty to the children of Kentucky.

For the "Bully from Burkesville," this is nothing more than business as usual. The Constitution is apparently important to him only when it grants the legislature (him) greater autonomy. At all other times - screw it.

Former KERA supporter Williams, now wants to drive a stake through the heart of the landmark legislation, with Senate Bill 1 by eliminating many of the Constitutionally required elements from the state assessment.

• The Supreme Court says the legislature must have as its goal that each and every Kentucky child will obtain "sufficient oral and written communication skills to enable students to function in a complex and rapidly changing civilization." But Williams wants to drop the requirement for open-response questions on the CATS assessment. He wants to use multiple-choice items to check for writing mechanics and editing - evaluating the writing of students who have not written.
• The Supreme Court says the legislature must provide students with "sufficient knowledge of economic, social, and political systems to enable the student to make informed choices." But Williams wants to eliminate the practical living and vocational testing from the program.
• The Supreme Court says the legislature must provide students with sufficient grounding in the arts to enable each student to appreciate his or her cultural and historical heritage. But Williams wants to eliminate arts and humanities testing.

Now, one can argue the relative merits and demerits of any part of an assessment system. Different parts have different roles to play. But Williams wants to toss the whole thing out while shifting responsibility to the local school districts and Councils. This, is unconstitutional.

As the Court stated, shifting responsibility "may not be used by the General Assembly as a substitute for providing an adequate, equal and substantially uniform educational system throughout this state." But that's exactly what Williams wants. He wants to pose, while the CATS assessment dies a thousand deaths.

Whatever its detractors may say, CATS - with its ambitious goals and multiple problems over time (recently made even more difficult by NCLB) - it was squarely focused on satisfying the constitutional mandate, even if some legislators are not.

I have criticized CATS myself on numerous occasions. From the early 90s when I complained to the state board that there was no real curriculum underlying the assessment and that annual changes to the test unfairly required schools to hit a moving target; to the dual scoring system of the new CATS; to this week's farce where KDE and Measured Progress are apparently pressuring teachers to admit that they didn't hear from Measured Progress what they surely heard - my goal has been the improvement of the system. Others have criticized CATS in order to gin up antipathy toward the entire effort, preferring normative measures that favor top students while maintaining a class of bottom students for comparison.

I think the right solution for Kentucky is much more complex. We collect a lot of information about our schools. I'd like to see the state use all of it in a stable, value-added system that collects metrics according to a standard set of well-understood definitions, and that doesn't change much - and never without getting better.

Williams just wants to dump it all for an off-the-shelf normative test where the curriculum Kentucky teachers teach is not the same as the curriculum tested.

This is not exactly an unpopular idea.

From the earliest days of KERA, next to the multi-aged Primary Program, the hardest thing for many up-scale parents to accept was the new assessment which focused on how well the school performed. That's not what most folks wanted. Parents generally want to know, "How's my kid doing compared to others?" Normative tests provide that kind of data.

But in the brokering that led to KERA's passage the business community, appropriately, insisted on accountability in order to support the new law. The larger community, beyond parents, wanted to know how the schools were performing, so that became the focus of the new assessment system.

In a perfect world, one would begin with the curriculum, write assessments according to what students were expected to learn, and the accountability metrics would be layered on last. In Kentucky's case, it came first; exactly backwards and the implementation was long and ugly.

The "performance-based" test was continually and frustratingly reinvented. Performance events came and went. Portfolios came and went. The number of Open Response items was decreased. Multiple choice items increased. Teachers have had to work extra hard. If one ignores the Constitution, William's SB 1 can be seen as just the next step in a long progression. It sure is easier.

I always thought the test should have a normative component, but that that would be the minor player in the overall accountability scheme. Normative tests are not very diagnostic, and their usefulness for improving instruction is very limited - even if results were returned to teachers the next day. But it is good to have an annual snapshot to let parents know where their children stand. The best part of SB 1 is its call for "individual reports to parents on the achievement of their children compared to school, state, and national results."

But throwing the whole thing out in favor of a CTBS-like test surrenders the curriculum to someone else - this, after years of Kentucky teachers helping build a core content based on what is actually being taught in Kentucky schools; as it should be.

But as Kentucky drifts further away from a performance-based assessment, and closer to some national curriculum that Kentucky teachers didn't write and don't understand - we do a disservice to our students. Teaching to the test becomes a real problem. Further restricting Kentucky's assessment to a narrow set of subjects is a problem. And we shouldn't do that just to make some adults feel better about their kid beating some other kid. Winning teams love scorekeepers. Everybody else understands our history, and how important it is to reward growth.

A normative test will apply the old bell curve and only serve to reinforce preexisting stereotypes about who is worth teaching.

At a time when the bachelor's degree needs to become the new baseline requirement for entry into productive work, the exclusive use of the ACT and other normative tests will discourage far too many Kentuckians from seeking higher education. And we will all pay the costs.

Senate Bill 1 should die. If not in the Senate - then, in the House. If not in the House - then on the governor's desk.

Photo from C-J's Politics in Kentucky blog, and a tip of the hat to KyVotes.org.