Lawmakers may be close on testing

This from Ronnie Ellis in the Glasgow Daily Times:

Work on accountability compromise

The state’s public schools accountability testing system, CATS, may have run out of lives as key lawmakers appear close to a compromise on its replacement.

The Republican controlled Senate has passed Senate Bill 1, which would replace the time consuming, controversial testing system with a simpler, less expensive multiple choice test. But they’ve done that in past sessions only to see it go nowhere in the Democratic controlled House. But the landscape has changed in the House with the selection of Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonsburg, as Speaker, and he’s been more willing to discuss changes to the testing system.

Senate Majority Floor Leader Dan Kelly, R-Springfield, said there’s “been a sea change in attitudes about the need to make adjustments in the test.”

Rep. Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, concedes it’s time to adjust the test, but he doesn’t want to rely solely on a multiple choice test – especially what is known as a norm-referenced test. Such tests compare student performance to that of students from across the country – as opposed to criterion or standards based tests, which measure how much a student knows against established standards of knowledge.

Sharron Oxendine, president of the Kentucky Education Association, said many teachers prefer a multiple choice, “norm-reference” test, but KEA wants to retain a standards based component to any new test.

She said norm reference tests are fine for comparison purposes but they don’t help with assessment because they don’t measure what students specifically know. And such tests, she pointed out, are designed so that half of all students score at the 50th percentile or below. So schools can never place most of their students at the proficiency level on such tests...

Both the right and the left have taken shots at former Commissioner Jon Draud for either too much or not enough of something or other. OK, there was the car thing. But his Task Force on Assessment that was said, by some, to have produced no good, seems to have produced some good. No matter how one views the testing situation, perhaps we should ask ourselves; Until recently, when is the last time we heard cooperation like this out of Frankfort?

Kelly said universities are “reaching out and starting a dialogue with school districts,” helping them prepare their students for college level work.

Nearly everyone said discussions between Senate leaders, including Kelly and Sen. Ken Winters, R-Murray, who sponsored SB 1, and House members over their differences are going well.

Rep. Carl Rollins, D-Midway, chairs the House Education Committee. He said Thursday, “We’re real close to an agreement. I’m very optimistic.”

Included in discussions about how to re-craft the state’s testing system have been school board members, superintendents and Oxendine and KEA. Rollins said for the most part, all the parties “are pretty much on the same page.”