A Pause in CATS Accountability May be a Good Idea

Kentucky endured an excess of editorial hand-wringing recently over the demise of the state’s CATS school assessments. Those one-sided rants fuss about newly enacted plans for a three-year pause from CATS school accountability. Instead of even considering that there might be a bright side to temporarily halting high stakes accountability, these editors just whine that education reform is dead (it isn’t).

Since you apparently aren’t going hear it from the press, we look here at the other side of the coin – how dropping the high stakes accountability for CATS for a few years could allow our teachers to start making needed curriculum improvements right away while we go through the three year process of creating a much better and up-to-date assessment program.

If you are interested in seeing what Paul Harvey liked to call, “the rest of the story,” read on.