Fordham study trashes education standards used in Kentucky

Says pending new standards should be MUCH better for us

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute just published comparisons of all the states’ existing education standards versus the new Common Core Standards that Kentucky is now adopting. The new standards were developed by a partnership of the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors’ Association.

The new standards will guide course development in Kentucky and also will be the basis for the new public school assessments the state plans to introduce in about a year.

The change comes none too soon for Kentucky’s children, because the Fordham report says our existing education standards are “among the worst in the country.”

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Where’s All the Writing Improvement?

Kentucky Tonight just held a discussion of the pending CATS Task Force that will be looking at the state’s public school assessment program. It was three educators against our friend Martin Cothran from the Family Foundation, so the educators were outnumbered.

One item the educators brought up repeatedly was how much improvement they have seen in writing. That’s just more evidence our educators see too much in too little, so I called in to the show to share the latest results on eighth grade writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I thought you might like to know about that, too.

The NAEP 2007 Writing Report Card says Kentucky’s eighth graders made no statistically significant change in writing performance between 2002 and 2007. That’s half a decade of flat performance.

The 2007 NAEP proficiency rate for our eighth graders was only 26 percent – just one of four Kentucky kids scored proficient for writing. That was a statistically insignificant change from the 25 percent proficiency reported in 2002. In fact, since 1998, a decade ago, the NAEP eighth grade writing proficiency rate in Kentucky has only gone up 5 points – but there is a catch.

While posting its miniscule score improvement between 1998 and 2007, Kentucky’s exclusion rate for students with learning disabilities shot up faster than anywhere else in the country, rising from two to six percent of the entire NAEP raw sample of students. This big increase probably means most, if not all, of the tiny writing score rise since 1998 is an illusion. Scores look a bit better if you simply prevent a lot more of your weakest kids from taking the test.

By the way, over that same period, the CATS said our middle school kids “on-demand” writing sample, which was collected in a manner similar to the sort of testing conditions the NAEP uses, exploded from just 5.92 percent proficient to 42 percent proficient. So, CATS went from being graded far too hard to being graded much easier than the NAEP. That’s just perfect if you are an education person trying to make yourself look good.

It’s terrible if you are a member of the public searching for the truth about how schools are really doing.

And, all of this shows how CATS just confuses educators and the public alike.

“Homework” for the CATS Task Force

Last week, the Kentucky Department of Education released the names of people who will serve on its CATS Task Force to review Kentucky’s school assessment program. Before these people meet, they need to get smart on the inflated grading in CATS discussed in the videos linked below. If the Task Force fails to recommend changes to the CATS’ inflated scoring scheme as discussed in these videos, their work will be an automatic failure.

You can easily learn what’s wrong with CATS scoring by looking at these You Tubes. For the best understanding, watch all four videos in order, but if time is short, start with Part 3 and continue to view Part 4. Just click the links to start each part.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Someone else has figured the high school dropout rate business out

"Clearly no one wants to talk about this, but in Kentucky's current assessment and accountability system schools actually benefit from young people dropping out rather than having them perform at a low rate on the tests," he said. "No one wants to admit that's a problem, but it is a problem."

Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates

Quoted in “Kentucky slips in six key areas,” Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, June 12, 2008 as provided by Kentucky School Boards Association News Service (subscription required).

When Kentucky's CATS assessment starts to really penalize schools for dropouts (right now, the penalty is trivial), maybe this will stop. By the way, Mr. Brooks, I have criticized this problem in CATS for years. Glad you are now on board on this important issue.