What do we want children to know?
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, May, 1997

When state education officials testified at an April hearing of a sub committee of the State Task Force on Public Education, state education officials had to contend with questions and criticisms, not just about the state’s tests, but about the standards that Kentucky’s children are expected to meet.

When KERA was originally passed, it required state education officials to come up with a set of statements that outlined the state’s six general learning goals in measurable terms. These were originally called the “valued outcomes.”

However, when the set of valued outcomes came under fire for being too vague and politically correct, state officials changed the name several times, eventually settling on “Academic Expectations.” Critics then charged that, whatever the state wished to call them, they still did not say in clear terms what children were expected to know and what the school would be held accountable for. They were also criticized on the grounds that they had been cooked up by committees of experts behind closed doors in Frankfort, to the exclusion of average Kentuckians.

A state committee forced the Kentucky Department of Education to hold public hearings on the outcomes and have them approved by a panel of state lawmakers.

The controversy came to a head in June of 1994, when a 7-member panel of lawmakers heard testimony both for and against the outcomes. They were approved by a narrow 4-to-3 vote, but only after assurances that they were not what the state tests were actually testing.  That, in fact, the tests were not measuring any particular document.

But in recent state task force meetings, state officials have said that they are measuring another document, called “Core Content for Assessment.” It is this document, state officials now say, that is what we expect children to know and is the basis for state tests.

This document, however, like the original valued outcomes, was developed behind closed doors and has never been subject to public hearings.

Debate is expected later this spring on why it is that the knowledge and skills that all students in the state are expected to know and all schools are held accountable for has not been subjected to public scrutiny.

The Task Force is expected to deal with this issue in its May meetings.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst