A letter to President Clinton
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, July, 1997

Dear Mr. President:

Education officials in our state recently announced that they will be helping your administration design a set of new national tests as a part of your education initiative.

But before you launch off into this project, there are a few things you should know.

The people you are calling upon to help bring the nation’s students up to the level of students in other countries are people who have presided over what is probably the most controversial element of our state’s school reforms: the KIRIS test (the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System).

Why is it so controversial? That would take too long to fully explain, and I know how valuable your time is. The best way to explain it is to tell you a little about the people here in Kentucky.

You see, we Kentuckians have this idea that if state bureaucrats (and we’ve got a few of them here) are going to spend millions of dollars of our tax money on a big, expensive test, then it ought to be reliable.

But there have been several reports, which have been written by various experts from around the country, that say it isn’t.

The state officials who are going to help you design your new national test know about these reports, but they seem to think reliability isn’t that important. What’s important, they say, is how the tests affect instruction in the classroom.

How does the test affect instruction? It depends on whom you ask.

If you ask state education officials, they’ll tell you that students are writing like never before. In our testing program students write and write and write. They write until tiny blisters form on their tiny hands and then they write some more.

But if you ask other people how the state test affects instruction, they’ll tell you something completely different. For example, if you ask the researchers at RAND (that’s the famous think tank), they’ll tell you something a little different.

In a recent report from RAND, teachers from across the state were interviewed about the tests. They said that they were deemphasizing things like grammar, punctuation, spelling and math calculation skills. Why? Because of the tests, they said.

The test is changing instruction all right. The question is, is it changing it in the right direction?

That’s another thing about us Kentuckians. We like our children to know basic skills (most of us anyway) and we get a little upset when we find out that the tests we’re having to belly-up for are causing teachers to do away with them.

I don’t know about the people in the rest of the country, but I would be willing to bet that they have an attachment to the basics too. I would wager that if they were to see their nation’s leaders buy into the idea that basic skills are not important, they would be a little upset.

We Kentuckians also like to know how our own individual children are doing. But despite the big price tag, our tests can’t tell us that.

And about the price tag. Another recent report found that our tests cost between $848.59 and $1,791.96 per student to manage, develop, administer and score. That may not sound like a lot of money up there in Washington, but it’s a lot of money out here, especially when you consider that you can buy an off-the-shelf test that compares every individual child to students around the country for $20.00 per student.

So the idea of wanting to take our state’s testing officials who have been responsible for such a huge boondoggle here in Kentucky and flying them to Washington is simply ...

Wait a minute.

I’m thinking about this all wrong.

You want to fly them to D.C. and put them to work designing your new national test? You want to take them off our hands? They’re all yours. You can have them.

We will miss them, of course. They’re a nice bunch of people and they’ve got a good sense of humor. But we will not be responsible for the results.

And it’s one of those no guarantee, no return kind of things. You want ‘em, you gotta keep ‘em.

But don’t come back in a couple of years and say, “Hey, I thought Whitewater was giving me headaches. Now I’ve got a multi-billion dollar testing system that isn’t reliable and doesn’t stress academic content and basic skills and it can’t even tell us how individual students are doing.”

“What do you take me for anyway? Some hick from Arkansas?”

You know what we’re going to tell you? We’re going to say, “We told you so.”
 

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