Kentucky's portfolio program controversial
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, Nov, 1997

Kentucky’s portfolio program has been controversial from its inception. As an instructional method, portfolios have been useful to many teachers. As collections of a student’s best work, they can tell us something about a student’s progress.

But their value to teachers as a way to monitor their student’s progress does not necessarily mean that they are valuable for use in an assessment program.

When Kentucky began the education reform effort in 1990, “performance-based testing” was a fashionable buzzword among the education establishment. Portfolios were seen as one important component of performance-based assessment. Consequently, even though the use of portfolios for assessment purposes was new, state education officials decided to use them as part of Kentucky’s high-stakes accountability system.

That decision has been far from popular. Questions in regard to whether portfolios could be objectively graded, whether they really have measurable instructional benefits, and whether teachers were being forced to spend too much time on them at the expense of regular classroom instruction have dogged the program from its inception.

The portfolios even became an issue in the gubernatorial election of 1995. Republican candidate Larry Forgy argued against their use in the state’s testing system, saying that they were causing teachers needless headaches and charging that they could not be objectively graded. His position on this and other education issues was at the forefront of his campaign. In a largely Democratic state, he lost by only two percentage points.

Portfolios have even come under fire from some in the education testing community.  When the Office for Education Accountability’s panel of six national testing experts studied the state’s testing system, they recommended that portfolios not be used to judge schools because of their questionable reliability.

Susan Phillips of Michigan State university, one of the panel members, went even further: “The positive instructional effects (of portfolios) are supported by testimonials and anecdotes but no systematic, comprehensive data.”
 

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