For KY kids: CATS, ACT or what??

A big battle has broken out in Kentucky's education community over state Senate Bill 1, which would dramatically change the way students are tested in Kentucky public schools. The Senate leaders didn't help things by orchestrating a hearing last week in which they basically gave the opponents little or no time to speak.

Why should you care? For starters, we all have a stake in our kids being successful in school. (The alternative, I guess, is Kentucky's latest claim-to-fame as having the nation's fastest-growing prison population, a system costing state and local governments a fortune to prop up.)

SB1 would throw out CATS and replace it with a nationally standardized test such as the ACT college entrance exam. It also is opening up a divide between higher-achieving districts, such as Fort Thomas, that see CATS as not raising the bar well enough, fast enough, and CATS supporters, who say it needs reforming but schools need to stay the course to keep improving.

Perhaps the biggest rap on CATS is that there is no good way to use it to track individual student achievement from year to year. SB1 proponents tout cost savings and reduced days when teachers have to spend basically "teaching to the test," a practice that certainly has taken a lot of the energy and passion out of education for both teachers and students.

On the other hand, SB1 could eliminate testing in the area of arts and humanities. That would be a tragedy if you believe in a well-rounded education, because more schools would cut back. Student writing portfolios would carry little or no weight, too.

So, in the spirit of that debate, I'm going to post excerpts from an e-mail (he gave permission) from Northern KY University professor Steve Newman to members of the Northern Kentucky Council of Partners, an education advisory and support group of which I am a member. If you want to read a position from the other side, click here for an editorial from the Courier-Journal.

Dense subject. Important issue. What do you think?

Dear Council of Partners Members,

... the design of the CATS tests make any proposed solutions difficult if not impossible to implement.

One problem is that the CATS tests are intended to evaluate schools, not individual students. The tests use a matrix design, with several different tests in the same subject and for the same grade level being given to different groups of students. This makes it difficult to compare individual students with their peers. Consequently, the tests do not provide meaningful feedback about individual students to teachers and parents. The tests do not provide timely feedback either because it takes five months to get them graded and returned.

An even more serious problem is that the tests are not aligned with postsecondary and work force expectations. We have all worked hard to correct this problem, and we have made some progress, but the problem seems just as intractable now as it was a decade ago.

The problem is in part caused by the wide range of topics covered on the CATS tests and the amount of instructional time these tests consume. Teachers are stretched to cover all the required topics and often do not have the time to cover important topics effectively and in depth. Unfortunately, these are often topics essential for success in postsecondary education.

The CATS tests in mathematics put too little emphasis on essential arithmetic and algebra skills. The consequences are profound. The college remediation rates in mathematics are high and appear to be getting higher. There are too few bachelor's degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, in part because our incoming college students do not have a sufficiently strong background in mathematics to be successful in these disciplines. Our economy suffers as a result...

Many of the leaders supporting Senate Bill 1 are in our region. Senators Westwood, Stine, Roeding and Thayer are among the 10 co-sponsors of the bill. (Senator Stine joined the others last week.)....

The time for change is long overdue....

Sincerely,
Steve Newman
Department of Mathematics
Northern Kentucky University
newman@nku.edu