(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

Learning to Live (and Grow) with KERA

By Holly Holland and John Norton

Back in 1984, the Kentucky General Assembly decided the best way to get public school teachers to toe the line was to focus on the clock. Legislators created a series of "time on task" requirements that forced teachers to spend a certain number of minutes per week on each subject -- no more, no less. Teachers were also expected to march lockstep through the state-approved textbooks.

The strategy was so successful that Kentucky's students stayed at the bottom of nearly every national measure of academic achievement through the end of the decade.

In 1990 state officials came up with a new plan-the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA)--which took a different tack. It assumed that teachers were professionals who could make some critical decisions about teaching and learning in their own classrooms.

KERA asked teachers to help students meet six major academic goals: use basic communication and mathematics skills; apply core concepts in all the major subjects; become self-sufficient learners; become responsible group members; think and solve complex problems; and connect and integrate knowledge.

These broad goals were supposed to frame everything that teachers and students did in the classroom. At the outset, KERA left it up to local educators to decide how best to meet the objectives.

While state officials loosened the instructional leash, they didn't let go of it altogether. To assure accountability, the state created a complex new testing program -- including writing portfolios, group problem-solving, and short-answer questions-to verify student progress. Officials gave the new testing program a long-winded name: the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System (KIRIS). And they made it a "high stakes" test. Schools that kept students marching uphill at a quick enough pace got cash rewards; those that didn't got extra help and could face a state takeover.

Since the creation of KIRIS , the state has gradually released more details about what will be tested and what academic standards students are expected to meet. But six years into Kentucky's education reform initiative, there is ample evidence that the tests themselves, not the standards upon which they are based, have become the focus of instruction in many classrooms. And nowhere is that more prevalent than in Jefferson County's middle schools.

KIRIS is driving the train

"I don't know if we have a bigger focus beyond the fact that KIRIS is driving us," said Kathleen Sayre, assistant principal at Noe Middle School. "There are some people that know the standards and can quote them. Others will say, 'Oh yeah, I've seen that book somewhere.'"

Some teachers and principals see the state tests "as an end point," said Cindy Davis, a Jefferson County resource teacher who works with middle schools. "If they do good on that, they don't need to do anything else."

In order to "do good" on KIRIS, schools have tried to sharpen their students' test-taking skills, juggled teaching loads to concentrate the best teachers in grades and subjects where the tests are given, and used other "test-beating" strategies. Mostly, these strategies have not produced lasting improvements. Recent KIRIS results reveal that as a group Jefferson County's middle schools ranked at the bottom in the state.

While there's nothing wrong with preparing students for the state tests, they were never meant to be the limit of reform. When schools focus on the test and fail to embrace the larger goals of KERA, they engage in a kind of arcade game: occasionally hitting the moving mechanical duck but often missing the more challenging target in the background -- improved student learning.

Not enough help for teachers and principals

For teachers who preferred the certainty of the old method of teaching by the clock, KERA introduced a burdensome amount of freedom. From the beginning, teachers complained that the KERA goals were too broad and vague and the state education department gave too little information about what to emphasize in their lessons.

In 1989, Roger Pankratz, executive director of the Kentucky Institute for Educational Research, headed a group called the Council for School Performance Standards that produced 75 "valued outcomes" for students. The council recommended that the state thoroughly train teachers so they would be able to use the outcomes to guide their teaching.

But Pankratz says the state, which incorporated the outcomes into KERA, "did a poor job of telling teachers how you get to these goals. They said each school should figure that out." KSDE spokesman Jim Parks offers a different spin. "There was a deliberate attempt to not have the state Department of Education be in the business of prescribing what teachers should do in the classroom," he says.

Ultimately, the state developed Transformations, a "curriculum framework" based on the valued outcomes. The thick book included a broad description of standards in each subject area and some sample classroom activities. "It's a remarkably well-thought-out and useful document," a JCPS administrator said recently. "But it's not simple to get at."

Unfortunately, few Louisville teachers received in-depth help in understanding the Transformations document or learning how to apply the standards to their everyday teaching. Principals, whose leadership would be required to make significant changes in teaching and learning in their schools, received even less training.

The result was that many teachers continued doing what was familiar, instead of learning something new. And still they clamored for more information about how to prepare students for the tests.
Last summer, after two years of deliberation with teachers, parents and national education groups, the state began releasing "Core Content for Assessment" documents that outline the specific knowledge and skills in each subject area that are fair game for state testmakers. State officials hope the documents will finally give teachers and principals the level of detail they've been asking for.

At about the same time, the Jefferson County Public Schools released a standards-based curriculum guide of its own. But when middle school teachers at an August conference asked about the connections between the district guide, KIRIS, and the state's standards documents, many were dissatisfied with the vague answers they received.

Where to now?

In the wake of this fall's disappointing KIRIS test reports, district leaders and middle school educators are trying to sort through the confusion and disarray created by testing changes, conflicting documents, a lack of thorough training, and a general failure to create a common vision for teaching and learning in the district's middle schools.

The prospect that as many as half the district's middle schools could find themselves in the KERA "crisis" category in 1998 only adds to the tension and the urgency. While many believe that the state should have acted more quickly to help schools prepare for KIRIS, some concede that other Kentucky school districts are much closer to meeting KERA goals than Jefferson County.

"We can't blame it all on the state," says one JCPS central office administrator who asked not to be named. "For years we've said to the state, 'don't dictate to us.' How can we then turn around and say 'it's all your fault for not telling us what to do.' We should have done a better job in the beginning of creating our own standards based on the KERA expectations."

Cheryl DeMarsh, a former principal who now leads JCPS's middle school reform initiative supported by the Clark Foundation, believes the district must look beyond the preoccupation with KIRIS and who's at fault for the failure to prepare teachers adequately in the past.

"We have to bring ourselves past the testing to ask what we want our students to know and be able to do," she says. "The state provides us with the big picture of what students should be learning and that's what KIRIS is based on. But it's our job to take it from there."

Sandy Ledford, whose job as Middle School Advocate gives her direct access to Superintendent Stephen Daeschner, says the district is committed to standards-based reform and believes it will raise student achievement over time. "We are making the transformation from teaching out of the book to teaching to standards," she says. "It's a huge task and there's no precedent for it. But we must do it."

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