The Prichard Committee in Wonderland: When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

In response to my recent post "The Death of KERA," Susan Weston at the Prichard Committee Blog characterizes me as "spinning wondrous tales" over the years about a KERA dragon that ravages the land eating educators caught teaching spelling and setting fire to villages caught administering multiple choice tests. The real story of KERA, she says, "has been dull by comparison."

I've heard KERA called a lot of things, but this may be the first time it has been called "dull." After disagreeing with the dragon narrative, Weston relates her own narrative--one in which everyone lives happily ever after:

KERA delivered stronger and fairer school funding, reduced political corruption, and vastly improved facilities and technology. It nurtured more focused teachers, better instructional leaders, and a big step up in justified pride in public education. We've still got work ahead to strengthen classroom work, not because the primary program, extended school services, or sustained professional development were mistakes, but because we didn’t put in the hard work to help them succeed.

I'll leave it to readers to determine which is the fairy tale.

I don't remember actually comparing KERA to a dragon, but I do remember comparing it to Alice in Wonderland. In fact, my career as a prominent KERA critic back in the 1990s began with a public debate in the Danville newspaper with none other than Susan Weston, a debate in which I compared the rhetoric about all students being equal to the caucus race in Lewis Carroll's book, an event in which everyone wins--and everyone get's a prize.

That was only one of the silly and sometimes surreal practices that were foisted on schools when the reforms were implemented. It was a bit like being in a Jefferson Airplane song. There was best guess spelling, and the new New Math, and open classrooms, practices most of us thought were discredited in the 1960s, but which those implementing KERA thought the rest of us had forgotten. The only thing missing was tie-dye T-shirts and peace signs.

I remember a retired superintendent calling me one day after something I had said in the newspaper. "You're absolutely right," he said. "We had just put the walls back up in our building that they had torn down when we were doing open classrooms, and then we had to tear them back down again for the non-graded primary program."

Oh, and I didn't see anything in Weston's tale about the year that, under the KIRIS testing system (the precurser to CATS), the best school district in the state (Anchorage Independent) was rated the worst. Not exactly a result that comports with logic and proportion.

It's a story I've told many times, but just for old time's sake, I'll tell it one more time. I went to an inservice day in 1992 at Lawrence Dunbar High School with a friend of mine. The Department of Education presenter approached the podium and began her harangue about the evils of traditional education techniques and explained why we needed to replace them with the "new" practices under KERA.

"When you learn," she asked, "do you sit in straight rows of desks, sitting under phosphorescent lights listening to a lecture? Or do you do it better sitting back on a couch, with the sun coming through the window, and talk with your best friend?"

Exactly how we were going to provide this experience for the tens of thousands of school children in Kentucky wasn't exactly clear, but I remember leaning over to my friend and whispering, "Look around the room." We were surrounded by teachers and administrators sitting in straight rows of desks, under phosphorescent lights, listening to a lecture.

To make any sense of that, you'll have to go ask Alice (when she's ten feet tall).

Or maybe I'll just take Susan up on her offer to visit her at her favorite hangout: Danville's "Hub." I suppose it is fitting that the debate over KERA should begin and end with the same two people jousting over education policy. I might even try those "magic free muffins" she mentions they sell there--although I'm not entirely sure, given her fanta

The Death of KERA

The Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 is now officially dead. The program was made up of many components, some of which have effectively been abandoned (like the nongraded primary), and others that live on (the family resource and youth services centers), but the heart of the program was always the testing system.

And when the heart goes, so does the body.

You could call this a transplant, of course--taking out a high stakes test that measures the performance of schools, not students, that uses unreliable open response questions rather than multiple choice questions, and that grades schools on subjective portfolio assessments, and replacing it with one that doesn't do those things. But it hardly seems worth the trouble to attempt it.

No. This was turning off the life support machines.

The irony of this whole thing is that those of us who fought this back in the 1990's advised policymakers to do exactly what they did today: to drop portfolios from the accountability for schools, to drop the ridiculous open response items that have not (Repeat: have not) improved writing, and give parents a test they can adequately judge the progress of their children with.

We were told we were against education. That we were not hip with the educational times. That we were not familiar with the educational research (that was really just trendy pronouncements) that said this stuff would work. That we were opposing progress in schools.

Funny. Do you hear any of that now? What was the House vote? 93-0?

I suppose I should feel vindicated, but I wonder about the Lost Generation: the children who went through the KERA system who were denied a proper grounding in basic skills in the nongraded primary program. Who were told they were learning to write but who were instead denied help in grammar and spelling by teachers who, because they were told they couldn't, were scared to say anything. Who thought they were learning to read, but denied help in sounding out words because it was discouraged by whole language advocates.

What about them?

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that movements don't die because they were repudiated; they die because the leaders of those movements themselves die. We may have the same thing here. How many of the people who voted for the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 are still in the legislature? I'm thinking it is less than 20.

One of the people in the legislature when KERA passed was Ed Ford. Ford chaired the Senate Education Committee, helped shepherd the bill through the legislature, and assisted in its implementation. Ford one proclaimed that "it would be a generation" before we knew whether KERA had worked.

Well, a generation has passed. And we know now, don't we? Who ever thought that such a momentous action as was taken today would have been attended with such little fanfare? I'm told that that's not uncommon when they turn off the life support machines of a dying patient.

Will the last person out of Kentucky's Education Reform Headquarters please turn off the lights?

No one knows how much CATS costs, committee finds

Oh dear. While some of us were thinking that the problem with CATS was that it costs too much, all of a sudden we find out that that's not the problem. The problem is we don't know how much it costs. Turns out that our wonderful education bureaucrats have no idea how much the monstrous state education testing system is setting us back because of poor accounting.

All state auditors could determine is that it costs at least $18.6 million, a higher figure than has been reported before. But there is no way, given the state's poor accounting, to know the total cost of the tests because no figures are available to determine how much local school districts are spending, and amount that is likely to be very high.

"There isn't a mechanism to be able to determine the cost at the local level for the assessment testing," Brian Lykins, director of special audits in the auditor's office, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

This comes at a bad time for supporters of the tests, since President of the Senate David Willliams has announced that he would like to see the test eliminated.

Stay tuned on this issue...

David Williams takes on CATS

I still haven't seen it yet, but on KET's "Kentucky Tonight," State Senate President David Williams apparently called for dumping CATS and changing math education. Williams voted for the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA), so he can't exactly be labeled a fire-breathing anti-KERAite. Good credentials for the person who takes on some of the excesses that still plague Kentucky schools as a result of what many of us at the time labeled a boondoggle.

KERA simply never has been able to live up to the hype which has always surrounded it. Has there been progress in Kentucky schools? Here and there. But, as Larry Forgy pointed out at the time (and he was one of the plaintiffs in the case that prompted the State Supreme Court's Rose decision), there were a lot of good things already afoot before KERA turned the state's schools upside down.

The question is whether Kentucky schools would have been better off without KERA. We'll never know the answer for sure, but it wouldn't be a hard case to make that the entire generation of children who were robbed of a decent education in basic skills by the now somewhat etiolated nongraded primary program were ill-served.

And then there was the preposterous attempt to teach math using "math essays," thanks to "math portfolios" in which students were not even allowed to write numerals, but were to spell out each number. And the ludicrous attempt to teach writing by preventing teachers from telling kids how to correct their mistakes, thanks to the writing portfolios. We could go on.

The chief role of CATS has been to hide from ourselves the consequences of this interminable educational silliness.

Williams faces an uphill fight since there are still people who have a political stake in propping up KERA. But surely there will come a time when the Fathers of the Kentucky Education Reform Act have died out, and more level-headed generation takes its place.

May that time come soon.

The Corns Appointment: The wrong message at the wrong time

"This is the wrong message to send at the wrong time," said Martin Cothran in response to today's announcement by the Kentucky Department of Education that the author of the decision that resulted in the Kentucky Education Reform Act has been appointed to the #2 state schools post.

State Education Commissioner Jon Draud appointed Ray Corns, the former Franklin County judge who authored the Rose vs. Council for Better Education decision of 1988, to the post of associate commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education’s Office of Legal, Legislative and Communications Services.

"The Rose decision was one of the most political decisions ever made by a state court," said Cothran, senior policy analyst for the group, "and went well beyond the call for equal funding by requiring the state legislature to completely turn Kentucky's schools upside down in the interest of a misguided egalitarianism."

"Why, at a time when we are trying to fix problems that his court had a hand in creating, are we appointing a member of that court to a position of prominence?" Cothran said the decision didn't fix what it was supposed to fix--inequalities in the state's education system--and it created new problems for which the state is now trying to find solutions through a task force that the Department of Education has had to convene.