Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern
A bill that would change how Kentucky schools measure success of their students passed out of a House committee Wednesday with support from Republicans and Democrats.
House Bill 257 from Henderson Rep. J.T. Payne would implement a new accountability and assessment system for public K-12 schools that focuses on community feedback and individual student learning. The Kentucky Department of Education has expressed support for the legislation.
Payne, the principal of the Career and Technical Education unit at Henderson County High School, told the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee that HB 257 would allow schools to adopt a local accountability system that focuses on direct feedback from their surrounding communities about what is expected of their graduates. Some school districts already have this component in place.
“This is kind of uncharted territory, so it allows kind of a phased-in approach for districts to participate and to get community input to make sure that what our schools are doing actually aligns with the needs of that region and community,” Payne said.
When a majority of school districts opt in to the local accountability system, all districts will then be required to join the program, and have two years to do so.
The legislation would also reduce statewide student testing and focus data on tracking individual students’ growth, rather than comparing cohorts of students’ scores. Other components would direct schools to publish student test performance data online and measure student engagement by tracking chronic absenteeism, or when a student misses 10% or more of a school year.
Education Commissioner Robbie Fletcher previously expressed support for the new system in an interview with the Kentucky Lantern. At the time, he said the Kentucky Department of Education had been working on the system for about two years. He told the committee that the legislation would provide a “very good launch” for changes that have been created with significant feedback from surveys and town halls.
Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, said that the “most significant, important part” of the bill is the change to tracking individual student growth.
“I believe it’s going to help us to better understand which schools are helping our students improve the best,” Tipton said.
Rep. Tina Bojankowski, D-Louisville, said she ran for office initially because “I felt like there needed to be changes in our accountability system.” She is a teacher in Jefferson County Public Schools. She added that she hoped lawmakers would consider policies for adaptive assessments and multiple interim assessments in the future. Adaptive tests adjust difficulty in real time based on student responses, which supporters say make the tests more accurate and less time consuming.
Rep. Timmy Truett, R-McKee, said he would encourage education officials to consider how to measure the growth of students who are continuously performing well on tests each year. He is an elementary school principal.
“If we have students who are at that high level that can’t go any higher, but stay at that level, and they’re moving from grade level to grade level to grade level, that is growth, and I encourage us to incentivize those kiddos for that,” Truett said.
The bill can now go back to the House for a floor vote in the future.
