Senate Bill 1 would change Kentucky’s assessment and accountability system by requiring only multiple choice questions and eliminating  all testing where students have to do their own analysis and explain their own thinking.  Both open-response questions and portfolio writing would be abandoned.  SB1 would use an off-the-shelf national norm-referenced test as the main assessment: the kind that compares each student to a group of other kids and charts them on a bell curve.  Overall, the bill would lower Kentucky’s standards and ensure that our children are less prepared for a successful future.

Arts, humanities, pratical living and vocational studies would no longer be a part of accountability. That would be another reduction in what we prepare our students to know and be able to do, and hard to square with Kentucky's constitutional expectation that schools will work to deliver that knowledge for each and every child.

SB1 would disrupt our schools. Teachers are still working through the major revisions to Kentucky Core Content for Assessment, added elementary testing for No Child Left Behind, and added readiness testing in grades 8, 10, and 11 (the Explore, Plan, and ACT tests). They need and deserve time to complete that process and deliver for students on the standards already before them.  
 
Finally, Kentucky spends about $15 a student for CATS, which measures our own Kentucky standards. This is a fraction of what the state spends per pupil ( less than twenty-five one-hundredths of one percent) and less than 25% of the cost of  a single textbook.  It’s far too small a savings for a bill that will confuse our schools, lower our standards, and weaken our children’s futures.