SB 1 accountability under the new test

Senate Bill 1 calls for the Kentucky Board of Education to establish new goals and consequences. Both schools and districts will have goals, based on assessment results, program reviews, and school improvement, plus other elements if KBE chooses to use them.

KBE will also define a new set of consequences, with the option of continuing familiar methods including improvement plans, highly skilled educators, and improvement funds.

Scholastic audits will not exist by that name. SB 1 does allow program reviews and audits to check whether a school has been classified correctly, and I think that could be a process separate from the arts, practical, and writing reviews. I hope it means that, because surely accountability decisions should reflect both those three subjects and how schools address the curriculum that will still be included in student assessments. Where current law has some details about how the audits are done, those rules will be deleted, giving KBE more flexibility about how the process will work.

Finally, SB 1 continues the process of local decisions on achievement gap targets, the one set up by 2002's SB 168, but calls for each target to be set by October and met within a year.

For a more detailed summary (yet another one-page PDF), please click here.

Still to come: a look at transition accountability, and a post that looks just at writing.