Kentucky’s Commissioner of Education, Dr. Terry Holliday, spoke at the monthly meeting of Union County First on Thursday, September 6th in Morganfield. Holliday discussed the state’s new standard of college and career readiness. The state’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards and new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) assessments that are tied to those standards have raised the bar for student performance in Kentucky. Kentucky is the first in the nation to be taught and tested on the new standards; forty-six other states are adopting these standards as well.
According to Holliday the state’s standard of college and career readiness is a necessary focus area. Currently, Kentucky’s graduation rate is approximately 75%, meaning that nearly 25% of Kentucky’s students are without a high school diploma. With only 8% of Kentucky’s jobs at this skill level, 25% of the students are competing for 8% of the jobs. By increasing the graduation rate and ensuring every student is college and career ready, we can begin to remedy this.
Holliday shared that while the adoption of more rigorous standards will raise the bar and make Kentucky students more successful overall, in the short term we will see lower proficiency rates than what we have previously seen from students. There is an expectation that the scores will be lower this year and for the first few years. This is because the bar is higher, not because our students are performing lower. In fact, one of the things that will be measured is student growth- how much the student has grown academically from year to year. Steady growth is expected to continue for students.
According to Holliday, the upcoming state testing results cannot be compared to previous results, since we are assessing students on a different standard. The previous standard was basic proficiency on math and reading. The new standard is college and career readiness. The change was made to college and career readiness due to the competitive global economy that was the basis of 2009’s Senate Bill 1, which required KDE and the Kentucky Board of Education to provide new standards and assessments that are internationally benchmarked.