FRANKFORT, Ky. (WDRB) -- Legislation that would change how Kentucky schools are identified for additional state support based on student performance may be revised based on concerns raised Thursday by Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis.
Senate President Pro Tem David Givens, a Greensburg Republican and sponsor of Senate Bill 175, said he and Lewis plan to meet Friday and possibly Monday on the bill, which was presented Thursday to the Senate Education Committee.
Instead of comparing test scores of student subgroups – based on factors like race, family income and disability status – with the bottom 5 percent of schools as the Kentucky Department of Education currently does, SB 175 calls for subgroups to be compared to the same subgroups in the bottom 5 percent of schools starting next school year. The percentage of low-performing schools used in the calculation would jump to 10 percent in the 2020-21 school year.
The legislation comes after hundreds of schools across Kentucky were identified for targeted support and improvement, or TSI, based on last school year’s state test results. Givens, during his testimony before the committee, said in all, 30 percent of schools in Kentucky were tabbed as TSI schools. That’s up from about 10 percent in a similar status the year prior, he said.
“When you take 30 percent of the schools and say we’ve got to target supports for them and we only have the same amount of resources, we water it down much too much,” he said.
Kentucky changed the way it designates struggling schools based on the federal Every Student Succeeds Act last year. The lowest-performing schools are identified as comprehensive support and improvement, or CSI, under ESSA, and TSI schools that don’t show improvement after three years automatically become CSI schools.
Givens said Senate staff was assured by an official in U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s administration that when ESSA regulations were repealed in 2017, guidance on designating schools as TSI was among the casualties.
But Lewis warned that from the Kentucky Department of Education’s perspective, SB 175 still runs afoul of ESSA law and could jeopardize federal funding for the state.
“After careful legal analysis, we’re confident that the bill’s approach to identifying continually underperforming groups of students does not align with the federal law, and if you pass legislation defining our system in a way that violates the federal law, we’ll find ourselves in danger of losing federal funding and needed support services for our most vulnerable students,” Lewis told the committee.
Lewis said KDE agreed with Givens’s concern about the number of Kentucky schools designated TSI and asked lawmakers to allow KDE to develop its own guidelines on identifying struggling schools that need help from the state.
Some superintendents mistakenly believe the TSI and CSI guidelines originated with the department or the Kentucky Board of Education, he said.
“Giving us greater flexibility in statute would enable us to work with the General Assembly, stakeholders and the U.S. Department of Education to identify an approach that holds schools accountable while limiting the number of schools that would be identified as TSI,” Lewis said.
SB 175 would also rescind an executive order reorganizing KDE’s standards and assessments process review committee and alter Kentucky’s school accountability system.
It would also require KDE to present state testing data to lawmakers on the House and Senate education committees on Dec. 1, 2019, and Dec. 1, 2020. As part of those meetings, the agency would be asked to detail how many students would fail to hit required scores under new graduation requirements, which cleared the Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee on Monday, and what options such students will have.
KDE would be required to hold meetings across the state to get feedback on the graduation requirements linked to state test scores.
Sen. Max Wise, a Campbellsville Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said a special meeting may be called on Tuesday as talks between Givens and Lewis continue.
Reach reporter Kevin Wheatley at 502-585-0838 and kwheatley@wdrb.com. Follow him on Twitter @KevinWheatleyKY.
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