While the Kentucky Department of Education celebrates KERA successes in terms of scores on the state test, there is a more troubling story underneath the scores. This has to do with how the prerequisites of high stakes have lead inexorably to standardization and disempowerment. What we have seen is not the flowering of local curriculum leading to responsiveness to students, but a wholesale regimented responsiveness to the state. At the heart of this loss is the requirement that high-stakes tests adhere to established psychometric principles of validity and reliability. It is this pressure that forces state departments to take a safe approach to testing, despite all best intentions about classroom visions.
Content validity requires that the assessment align with the curriculum.
In Kentucky, it has meant that the schools, held highly accountable by the mandated test, have demanded that the state define the curriculum to be tested. Over the years, we have seen greater and greater articulation from the state. Now there is a very precise, and extensive, core content for assessment published by the state. Thus, opportunity to learn has come to mean teaching to the test. So much for local empowerment.