With great sadness we have been advised of the passing of Dr. Faurest Coogle, a life-long educator who spent the final years of his distinguished career as an advisor to the Kentucky Senate’s leadership.

While he was influential in many key pieces of education legislation, I’ll just mention two.

Dr. Coogle provided the intellectual horsepower behind Senate Bill 130 from the 2006 Regular Legislative Session, which introduced high quality, college readiness testing with the ACT, the PLAN and the EXPLORE tests in Kentucky’s 11th, 10th and 8th grades, respectively. These tests finally gave Kentucky a good idea of how its public education program was really performing while providing students a much better idea about what they still needed to be ready for college.

In 2009 Dr. Coogle was again an important contributor to Senate Bill 1, the bill that finally ended Kentucky’s highly inflated CATS assessments and clearly stated that the goal of our public education system was to get students ready for college and careers.

The Bluegrass Institute joins with many others around the state in mourning the passing of this outstanding Kentuckian. Our hearts go out to Dr. Coogle’s family at this time of great sadness. Kentucky has lost a great citizen.