There is a lot of discussion going on right now about what tests to evaluate student performance under the Common Core State Standards should look like.

A number of people, including some right here in Kentucky, are pressing for a return – yes, it will be a return – to something called “Performance Assessments.” The assessments being envisioned would feature more than a lot of open-response, or written-answer, questions. There is a push to use more radical ideas like “Portfolios” and “Performance Items,” the sorts of things Kentucky tried on its old Kentucky Instructional Results Information System (KIRIS) tests in the mid-1990s.There is a big problem with this – Performance Assessment ideas, which have also been called “Authentic Assessments,” didn’t work very well in Kentucky. In fact, the “Performance Events” and the “Mathematics Portfolios” used in the old KIRIS only lasted four years before unsolvable problems relegated both to the dust heap. Later on, as part of the process that led to Senate Bill 1 from the 2009 Kentucky Regular Legislative Session, the state finally figured out that using student scores from Writing Portfolios in an assessment program didn’t work, either. In fact, using Writing Portfolios in assessment even acted in ways that undermined good writing instruction.

Also, the burden from failures of Performance Assessments may have fallen unevenly on minority students.

So, why are these failed ideas being pushed, again?

If Kentucky had paid attention in the early 1990s, the state might have avoided some expensive assessment surprises. That’s because technical experts were issuing cautions about Performance Assessments at least as far back as April of 1991. That was just one year after the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 was enacted, now nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Here is one telling comment from that era from Dr. Gary W. Phillips from the National Center for Education Statistics. Dr. Phillips makes this comment, which can be found on Page 11 (actually Page 5 of his individual paper) in the Proceedings Document for an April 1991 conference titled “Performance Assessment & KERA.” Writes Phillips:

“A second caution is that performance assessments are said to somehow lead to more equitable testing because minority students have a better chance to show what they have learned in a real world context which respects divergent ways of thinking, and creative solutions.”

Phillips then points out that such theory does not mesh with the facts, saying:

“Based on preliminary data we have noticed the opposite in the National Assessment. The gap between White and Black students, and White and Hispanic students gets larger as the item format gets more authentic. In fact in some cases high proportions of the minority students get zero on all of the more difficult authentic assessment items.”

Kentucky’s more recent history backs up Phillips’ concerns.

While Kentucky shed many of its Performance Assessment items over the years, even its current KPREP tests continue to include a notable number of open-response questions of the type that concerned Dr. Phillips a long time ago. Never the less, as I pointed out recently, Kentucky has experienced unsatisfactory minority performance in the succeeding quarter of a century, as this graph for fourth grade reading performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows.

Not only have black reading scores for Kentucky stayed essentially flat for more than a decade, but the gap between white and black reading proficiency rates increased notably between the early days of KERA and the most recent year of testing.

So, let’s be sure we understand this. It seems that some educators have short memories and/or don’t do very thorough research, so a push for Performance Assessments is back on both here in the Bluegrass State and across the nation.

But, Kentucky never solved the Performance Assessments problems in the 1990s. I don’t think anyone else ever did, either. So, unless proponents of Performance Assessments can produce a lot of very high quality research that proves beyond reasonable doubt that they have overcome the problems that abundantly surfaced in Kentucky in the mid-1990s, Kentucky needs to steer clear of those failed – and expensive – ideas.