It’s no news to our readers. We've talked about the inflation in CATS scores for many years and how – if we ever got honest testing in Kentucky – people would be shocked by the low numbers of our students who are really getting adequately educated.

Now, with the first round of Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test scores scheduled to release on Oct. 15, and with the inevitable severe drop in those scores from our old CATS “stuff,” there is a lot of damage control under way by the Kentucky Department of Education and some of its partner groups.

Some of that damage control may turn out to be counter-productive. It is leading to folks like the Insider Louisville blog writing stories such as “A storm comin’: Louisville and state officials, JCPS trying to prepare public for ‘ugly’ test scores.”

The Insider Louisville crowd worries that there may be an effort to get the media to spin the data as softly as possible -- something the bloggers clearly don’t like.

The blog also provides more evidence that some of our education leaders still have a lot to learn about testing.

For example, Insider Louisville quotes one long-time Jefferson County Board of Education member saying,

“We know anytime there’s a switch (to a new test), scores drop.”

Well, that’s not always so.

In fact, when our highly inflated KIRIS assessments turned into our even more inflated CATS assessments in 1999, scores for Kentucky’s middle schools jumped UP dramatically, as this graph shows.

However, the rate of progress still wasn’t good enough, so another inflationary jump in the scoring standards and the resulting scores occurred in the 2006-07 year.

That second resetting of the CATS scoring standards to an even lower level of rigor might have been the last straw for CATS, as this new inflation helped set the stage for the Kentucky General Assembly to halt the inflated assessment in 2009.By the way, I do like one other comment from the Jefferson County board member:

“Now we’ll have a benchmark to know what to teach to better prepare students for college.” I certainly hope so. Because if K-PREP is to come anywhere close to showing us how many students are truly on track to be ready for college and careers, the numbers involved MUST drop dramatically from the nonsense we were fed over the first two decades of KERA.

(Edit 28 Sep 12 corrected first year of CATS testing)