The Kentucky Education Reform Act was one of the most important school funding cases in the United States and became a model for other states.
It grew out of a court case that began in 1988, when 66 property-poor districts sued for better public school funding. The Kentucky Supreme Court agreed and went many steps further by declaring the entire system to be unconstitutional.
“I think it’s astonishing in its sweeping impact,” Robert Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, said on June 8, 1989, the day the court’s opinion was released. “It’s the most important ruling on education in our lifetimes. It gives us a chance to build a system that works.”
The General Assembly was ordered to started over, and in 1990 KERA was adopted, changing everything from school financing to academics, from nepotism rules to teacher training. New funding came from a $1 billion tax increase supported by the state’s business leaders.
But in both standards and finance, KERA’s brave new world was eventually abandoned. On Tuesday, the Kentucky Student Voice Team announced they would reopen the case to force the General Assembly to come back to its constitutional duties on public schools.
The KERA Timeline
- 1985 - In their lawsuit, Rose vs. Martha Layne Collins, 66 property-poor school districts named the governor, the General Assembly and the superintendent of public instruction. The districts charge the state with vast inequities in public school funding.
- June 8, 1989 - The Kentucky Supreme Court holds that the state public school system is unconstitutional and directs the General Assembly to create a system that offers an adequate education to all children.
- January 1990 - The General Assembly brings in national experts to create an effective and adequate school system.
- April 11, 1990 - The Kentucky Education Reform Act is passed into law.
- April 1998 - The General Assembly passes laws to dismantle KIRIS testing and replace it with a new test, part of which is standardized.
- Since 1990, Kentucky had had three major testing phases. The Kentucky Instructional Results Information Service (KIRIS) was used from 1992 to 1998, and included (for 4th, 8th, and 12th grades) open-response items, performance events, an on-demand writing prompt, and writing and mathematics portfolios.
- Based on psychometric concerns and lack of political support for KIRIS, 1998 legislation replaced KIRIS with the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (or CATS; the acronym possibly inspired by the Kentucky Wildcats), using open-response and multiple-choice items, an on-demand writing prompt, a writing portfolio, and the TerraNova national norm-referenced test. As part of the testing change, the state set new "cut point" scale scores for rating student work as novice, apprentice, proficient and distinguished. The new cut points counted higher numbers as proficient in most subjects.
- In 1998, The Ford Foundation and Harvard University awarded Kentucky's education system the Innovations in American Government Award.
- From 1999 to 2006, Kentucky schools showed improvement on the state's CATS assessment in every subject, at every level, for every student group listed in disaggregated data reports.[29] Most elementary schools improved at a pace strong enough that, if continued, they would have reached the proficiency goals set by the state for 2014. Most middle schools and high schools, however, were improving at too slow a pace to meet those proficiency targets.
- 2003: The Council for Better Education, the group of superintendents who initiated the Rose decision, commission a new study on KERA funding. The eight-month study by Deborah Verstegen of the University of Virginia says that to uphold KERA’s standards and financing, the cost would be $1.16 billion a year for the foreseeable future.
- 2008: The national housing crisis leads to a recession that leads to K-12 education cuts under then-Gov. Steve Beshear.
- 2023: A report by the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy finds that inequality between rich and poor districts has returned to pre-KERA levels.
- 2025: The Kentucky Student Voice Team files suit in Franklin Circuit Court contending that the General Assembly has neglected its duty to provide an adequate, efficient set of public schools.
Before the Act, in 1990, per-students spending in poor districts was about $1,600 less per year than in rich areas. By 1997, the Act had decreased this gap to about $550. By 2016, the gap had crept back up to $1,400 per student.
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Sources
- Wikipedia: Education in Kentucky
- Herald-Leader: What is the Kentucky Educational Reform Act?
