Students in Kentucky won’t have to take standardized testing this year.
The United States Department of Education announced last week that districts impacted by school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic can bypass standardized testing for the 2019-2020 school year.
Interim Kentucky Education Commissioner Kevin Brown applied for the waiver on behalf of all school districts to bypass the Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress, which was supposed to start at the end of the year.
“It’s probably the most logical and best thing that could happen to us in terms of logistically being able to take a test like that, let alone having kids be really prepared for it as if we were in the traditional environment,” said Matthew Constant, Owensboro Public Schools interim superintendent.
Students in the Daviess-Owensboro school districts have been participating in non-traditional instruction classes since March 18. Gov. Andy Beshear has requested that all schools stay closed until April 20.
“Right now since we are in the non-traditional instruction period and we are unsure of when that period might be lifted,” Constant said. “For that reason, it’s just best that for this year we put the brakes on state accountability and assessment giving everything that is going on in the world right now.”
Jana Beth Francis, Daviess County Public Schools assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, said there will be no spring K-PREP testing.
Francis said this means schools won’t receive accountability scores based on the new Kentucky state accountability system, which would have based the results from the spring 2020 K-PREP tests.
However, she said, students in grades three through eight, as well as 10 and 11, would have taken components of K-PREP.
Most DCPS students were able to finish the ACT prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Schools use the assessment results to make adjustments to instruction,” Francis said. “There are other assessments used in the school that we use on a routine basis to make adjustments. State results are big picture results. We will just use local results this year.”
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