Board of Education May Vote on CATS Replacement Wednesday

The Kentucky Board of Education is expected to approve changes to school assessments this week. The board has been focused on meeting the fall deadline to implement Senate Bill One, which passed the General Assembly in 2009. The legislation changes school assessment guidelines, and requires many rules and regulations to be updated. That task has fallen to the board. Spokesperson Lisa Gross says the panel is now set to approve one part of a newer, more thorough assessment system."The new system will do very similar things, but it's a much more in-depth system. The proposed model the board has been looking at takes into account many new items, including achievement gap closures, whether or not students are ready for college and career," she says. "Eventually, this model may include a lot of other different things. It may look at the school environment and how well teachers are getting training and the kind of supports they have."The new system will replace the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, or CATS.