Final Progress Reports - Southern Regional Education Board

Effective implementation of a statewide college-readiness initiative requires strong state-level and statewide
leadership, both within K-12 and postsecondary education individually, and then across both segments.
This will be a challenge in Kentucky, with its history of strong institutional autonomy.
In postsecondary education, SREB found that the CPE president and his staff were committed to this
initiative and the challenge. Yet SREB staff were somewhat concerned about the involvement at that point
of the KCTCS. This sector needs to play a central leadership role in the implementation of Senate Bill 1
and the further development of all components of Kentucky’s college- and career-readiness initiative.
In K-12, SREB found a strong commitment and understanding, especially from the new commissioner.
CPE leadership also embraced the readiness initiative and recognized the challenge of coordinating the
individual campus responses to the priority.
The following sections describe Kentucky’s progress on each of the elements in SREB’s readiness agenda and
suggest areas the state may want to consider to advance its college- and career-ready goals.
Statewide College and Career Readiness Standards
SREB’s college- and career-readiness model is framed on the premise that the same standards and performance
expectations should be used by both K-12 and postsecondary education and should connect all steps of the collegereadiness
agenda. Having one set of readiness standards that are approved and used by K-12 and all public postsecondary
institutions (two- year and four-year sectors) is vital to sending clear signals to all public high schools about
what it means to be college- and career-ready.
Before initiating its current statewide college- and career-readiness direction, Kentucky could not point to a specific
set of college-readiness standards that were clear in content and performance expectations and were shared fully by
both K-12 and postsecondary education. K-12 was not able to identify a subset of its Board of Education-adopted
core standards as the recognized set needed to be ready for college-level work, and the postsecondary sector had not
established a common set of standards across all public higher education and applied them through a common
placement process.
That changed with Senate Bill 1, a comprehensive piece of legislation designed to bring about immediate and farreaching
changes to achieve college- and career-readiness goals. Its centerpiece was the mandate to align the revised
academic standards from elementary through postsecondary education, so that students could be successful at each
level — a mandate that met SREB’s readiness criteria for statewide standards. Policy-makers wanted fewer but
more in-depth standards to facilitate mastery learning. The bill’s aggressive timeline called for completion of the
standards revision process in mathematics by early 2010 and in English/language arts by December 2010.
In February 2010 — in a bold move to establish high-level common standards — Kentucky became the first
state in the nation to accept the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and integrate them into the public
education system to meet the mandate of Senate Bill 1 and support its college-readiness reform efforts. In a joint
meeting, the KBE, the CPE and the Education Professional Standards Board formally directed their agencies to
implement the CCSS in English/language arts and mathematics and to begin integrating the standards into the
state’s curriculum guidelines, teacher preparation programs and higher education activities. The content standards
for English/language arts and mathematics were finalized in June 2010. Teachers will begin to provide instruction
related to the standards in fall 2011. The standards now form the basis of a new state testing system that will be
implemented in 2011-2012. Students will be assessed on the CCSS beginning in spring 2012.
Although many states anticipate full implementation of the standards no earlier than 2013 (Center on Education
Policy, 2011), Kentucky moved swiftly and efficiently to meet the fall 2011 legislative deadline. In concert with the
model agenda promoted by SREB, the KDE convened teams of K-12 teachers and administrators, higher educa-
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