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Kentucky Democrat has a host of reasons that we should be happy to let the CATS test go in our educational system. I’ll give you one more, which is going to seem like a bit of a controversial stance: it takes that much more authority away from local authorities. The people writing the test are no longer in Kentucky. We thereby get a FAR more accurate picture of how our children are performing, and, because we’re not paying for the CATS anymore, I imagine there’s probably going to be some money freed up in what always manages to be a cash-strapped school system.
I’ll be posting a little tirade on the federalizing of schools tonight, and here’s the crux of that argument: the higher up the chain that the schools become centralized, the easier it is to compare them, the more fairly you can distribute funds, and the more money you can concentrate on research. Unless one of the Presidential candidates has an education stance I don’t know about, this is never going to happen overnight, so we have to look for small victories–like getting rid of the provincialism the CATS test represents.
