LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Six years ago, the best you could say about Kentucky's schools is that they weren't in Mississippi.
For most of its 200-year history, Kentucky stood with Mississippi near the bottom of nearly every measure of educational success. Today, Kentucky is considered a national model of education reform. Spending and test scores are up substantially, as its schools are in their fifth year of implementing the country's most comprehensive state plan for improving instruction, including:
* Primary classes that drop traditional first-grade, second-grade
structure for multi-age, multi-ability groups.
* New statewide tests that trigger rewards and sanctions for teachers based on how much scores improve. The rewards include money (up to $3,690 per teacher this year) that can be used for school projects -- or as cash bonuses. The sanctions, which will not take effect until 1997, could include loss of tenure for teachers and the right for students to transfer to successful schools from those not meeting standards.
* School-based decision-making councils that have assumed much of the responsibility of school boards.
* A higher state sales tax and improved property tax collections to pay for it all.
The revolution started with a lawsuit -- 66 poor, rural school districts claiming the state had failed to provide an adequate, equitable education system.
And as Maryland contemplates the potential fallout from a similar legal challenge concerning Baltimore public schools, it may be worth studying a few pages from Kentucky's school reform textbook.
Maryland's school finance suit won't necessarily produce the same results as Kentucky's. And some elements of Kentucky's reform act -- such as new state tests and potential state action against failing schools -- are already being done in Maryland.
But Kentucky offers the best example of what can happen when a court aggressively deals with the question of whether a state is providing adequate education for all its students. The Kentucky case was one of the first decided on the adequacy issue, and the resulting reforms have been the most far-reaching.
"What makes Kentucky so unusual across the nation is that it's doing so many new things at once," said Robert Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a nonprofit citizen's advocacy group based in Lexington, Ky. "I don't think anyone could totally predict what would happen . . . because we haven't done this before."
Clearly, Kentucky's experience has been one of extremes. When the state Supreme Court considered the adequacy lawsuit in 1989, it was just one of many legal challenges across the country stemming from spending disparities among school districts. But the Kentucky court didn't just do what some other state courts have done -- spread the wealth around. It ruled the state's entire public school system unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to rebuild it within a year.
That deadline, more than anything else, produced the sweeping changes that are now known as the Kentucky Education Reform Act. In fact, strict mandates and time-lines, from the court decision and the resulting legislation, have been responsible for producing both the broad changes and the deep tensions the reform law left in its wake.
Beyond the procedural and policy fixes -- and there have been plenty -- the reform law forced fundamental changes in the way people do their jobs. Teachers, in particular, have had to juggle a heavy load of new responsibilities while figuring out how to help students meet higher academic standards.
Irmgard Williams, for example, a 32-year veteran who was a semifinalist for Kentucky Teacher of the Year last fall, said she has relished the opportunity the reform law has given her to develop more hands-on activities for students. She's happy with an integrated curriculum to help the children think and make connections, not just memorize isolated facts. But the pace and preparation have been grueling, said Ms. Williams, who teaches a mixed age class, made up mostly of 6- and 7-year-olds, at South Heights Elementary School in Henderson, Ky.
Where once she could take activities straight from the teachers' guides that accompanied textbooks, Ms. Williams now has to pull materials from multiple sources each day. All the lessons have to support the state's learner goals, relate the themes that her school and teaching team have chosen for the year and, most of all, make real-life connections for the students.
"Time is the tension," she said. "We need time to plan. Before, when we just used textbooks, it was easy to put a page number down in the planning book. I could plan weeks ahead. Now, I want to take my students higher. I'm not lazy, and I do use my time wisely, but they have got to do something to give teachers time to plan."
Thomas Boysen, Kentucky's commissioner of education since 1991, said he understands that the rapid, broad changes have put on edge nearly everyone involved in education. But he also believes the pressure was needed in Kentucky.
"I think people don't get ready until they have to get ready," he said.
A decade ago, for example, hundreds of citizens mobilized in town meetings around the state to push for education reform. Inspired by the work of the late Edward F. Prichard, a Kentucky native who was one of the chief architects of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, volunteer activists laid the groundwork for many of the current education changes. The state's two largest newspapers, in Louisville and Lexington, also served up articles exposing the corruption and neglect that symbolized the deep problems in Kentucky's schools.
But there's nothing like a hammer over your head to produce instant statesmanship. Meeting during its regular biennial 60-day session in 1990, the Kentucky General Assembly responded to the court ruling by producing a 270-page reform document some legislators said they didn't have a chance to read before voting approval.
Kentucky's legislative leaders turned to national experts -- including David W. Hornbeck, a former Maryland state school superintendent -- to help craft the reforms. Using outsiders dangerously alienated Kentucky's educational leadership, but it earned respect from the state's business community, whose support was crucial in winning approval of a 1-cent increase in the state's sales tax.
Most of the new programs and strategies adopted as part of the reform law have been put into place now, with full implementation of the law expected by 1996. But five years is a short time in the cycle of massive social change, and Kentucky is still a long way from the mountaintop.
According to the Bluegrass State Poll, conducted by the Louisville Courier-Journal last spring, support for the reform law has declined. Fourty-four percent of adults surveyed last year said they disapproved of the changed in the public schools, up from 33 percent in 1993.
Resisters include many of Kentucky's 38,000 certified public school teachers, who have found themselves caught in the tension between the desire to do a better job and the impulse to stick with what they know. School board members have railed against their diminished authority. And parents -- particularly the wealthy and religious conservatives -- have fought what they consider efforts to achieve equity at the expense of excellence.
The biggest concern among all groups has been the state's controversial new testing system, which includes portfolios of student work and "performance" tests, with fewer multiple-choice questions.
Surveys released last fall by the Kentucky Institute for Education Research, a non-partisan group based in Frankfort, Ky., showed a lack of understanding about the reforms -- about 60 percent of the public and 40 percent of parents said they didn't know what was going on.
"There's a general sense that schools need improvement, but what that means in academic terms hasn't sunk in," said Mr. Sexton, of the Prichard Committee. "Schools did reach a small number of students, but they didn't reach most of our kids."
There is a strong tendency in Kentucky and elsewhere, he said, to seek simple solutions to complex problems.
"The whole challenge of a reform like this is to change the way people work. It requires an immense transformation of professional practice," Mr. Sexton said. "It wasn't presented to the profession or to the public as something that would happen quickly."
There are encouraging signs that the reforms have started to take hold. Outside researchers have found that reachers are still struggling to learn and use new strategies, such as compiling portfolios in every subject and teaching through cooperative learning, in which students solve problems in groups. But, however grudgingly, more and more teachers are making changes.
Student test scores have risen about 20 percent statewide in the last two years on the new tests.
In some of the poorest regions of the state, the results have been nothing short of remarkable. For example, in Elliott County in eastern Kentucky, one of the state's poorest regions, the school budget has increased about 70 percent under the reform law, and the average teacher earns about 20 percent more than before. Last fall, students at Elliott's Lakeside Elementary outpaced students in the Anchorage public schools -- a Louisville suburb, the state's wealthiest and most consistently stellar school district -- on key portions of Kentucky's new assessments.
Additional money available through the reform law has helped in other ways. For example, in the last five years, state legislators have increased the number of paid teaching days available for staff development from zero to nine.
hTC Still, Kentucky has much ground to make up. Despite an increase of about 40 percent in per-pupil spending over the first four years of reform, Kentucky remains below the national average in spending.
And supporters of the reform law recognize that a bigger challenge is still before them -- persuading people to stay the course. For if Kentucky can't make its national reform model work, will any else bother to try?
Gayle Ecton, superintendent of the Henderson County public schools in western Kentucky, recalled speaking last spring to a group of superintendents from Missouri, where another state reform law had just been approved. Mr. Ecton, a leading advocate of Kentucky's school changes, said he tried to explain that school reform requires not only major public policy shifts, but wrenching emotional conversions.
"You can just tell," he said, "that people don't realize what they're getting into.
Holly Holland, a former education reporter at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, has covered the Kentucky Education Reform Act since its inception.