The cut scores of the Kansas Assessment have been an issue since they were last set about a decade ago. Today the State Board of Education voted to approve new cut scores 7-3 (Hopkins, Zeck, Haas, New, Hershberger, Arnold, and Porter voting for the change, and Dombrosky, O’Brien and Potter voting against the change though Dombrosky sounded generally supportive). Game On Executive Director Judith Deedy sent an email to Board members and spoke at public comment this morning. Here is the content of her email:
I am emailing today as a parent and a public education advocate. As a parent, I have been aware of the disconnect between the Kansas Assessment cut scores and academic achievement since the new assessment was administered about 10 years ago. That’s when my oldest child, who had consistently scored 5s on the old Kansas Assessment, and around the 99th percentile on the MAP test, got a 3 (not a 4) on the new assessment. My child continued to get 3s on the Kansas Assessment while going on to get high scores on the ACT and PSAT and graduate with honors from a highly selective college. The Kansas Assessment has persistently been an outlier for all three of the children in my own family and, data show, for thousands of other students in our state.
The cut scores were designed to be aspirational, but they overshot even that standard. In a state where around 30% of adults have a 4-year college degree, ACT college readiness scores correlated with the bottom of Level 3 and the top of Level 2. NAEP determined that Kansas’s cut scores were among the highest in the country, and Kansas is one of only a handful of states tying their “proficient” level to NAEP “proficient,” which is commonly understood to be a very high level of achievement.
“NAEP officials urge that proficient not be interpreted as reflecting grade level work. It is a standard set much higher than that…The highest scoring nations of the world would appear to be mediocre or poor performers if judged by the NAEP proficient standard. Even large numbers of U.S. calculus students fall short.
“As states consider building benchmarks for student performance into accountability systems, they should not use NAEP proficient—or any standard aligned with NAEP proficient—as a benchmark. It is an unreasonable expectation, one that ill serves America’s students, parents, and teachers–and the effort to improve America’s schools” (Brookings Institute, Loveless, 2016, The NAEP Proficiency Myth).
As data continued to roll in, the Department of Education found large numbers of students scoring in Level 2 achieving post-secondary success (and that’s even with several large categories of post-secondary success data, like military enlistment, inaccessible, as Dr. Watson explained to the Board several months ago). In short, adjusting current cut scores is not lowering our standards, but rather improving the predictability and reliability of this point in-time assessment to more accurately label student achievement levels.
The increasing focus on state assessments and misuse of performance level results have been abundantly clear over the past decade. The cut scores were never treated as aspirational even though Dr. Watson and others repeatedly explained that they were. Dr. Watson has on numerous occasions explained that students scoring in Level 2 are not failing, but legislators, anti-public education voices and even the press, either didn’t hear or refused to acknowledge the data showing students in Level 2 were going on to achieve post-secondary success. As a State Board, you should not continue to tell students, parents and teachers that students are failing to meet expectations or are at risk for being unable to support themselves when data show they are not. You also cannot ignore the level to which the state assessment scores have been weaponized to claim our schools are failing and to drive support for vouchers and other bad education policies. Now that you have been presented with more accurate data about the cut scores, you should not be participants in a misinformation campaign.
Thank you for your consideration.
Originally posted to Facebook 8/12/25.