August 15, 2025

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What Are Kansas School Assessments Telling Us over the Years?

The Kansas State Board of Education voted on August 12, 2025 to change the cut scores for student achievement state testing in math, science, and ELA.

The vote was 7 to 3 with members Michelle Dombrowsky, Connie O’Brian, and Debbie Potter voting no. Vice Chair, Danny Zeck, urged parents not to have their children take the tests.

In a similarly worded decision the next day, Illinois State Board of Education also approved changes to their cut scores to determine proficiency. These two states were also the first to enthusiastically adopt comprehensive K-12 social emotional learning (SEL) as a leading focus for instruction in their state’s schools, enforced by accreditation. The warnings that SEL would lead to academically failing students were ignored.  Worse is the fact that SEL would lead to mental health clinics in our “community schools,” and mindfulness teaching derived from Oneness Eastern religions gaining a foothold. Remember the goal of SEL was to “catalyze a global spiritual transformation” (Source: John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age”), and our students have suffered academically because of it.

Money is not the issue prohibiting student learning. Kansas is also the state that “fully funds “ education, ranking among the highest spenders in the nation. Legislators have been forced to vote to increase taxes due to the Montoy lawsuit initiated in the 2000s and the Gannon lawsuit, beginning in 2010. It was funded by taking money from each student by a coalition of 54 districts claiming the state failed to provide sufficient funding to meet constitutional requirements for a “suitable” education. The largest cost share came from Wichita School District (USD 259) and Kansas City School District (USD 500), two districts with students today scoring in the teens proficiently. The legislature satisfied the funding requirements, but is the legislature satisfied that the students are receiving a “suitable” education when the assessment cut scores were lowered in 2019 and again this week to increase proficiency numbers. This adds to other problems in the schools.

Looking back, the directives of the KSBE, governors, federal laws, and NGOs’ influence have impeded learning. Many of the directives KSBE adopted were developed by “experts” who sold their plans to the board. In 1992 the KSBE, encouraged by Commissioner Lee Droegemueller, adopted the Quality Performance Accreditation (QPA) redirection for Kansas schools. This was the forerunner of Outcomes Based Education (OBE) adopted in the 1994 Goals 2000 legislation by congress, after being pushed by the Clinton administration. The board hired New Ager Dr. Shirley McCune of the Midwest Regional Educational Laboratory, funded by the US Institute of Education Services, to come up with the QPA change in Kansas schools. She was introduced by Droegemueller as the “best speaker” at the Wichita National Governor’s Conference on Education where she said: 

“Two things matter, human capitaland information to create new products. What we are facing is a total restructuring of the society. Schools are no longer in the schooling business, but rather the center for all human resource development. We are not teaching facts—no longer seeing facts as the primary goal of education. Curriculum is to prepare them for psychological skills.The synthesis of technology with educational tasks opens new possibilities for more humanistic schools and educational systems—anticipatory socialization.”

That’s it! The goals with QPA, OBE, Workforce Development and SEL are not learning! According to education reformers STUDENTS ARE SEEN AS HUMAN CAPITAL BEING DEVELOPED WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL SKILLS IN HUMANISTIC SCHOOLS. School mental health clinics, with an abundance of counselors, are searching the minds and souls of our students and storing data on them. The plan is to make workers for the Workforce Development system, put into law along with OBE and the development of SEL in 1994 under the Clinton administration.

Now these many years later the public is alarmed that only a third of our students are proficient in math, science, and ELA. So, to raise the proficiency scores KSBE adopted the plan put forward by KU, charging us $35 million to develop the assessments, which will be reduced to 40 questions because the test is too long. The lowest score on the test is 400, a random number assigned, instead of scoring 1 to 40. We are told that the expectation is that the proficient tier levels 3 and 4 will improve from 30% to 45 % of students proficient. On KSDE’s website you will find their goal of 75% of students proficient. They are embarrassing themselves by falling so short of that stated goal.

In 1913 Woodrow Wilson became president. He said, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.”

He was introducing the concept that would later become socialist Workforce Development, also known as School to Work. We cannot blame the KSBE for implementing this in Kansas. They voted no after much public outcry, including my testimony in the senate. However, Governor Bill Graves signed an executive order to bring it to Kansas schools.

Let’s look even further back at what assessments of eighth grade students included in 1895. This is the five hour eighth-grade final exam. There were no multiple-choice answers. Think of the intelligence and endurance this took for an eighth grader! This assessment was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications. 
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of lie, play, and run. 
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation. 
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

 

Arithmetic (Time, 1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. for tare? 
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals? 
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent. 
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods? 
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

 

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.  
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas. 
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

 

Orthography (Time, one hour) 
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, and syllabication.
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals. 
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each. 
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. 
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

 

Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas? 
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America. 
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco. 
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude? 
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Schools back then served students with excellent expectations and made America a strong nation of intelligent people. It is time to put the Public Schools Innovative Districts Act, KSA 72-4223-4229, to better use.

Districts can shed some of the rules and regulations and get back to instilling better learning for our students. There could even be some friendly competition between the innovative schools and the rest not in the program.

Why are we settling for much less from public education and paying the price financially and morally?