By Karen Gutierrez
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Parents and teachers need to know exactly how individual children are progressing in school, and they're not getting that information from the state's annual accountability tests, Kentucky Education Secretary Virginia Fox said Tuesday.

She thinks teachers need more options for assessing students during the school year, to see where they are and how much they have to learn.

By contrast, the state's spring testing marathon - known as CATS for Commonwealth Accountability Testing System - is designed to gauge school performance at a moment in time. It doesn't show whether individual students have made gains from one year to the next.

"I think taxpayers and parents are telling us, 'That's fine for the legislature to evaluate,' but they would like for their schools to provide them with some information on their child," Fox said.

Just how to do that is a topic under discussion by the state Board of Education, which oversees the 176 school districts in Kentucky.

As education secretary in Gov. Ernie Fletcher's cabinet, Fox has no legal authority over the districts. But she has taken a much more active role than her predecessors in urging change.

In a meeting with the Enquirer's editorial board Tuesday, Fox said her main goal is to persuade Kentucky's various education islands - universities, technical centers, high schools - to work more closely together. Without such cooperation, Kentucky's economic growth will suffer, she said.

About 50 percent of freshmen in Kentucky's public universities must take remedial courses covering information they should have learned in high school. And the graduation rate is 45 percent, meaning more than half of college freshmen fail to earn degrees at the end of six years.

There is a disconnect between what schools are teaching and what universities and employers expect students to know, Fox said. That's why teachers need better tools for assessing student progress.

"When you have 25 kids on about 14 different levels, locating those proper, accurate assessments ... is asking a lot of a teacher. That's why I think we need to give them help with that," Fox said.

E-mail kgutierrez@enquirer.com