Geography for Life and Standards-Based Education in the Commonwealth of Kentucky
schools was fundamentally changed in 1990 with the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). This educational reform— mandated by the Kentucky Supreme Court ruling that funding for Kentucky public school districts was neither adequate nor equitably distributed—established a platform on which standardsbased educational assessment evolved. KERA mandated that all curricula and instruction be standards-based, that professional development for teachers follow standards-based models, and, most important, that high-stakes assessment of student performance be implemented to gauge how schools and teachers were performing (Kentucky General Assembly 1990). However, at that critical juncture in the state’s educational history and during the first few years of planning and implementation, the Kentucky Geographic Alliance (KGA) was at a low ebb and was not well positioned to respond to the new model of standardsbased curriculum and assessment. After a short period in which no formal geographic alliance existed in the Commonwealth, a proposal to the National Geographic Society to reconstitute the KGA was accepted and funded, and new leadership of the KGA was established. KGA was then in a position to serve as an advocate for geography education when subsequent critical curricular decisions and revisions were made. The revitalization of the Kentucky Geographic Alliance occurred simultaneously with educational efforts at the national level that included the establishment of the National Educational Goals and the publication of Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994 (GESP 1994). The convergence of those events provided an unprecedented opportunity for geographers and other educators to infuse geography into the curriculum at the state level. Without doubt, the availability of national geography standards in Geography for Life made a significant and positive difference in the development and revisions of the standards-based curriculum in Kentucky. A nationally agreed-upon set of standards in the discipline served as a powerful tool that was readily accepted by both the education leaders and those responsible for developing Kentucky’s curriculum. That said, geography per se is still not as explicitly referenced or as visible in the curriculum as we would like (in either the social studies or the science curricula). However, there is ample opportunity for geographers to demonstrate the linkages with related disciplines (e.g., economics, history, culture, and society) that contain essential and core geographic material.