The Kansas Senate failed to override vetoes targeting education policy in the state budget, stopping a plan to restructure the state assessment test system and reset score perimeters.

Governor Laura Kelly signed the state budget, House Bill 2513, but vetoed line items, including sections that addressed assessment tests and how scores are set for Kansas students. She also vetoed a line item that required the Kansas Department of Education to use existing resources to pay for professional development, mentor teacher and other programs.

The House overrode the line-item vetoes on Friday along party lines, but the Senate couldn’t follow through with the two-thirds majority needed to override.

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Senator Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican and a retired principal, carried the bill on the Senate floor. She said the legislation made sure students achieve appropriate goals.

“When the (state Board of Education) created a new assessment and new cut scores, it caused a problem,” Erickson said, referring to changes made in 2024.

Erickson said the Legislative Research Department found that in 2024, 23.34 percent of eighth graders were proficient in English Language Arts. In 2025, after new cut scores were implemented, that jumped to 40.29 percent.

Cut scores are specific points on a test’s scoring scale that separate different levels of student performance to determine categories such as limited, basic, proficient and advanced, according to the Kansas State Department of Education.

“An 18 percent increase in one year,” Erickson said. “That’s why it’s so important that we have some stability and that we keep the cut scores the same, so that we know whether our kids are actually learning, and we’re not lowering the bar and 18 percent get jumped in one year.”

Representative Nikki McDonald, an Olathe Democrat and a teacher, said it is legislative overreach to interfere in the state assessment scoring, which would “lead to mass confusion and ultimately unreliable data on student success.”

“This will have devastating impacts for our students and our public schools,” she said. “As is the case much of the time, the Department of Education and the State Board of Education have the evidence and the expertise and those best practices to dictate how we measure student success. Pushing things like this through a budget proviso without having the opportunity to have conversations, deep conversations in committees and on the floor, is sloppy, sloppy policy.

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Senator Scott Hill, R-Abilene, said he supported the amendment because the state changed two factors in assessing scores, making it impossible to understand what was happening with students.

“I think it’s important to know statistically, when you change two variables at once, you can’t know which of those two variables caused the change,” he said. “In this case, we changed both cut scores and we changed the assessment. We had two different variables. If we eliminate one of those variables, we can go back to the fact of what did actually happen between the years.”

McDonald and others complained that they weren’t told there would be an attempt to overturn this portion of the governor’s line-item vetoes and weren’t prepared to debate.

Fraying tempers emerged as the session moved toward it end, leading to sharp back-and-forth commentary.

“This is underhanded politics, in my opinion, and I’m really disappointed that you would bring this up without having given us the decency and the heads up to look at it and be prepared,” McDonald said.

Representative Susan Estes, a Wichita Republican, said that while she didn’t know assessment scores would be discussed Friday, she was well aware that any veto could come up on the floor, and it wasn’t underhanded.

Estes said a lot of time and work is put into tracking data and when the “measuring stick” is changed in the middle of that process, all history of what’s happening is lost.

“We don’t have a way to know other than the national tests that we take,” she said. The “gold standard” National Assessment of Educational Progress test is given every two years, she said. The ACT test contract is coming up, and it’s unclear whether that will be funded.

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“We’re at the risk of losing our continuity of measurements,” Estes said. “We also don’t measure the lower grades with the ACT. I think it’s important that we maintain the same yardstick so we will be able to know and respond if what we are doing is working or not working.”

Representative Jarrod Ousley, a Merriam Democrat, said the proposed changes to cut scores in the budget proviso would invalidate the state assessment scores for students taking the tests this week.

“To reiterate what’s been said, if the Legislature wants to dictate how the State Board of Education is to manage student assessments, they should run for the state board,” he said.

Kelly also vetoed a plan to take $8.25 million in funds from existing sources in the education budget to be used for a wide range of programs. The funds would come from anticipated excess finance formula funding, which isn’t guaranteed, she said.

Kelly said she supported many of the programs, but it was “improper to fund these programs in this manner” rather than providing funds outright.

The programs range from teacher mentoring to state matching funds provided for broadband and other digital access programs.

The Senate failed to get the two-thirds majority to override this veto.