We’ve written plenty about the scoring inflation in Kentucky’s public school assessment program, known as CATS, but some of you clearly have not had time to read it.

Now, a nice discussion of the evidence has been collected in one, easy to read source in the freedomkentucky.org Web site.

Everyone in Kentucky owes it to our kids to take a few moments to check this out and then let your legislators hear loud and clear that we are tired of getting inflated pictures of how our schools are really performing. As I commented yesterday, plenty of legislators seem anxious to fix this issue, but there still are holdouts. So, all our elected state officials need to hear it loud and clear – the inflated nonsense from CATS isn’t what we were promised back in 1990, and with tax dollars now severely constrained, we cannot afford a feel-good fabrication that doesn’t really level with us about our education problems.

Jim Rogers used to live in America. When he had the means to live anywhere he wanted, he moved to Singapore. Here is how he describes what is going on now:

“Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank’s mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work: people fail and then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people and you start again with a new, stronger base. What we are doing this time is they are taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying ‘okay, now you can compete with the competent people.’ So everyone is weakened. The whole nation is weakened. The whole economy is weakened. That’s not the way it is supposed to work.”

His entire interview is here. It’s long, but very good. There is a better way that doesn’t involve bloodshed, but we have to move fast.

In other words, a Russian foreign affairs expert suggests his country may want to consider taking over Alaska.

Big-government fans in Ohio are promoting an expansion of the food stamp program. Expect the same nonsense to catch on here in Kentucky soon enough:

“If you really want to help people who need such help – do so. With your own funds or time or talents that you have. But don’t fall prey to lobbying efforts and then use them as an excuse to take more money from the dwindling supply the rest of us have.”

Maggie Thurber has the whole story here.

The paucity of recommendations from the KDE’s Assessment and Accountability Task Force is a travesty.

Three of the recommendations, (1) using formative assessments in the classroom, (2) fixing our weak assessment standards and (3) properly training teachers for their role in assessment are things we should have been doing for years. Because this hasn’t happened after 18 years of KERA, there is little reason to suspect that having the task force call, yet again, for this to happen will lead to any meaningful improvement.

The fourth recommendation – do a better job of evaluating the arts and humanities – is a nice idea, but the task force never completed its homework by getting cost data for implementation, which could be a prohibitive killer in this austere funding climate.

Bottom line: even the few recommendations from this largely ineffective effort are likely to make much difference for Kentucky’s students. So, forget the task force. Its vague and repetitive recommendations don’t say very much.

But, the failure to come to grips with CATS tells us that allowing the KDE to manage this group just wasted another year while students still don’t get the assessment program, and in too many cases the educations, they need.

In any event, there is plenty wrong with CATS, and legislators know it. Last week’s meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on Education brought that home loud and clear. Of course, with press coverage of education issues all but extinct in the commonwealth, you have to come to this blog or our new Wiki at www.freedomkentucky.org to learn anything about what is happening.

For example, the media never made a single task force meeting, which says a bundle about how important the state’s news editors viewed the task force in the larger scheme of things.

I don’t recall seeing any press coverage of last week’s contentious meeting of the Interim Joint Education Committee, either. So, here’s a bit more on that, to add to my previous comments.

Both sides of the aisle jumped on a Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) report about the CATS and NCLB scores for 2008. Among other things, legislators zeroed in with displeasure on the persistent wide education gaps for minorities. The people who will ultimately make the decisions certainly didn’t sound happy about gaps and with CATS in general for failing to disclose them the way NCLB does.

There also is extensive ire about the obvious disconnect between CATS scores and college remediation rates. Senator Tim Shaughnessy, among others, was irate that the new tests from the ACT and our freshman college remediation rates show CATS is disconnected from what kids really need.

Representative Derrick Graham echoed and expanded on those sentiments, as mentioned in the previous blog. Graham specifically noted that schools prepare kids for CATS, but not for college. He clearly understands the disconnect between whatever CATS tests and what colleges want.

Graham was joined by fellow African-American Senator Gerald Neal in deploring the gap situation. Neal said he was almost speechless, finding the report depressing. He pointed out we have been going at this “since forever,” yet the gaps continue. Under Neal’s questioning, the KDE’s Ken Draut admitted that while there were some good examples of schools doing well with poor kids, that there were fewer examples of schools fixing the African-American gaps.

Representative Jim DeCesare pointed out that a CATS score of 85 isn’t terribly impressive performance. He says we need to do much better than that, something the Bluegrass Institute has extensively discussed in many publications and YouTubes.

Representative Alicia Webb-Edgington asked what was being done to fix the continuing 20 point gaps. Deputy Commissioner of Education Elaine Farris agreed that the gaps are indeed very large. She also admitted that some kids do not get exposed to the core curriculum in our schools and suffer from a culture of low expectations. That wasn’t mentioned in CATS Task Force meetings, as far as I recall.

Adding to the general tenor of strong displeasure, Representative Addia Wuchner pointed out there is an obvious disconnect in CATS, and the statistics are our kids. Says Wuchner, “It is time for dramatic reform of the reform.”

And, that seemed to pretty well sum up the overall tenor of the education committee members. So, forget the CATS task force. I doubt that even a little of the little it recommended will ever pass by a legislator’s way.

Big hubbub over the weekend in Oklahoma after the state insurance commissioner floated the idea of taking Sooner football tickets away from people who don’t buy health insurance.

The State Policy Blog responded:

“I’m glad that residents of the Sooner state were willing to stand up for their rights, when their football tickets were threatened.”

“I hope the rest of the country responds as strongly when U.S. Senator Max Baucus tries to impose the Massachusetts plan on the entire United States.”

Gov. Steve Beshear is already combing the neighborhoods to get more people signed up on government health insurance. Let’s don’t tell him about this one, okay?

Pension Tsunami UPDATE: I guess they saw you guys coming, because the latest data is now on the KRS web site.

The Kentucky Retirement Systems (KRS), under fire recently for unusually bad investment returns, was supposed to release its latest actuarial report late last week.

Instead, the Annual Reports section of the KRS web site has been down all weekend and remains unavailable early this morning.

Taxpayers get to pay up to replace investment losses because Kentucky “guarantees” pensions to public employees with a defined benefit pension plan.

We were told it could be the “Silver Bullet” to fix America’s lagging high school performance – moving to smaller high schools (around 400 or fewer students).

Since 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been all over small high schools to the tune of an incredible $2 billion. With Gates support, over 2,600 small high schools were opened across the country.

Here in Kentucky, small schools have been pushed by the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center and the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

Now, education historian and commentator Diane Ravitch writes that this education fad simply isn’t working out, and the Gates crowd admits it.

Ravitch reports that students in the fad high schools didn’t learn as much math as kids in traditional high schools. Test scores in reading and math came in lower for the boutique high schools. Also, supposed small school advantages in New York City turned out to be due to the fact that the small schools turned away students with learning disabilities and students who were still learning English.

In a remarkable bit of candor, Ravitch writes that while the Gates Foundation deserves credit for honest self-scrutiny of its small high schools program, that, “Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”

I wonder – was Ravitch was thinking of Kentucky when she wrote that?

Ravitch’s bottom line – there are no silver bullets in education. Clearly, we need to be wary of those who think there are.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was in Louisville Saturday night stumping for socialized medicine with an analogy that doesn’t hold up under any serious scrutiny:

“Elders called on President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to overhaul the health-care system to provide coverage for all, despite the potential cost to taxpayers.”

“”They say we can’t afford it,” she said, when “in one month we got $700 billion for Wall Street.”"

Right. And how well is that working out so far, Joycelyn?

Besides, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon points out, we already have enough government control of healthcare to see widespread negative effects:

“Consider two distinguishing features of socialist economies. The first is that the government decides what individuals may produce, what they consume, and the terms of exchange.”

“That is largely true of America’s health care system. Government controls production and consumption by determining the number of physicians; what services medical professionals can offer and under what terms; where they can practice; who can open a hospital or purchase a new MRI; who can market a drug or medical device; and what kind of health insurance consumers may purchase.”

“Government bureaucrats even set the prices for half of our health care sector directly, and indirectly set prices for the other half. When you read about Medicare over-paying imaging centers and hospitals, or that it’s impossible for Bostonians to get an appointment with a general practitioner, it’s largely because the bureaucrats got the prices wrong, and those rigid prices do not automatically eliminate shortages and gluts like flexible market prices do.”

“A second feature of socialist economies is that there is little incentive to make careful economic decisions, because government has put everyone in the position of spending other people’s money.”

“Canada may have the most heavily socialized health care system in the advanced world. Yet America’s system is as much a tragedy of the commons as the Canadian system, where health care is ostensibly “free.” In each country, only about 14 cents out of every dollar of medical spending comes directly from the patient.”

“How can America’s health care system be “socialized” when we rely on the private sector more than any advanced nation? Because it doesn’t matter whether the dollars and the hospitals are owned publicly or privately. What matters is who controls how they are used.”

Just as the banking bailout shouldn’t persuade anyone to further expand government’s role in healthcare, reality should inform us to pursue free-market reforms instead of continuing to hope that a little bit more socialism will suddenly start to work.

KentuckyVotes.org, the Bluegrass Institute’s legislative tracking web site received 1.75 million page views in the last twelve months, but the site has been pulled down this weekend for a major upgrade.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that when the site comes up, probably sometime on Sunday, it will have all the bells and whistles of MichiganVotes.org. Check it out!

Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson announced plans Friday to let go enough non-essential government employees for three days to save $2 million.

Let’s see: 2,000,000 times 365 divided by 3 equals $243,333,333.

Hmmm…