– The Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich agree on something????

– You Bet! It’s real education reform that includes charter schools

This Wall Street Journal article probably will be a collector’s item. The picture of Sharpton and Gingrich cordially talking to each other is classic.

But, even more important is that these two men from the absolute opposite ends of the political spectrum agree that real education reform is crucial. And, the reform plan they are supporting most definitely is pushing charter schools.

Are you listening, Kentucky?

Recently, one of the other blogs that writes about Kentucky education has been claiming that Kentucky only spends somewhere around 20 percent of its total money on public education.

That assertion surprised me, as I have heard many times that we actually spend 40 percent or more on public education.

So, I surfed to the governor’s new transparency Web site to see how the state’s fiscal experts describe the budget. The two graphs below are cut and paste copies from that site.

The first one shows how all of the $24.16 billion Kentucky spent in Fiscal Year 2009 was allocated. Education, which I think includes preschool through grade 12, did indeed get 20.2 percent of this pie. That works out to $4.88 billion. Postsecondary education got another 21.7 percent, or 5.24 billion. But, wait – There’s more.

This second graph shows how money from the General Fund, which the legislators can fully control, gets allocated.

When it comes to money the Kentucky legislature can control, public education got not 20 percent, but a much larger 44 percent of the pie. That’s about $4.136 billion from the $9.4 billion the legislature can control. Postsecondary education got another 13.8 percent, or about $1.3 billion, from the general fund.

I talked to one of the budget people in Frankfort about which graph would be the better indicator of Kentucky legislative intent. The answer was the second graph.

Apparently, a lot of the money in the first graph is “fenced” money from dedicated funds which our legislators really can’t touch.

A considerable amount of the fenced money comes from federal sources, like the federal highway trust fund and Medicaid, which cannot be reallocated by our state leadership.

Other state money that shows in the “all funds” amounts come from such things as license fees that are also dedicated, not general tax, dollars.

For example, license fees are generally fenced to serve the licensees. This includes a wide variety of groups from nurses and doctors to hunters. These are not tax dollars and should not be used as tax dollars. They generally serve to make the administering of the licensing services self-supporting.

License fees may also help do things like support wildlife conservation efforts, in the case of hunting and fishing licenses. Perhaps they even help cover game warden salaries.

While these fee amounts show in the all funds total, they are not available for reprogramming to education.

Of course, some of these license-related activities also contribute to education. For example, wildlife personnel conduct programs for our students, though I don’t think the costs involved for those other agencies’ education programs are shown as an education expense in the pie charts above.

Anyway, I now understand the two ways Kentucky reports funding a bit better, and I hope you also do, as well.

Founding father John Adams warned: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Click here to listen to the latest commentary by Jim Waters

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The Washington Post wasn’t messing around when it called the situation in Kentucky – one of 10 states without charter schools – “ridiculous.”

The Post also did readers across the nation a service when it explained the different atmosphere at charter schools, which are publicly funded, privately managed schools: “Freed from the constraints of union contracts and one-size-fits-all school policy, they’ve been able to innovate successful new approaches to learning.”

Little wonder, then, the most determined opponents to charter schools in Kentucky, is, has been and will continue to be, teachers unions and their enablers in the Legislature.

I did a little of my own research after posting a blog earlier today about two school districts that were questioning data in their 2009 No Child Left Behind Reports (NCLB). Instead of looking at district level data, I looked at the counts statewide for students tested under NCLB for reading in 2008 and 2009. The table shows what I found.

Most of the changes from 2008 to 2009 don’t look out of line, but there are two exceptions – the students with learning disabilities, and the students with limited English proficiency. Both groups showed very large one-year increases.

Most definitely, the increase in the count of students with learning disabilities looks out of line. This 11,000 plus jump in one year looks highly unreasonable.

Even worse, an increase that large can’t be due to one or two school districts having bad data. This must be spread out over more districts, maybe all of them.

The limited English proficiency number increase in one year of 1,443 students isn’t a big increase by itself even though on a percentage basis it is indeed a very large jump. However, the increase in the two groups that are likely to create this increase, the Hispanic and Asian students, in total was only 1,213 students. Where, exactly, did the other 230 limited English proficient kids come from? Whites? Not likely.

So, it looks like the Kentucky Department of Education may indeed have some problems. In fact, there may be some massive problems that could impact many schools that either did, or did not fail NCLB due to learning disabled kids who may not even exist.

This, indeed, is getting interesting.

This E.D. Hirsch commentary in the new “The Chronicle of Higher Education” should be required reading for every educator.

Hirsch explains how a major focus on “child centered” instruction often acts to prevent those children from being able to participate in our republican form of government. Hirsch knows that one of the key goals of education must be to teach every child the core of knowledge that is assumed by adult writers. Without that core of knowledge, a person is doomed to live forever in the “linguistic shadows,” unable to effectively communicate and participate in society.

The new Kentucky No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores for 2009 have been out less than a week, but at least two school districts are already questioning their reports.

The most recent situation was covered by the News-Graphic from Georgetown. Under the title, “Schools score 94.7 percent, fail No Child Left Behind” (Subscription), the newspaper includes comments that the Scott County Public School District found mistakes in the number of its learning disabled students in the new report.

Per Scott County, the NCLB report shows 188 more learning disabled students than are actually in the system. I calculate that figure would be more than 30 percent too high, based on the number of learning disabled students in the system one year earlier.

This error could point to a number of problems, but the leading suspect at this point is the Infinite Campus student tracking computer program. This is a program with teething pains, as we have noted before.

Scott County isn’t the only school district with concerns. The first school system to question the new NCLB results is the Barren County School District. According to the Glasgow Daily Times, the district’s director of Instruction and Techonology, Benny Lile, spotted some “discrepancies” which the paper didn’t discuss further.

I called Mr. Lile, who has a long history of service to state education as the past chair of the statewide School Curriculum, Assessment and Accountability Committee. He indicated the problem in Barren County also concerns questionable numbers of students who were reported as learning disabled.

It will be interesting to see if more districts have similar problems.

As an aside, I also talked to Mr. Lile about how Barren County is handling the new testing data. He is going to be doing a good job with that task. His district will take a detailed look at the data broken down by individual test and by student subgroup performance. I think that is exactly what the legislature intended when they disbanded the CATS accountability system with its overly simplistic single-score-for-everything approach, which just wound up hiding lots of problems.

Lile’s district isn’t going to do anything with the unofficial, CATS-like number called the “Transition Index” that a consortium of private groups concocted this year. Lile recognizes that single number can hide all sorts of underlying problems and mostly just serves to confuse the public about what is really going on in their public schools.

I’ve already discussed (here and here) two closely related ways some poorly performing schools in Kentucky got their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability slates wiped clean without ever meeting required academic targets. Those “slate wipes” were related to changes in the students attending the schools.

It turns out that there is a third way schools have gotten their NCLB slates wiped clean. I don’t think this one happens very often, but it does happen.

The example school for this NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card” is the Knox Central High School in Knox County. Knox Central’s avoidance of NCLB consequences is due to the school moving in and out of the category of “Title I School,” which refers to whether or not the school got enough federal support money each year to be held subject to the federal NCLB law.

The first table below comes from Knox Central’s 2006 Adequate Yearly Progress report. First, note that this school consistently failed to make the annual proficiency target for reading since the beginning of NCLB (Scores were not tabulated for the first, baseline year of 2001-02).

If Knox Central had been a Title I school, it would have entered NCLB Tier 1 status after the 2003-04 school term and would have been so classified for the 2004-05 school year in the right section of the table. Then, by the 2006-07 school year, Knox Central would have been in Tier 3 Status.

But, Knox Central wasn’t a Title I school until the 2005-06 school term, by which time it had amassed a record of failure for math as well as reading. Because the school was now in Title 1 status, it became an NCLB Tier 1 school for the first time after the 2005-06 term results were released and was carried in that classification in the 2006-07 term.

Now, look at the latest NCLB report for Knox Central for 2009.

First, note that this 2009 report added information in the right-hand section about Title I status of the school. That wasn’t in the earlier year’s table.

Next, note that the year after Knox Central entered NCLB Tier 1 status for the first time, that it again was not carried as a Title I school. That wiped out its NCLB Tier slate completely for the 2007-08 term.

Next, note that the school moved back into Title I status for the 2008-09 school term. Because of its long-standing failure in math, it was at once renamed an NCLB Tier school, but only as a Tier 1 school. Then, for this current school term, due to continued failure in math, Knox Central moved up to Tier 2 status.

But, if Knox Central had not cycled in and out of Title I status, its string of consistent failures to make proficiency rate targets in math would make it a Tier 5 school for the 2009-2010 term.

This helps highlight the problem with the NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards” I’ve been discussing. These policy actions can erase a school’s accountability history under NCLB in a number of ways even though the schools have not demonstrated acceptable academic progress.

The “Get Out of Jail Free” cards also work to deny students important benefits such as the right to transfer to better schools and the right to receive supplemental education services like extra tutoring.

As far as I can tell, the “Get Out of NCLB Jail Free Card” schools get to start the accountability process all over again. It seems that these schools could enjoy as much as five more years before they can again be identified by NCLB as a lowest-performing, Tier 5 school. That just isn’t acceptable.

Overall, it looks like 21 schools used one of the NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card” Trifectas to have their entire NCLB accountability reset for the 2009-2010 school term. Six of those schools that got this procedural “slate wipe” were in NCLB Tier 5 status last year, the very worst performance category. If the Kentucky Department of Education had kept its long repeated promise to look at Alternative Governance in those schools, the staff in these schools would have faced some consequences. Instead, it looks like the school staff are getting a free ride, perhaps for as long as five or six more years. We need to fix that.

I will have some ideas on how we can better monitor the “Get Out of Jail Free” schools, and I’d love to hear your ideas, too. Our comments feature in this blog is very easy to use, and you can do it anonymously.

What do you think about schools getting out of all NCLB accountability based on non-academic technicalities? Should their NCLB status be completely reset to non-Tier status? Should they be allowed to work up from Tier 1 to Tier 2, Tier 3 and so forth all over again if they fail NCLB again next year? Should a school be allowed to stop supplemental services to students just because the district makes some zoning changes, even though the staff in that school isn’t changed? What do you think?

One of the great strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school accountability program over our old CATS assessments is the focus on not leaving any subgroup of students behind. While CATS never had any penalties for a school that failed with say, its African-Americans or its kids in poverty, NCLB does. Furthermore, we get separate, easy to understand data on those subgroups in the NCLB reports.

Thus, the NCLB performance reports for 2009 make it easy to see the lagging performance of Kentucky schools with major student subgroups.

This table includes data taken from both the Kentucky Department of Education’s 2008 and 2009 NCLB Briefing Packets.

The table shows how many schools failed to make their NCLB goals with African-Americans, poor students in the federal free and reduced cost lunch program, and students with learning disabilities for both years.

I used data in the table to compute the rapid rises in failing schools, as shown in this graph. Across the board, there was no improvement for either of these student subgroups in either reading or math.

Clearly, the under-performance of schools with these populations is not acceptable, and neither is the weak excuse from the Kentucky Department of Education that the rises are due to the NCLB targets moving somewhat higher in 2009. Let’s talk about that excuse.

First of all, you have to consider that KERA is nearly 20 years old. We didn’t start this reform yesterday. We didn’t even start back in 2002 when NCLB got started. We’ve been trying to make education work better for our kids for nearly two decades.

Next, let’s really look at those target proficiency rates, which did increase a bit this year. Well, the real targets look pretty unimpressive once you consider all the Kentucky NCLB loopholes that shoot holes through the nominal numbers we are told schools had to meet. Some of those NCLB loopholes include:

Unstable, non-standard scoring over time

Confidence Intervals

Unreasonable requirements for size of student subgroups before reporting scores

Safe Harbor

and now

“Get Out of Jail Free Cards” which can totally cancel a weak school’s NCLB report card.

Thanks to all the loopholes, we see things like Ballard High School in Louisville “passing” the NCLB math test for its poor kids even though their actual proficiency rate in 2009 was only 37.5 percent – that’s all! We see Bardstown High getting credit for success with its African-American students in math even though the percentage of proficiency was just 33.33 percent. Imagine that, 20 years after KERA started, and Bardstown is officially doing just fine despite the fact that only one in three of its African-Americans can do an acceptable job in math.

And, thanks to the new “Get Out of Jail Free Cards,” we see Hazelwood Elementary School in Jefferson County get its NCLB Tier 5 failing status summarily wiped away without any apparent change in the school’s leadership, and despite the fact that the school promptly failed again with its new students. Those kids just lost their right to transfers out of this school along with important supplemental tutoring services, but it looks like not much really changed in the school.

(Note: find these schools’ individual “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT – 2009”, with the Web access tool here).

Hey, Kentucky! After almost 20 years of education reform, is that the kind of performance you think should be passing muster? We don’t need more of the same old, same old tiresome excuses. We don’t need more warmed over versions of tried and failed reform attempts.

We need to come to grips with the idea that some of our schools really need a stem to stern reworking including a major staff overhaul. One way we could make that happen is with charter schools, and the new NCLB results make it clear we are well past the point where we should have already made that decision.