It’s great for students, too

Even though I hear constant dialog from Kentucky educators about how they are reaching out to parents, we still hear about disconnects between parents and schools.

So, it was a real pleasure to attend the Boone County Public Schools’ “Making the Most of High School” parent event last Saturday.

The event was kicked off by Kentucky State Senator John Schickel and Boone County Superintended Randy Poe, and it was loaded with 35 different breakout sessions for parents and students that covered a tremendous range of topics.

Here is a partial listing of the breakout sessions assembled by Superintendent Poe and his enthusiastic Boone County staff. This will give you an idea of the huge range of subjects covered. You can see the full list by clicking the “Read more” link below.

• MATHEMATICS, THE PIVOTAL CLASS – How parents can help their kids master math

• NOT MY KID – Informing parents about drug issues

• BUILDING YOUR RESUME IN HIGH SCHOOL – Aimed at getting into college and beyond

• COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS – How to get the $$$$

• FINANCING YOUR FUTURE EDUCATION – Understanding the KEES scholarship and other programs

• DEMYSTIFYING THE COLLEGE APPLICATION PROCESS – What parent and student doesn’t need this help?

• DUAL ENROLLMENT IN HIGH SCHOOL – How to balance attending both high school classes and college classes while still in high school

• I HATE THIS RIDE, LET ME OFF: THE EMOTIONS OF HIGH SCHOOL – They could charge double for this one!

• SPORTS ELIGIBILITY IN HIGH SCHOOL AND THE NACAA CLEARINGHOUSE – Must know for high school athletes

• EDUCATION OF GIFTED STUDENTS IN BOONE COUNTY SCHOOLS – For the parent who has one, this is gold

• HIGH SCHOOL AND BEYOND FOR EXCEPTIONAL STUDENTS – Boone didn’t overlook the special needs kids, either!

Dr. Anna Marie Tracy from the Boone County Schools says that teachers and other staff donated their time to the event, and the costs were covered by private industry donations, making this a very efficient “bang for the buck” program.

I hope a lot more school districts are doing something similar for parents. If your school district isn’t, why not download the topic listings for your school system by clicking the “Read more” link or by just e-mailing them the link to this blog.

And, if you are a Boone County parent who didn’t come to this conference, you really missed out on a great opportunity. I hope you will be there next year, because your kids deserve no less.

Full, alphabetical listing of Boone County’s “Making the Most of High School” Breakout Sessions

BELONGING AND JOINING AT BOONE COUNTY’S HIGH SCHOOLS – There is more than classrooms in our high schools, and these custom-tailored programs (one for each high school in the district) tell parents and students about the neat extra curricular “stuff” available

BLOGS, WIKIs, PODCASTS AND OTHER WEB TOOLS – How Boone County is training the kid who someday may be doing my job!

BOONE AREA TECHNOLOGY CENTER – What it offers to students starting in the eighth grade and in high school

BROWN MACKIE COLLEGE – Information about this careers oriented school

BUILDING YOUR RESUME IN HIGH SCHOOL – Aimed at getting into college and beyond

CAREERS IN ENERGY AND GREEN TECHNOLOGY – From the BC Area Technology
Center, more about non-college career options

COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS – How to get the $$$$

COMMUNITY AND TECHNICAL COLLEGES – What is out there for students who don’t want to go to full university programs

COURSE SELECTION AP/HONORS/REGULAR – Helping parents understand this often confusing array of course offerings

DEMYSTIFYING THE COLLEGE APPLICATION PROCESS – What parent and student doesn’t need this help?

DUAL ENROLLMENT IN HIGH SCHOOL – How to balance attending both high school classes and college classes while still in high school

EDUCATION OF GIFTED STUDENTS IN BOONE COUNTY SCHOOLS – For the parent who has one, this is gold

EXPLORE, PLAN AND ACT – What are these tests, and what do parents and students need to know about them

FINANCING YOUR FUTURE EDUCATION – Understanding the KEES scholarship and other programs

GATTON ACADEMY – Information on getting into this highly selective resident high school on the Western Kentucky Campus, which any student in Kentucky can qualify to do

GOVERNOR’S SCHOLARS PROGRAM, OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME – About the program and how to qualify

HIGH SCHOOL AND BEYOND FOR EXCEPTIONAL STUDENTS – Boone didn’t overlook the special needs kids, either!

I HATE THIS RIDE, LET ME OFF: THE EMOTIONS OF HIGH SCHOOL – They could charge double for this one!

IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON CHANGE AND THINKING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY – How technology is changing the educational environment

INDIVIDUAL LEARNING PLAN – All kids get one, and this tells parents how to make the most of it

MATHEMATICS, THE PIVOTAL CLASS – How parents can help their kids master math

NO PASS/NO DRIVE – How to prepare kids for this new reality

NOT MY KID – Informing parents about drug issues

OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION AND CREATING ORGANIZATION – What kid doesn’t need this one?

SOFT SKILLS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY – CLASSROOM CUSTOMER SERVICE – More about learning skills for students

SPORTS ELIGIBILITY IN HIGH SCHOOL AND THE NACAA CLEARINGHOUSE – Must know for high school athletes

STEM CAREERS – Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and how to prepare for them

STUDY SKILLS FOR HIGH SCHOOL SUCCESS

TAKING THE MYSTERY OUT OF PAYING FOR COLLEGE – All sorts of strategies and some pitfalls, too

THE COMMONWEALTH DIPLOMA, WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOUR COLLEGE CAREER – Information about this advanced level high school diploma

THE LATINO STUDENT CONNECTION – Kentucky doesn’t have many Latinos statewide at this point, but there is a growing community in Boone County. This special program reaches out to those parents

TWO MILLION MINUTES – A viewing of this documentary on questions parents and students face

UNDERSTANDING THE PSAT AND THE NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARSHIP – Parents of top performers were definitely not overlooked

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE COLLEGE AND CAREER READY – More about what kids really get under their belt during the high school years

WORKFORCE SKILLS EMPLOYERS ARE LOOKING FOR IN THE 21ST CENTURY – Learning to do the last century’s jobs won’t prepare today’s students to have a happy and productive life

To learn more about this event, contact Dr. Anna Marie Tracy, Boone County Schools, at annamarie.tracy@boone.kyschools.us.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University recently released data outlining a rather striking fact: government pay in the last decade has outpaced that of the private sector.

I suppose this isn’t surprising given that the government doesn’t have any real competition to speak of.  It’s difficult to compete with someone who makes the rules and has a seemingly unlimited supply of funds.

Take a moment and read what the Cato Institute says about it here.

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday got some criticism yesterday for making statements that all schools with diversity will fail No Child Left Behind by 2014.

I like a lot of things Commissioner Holliday is doing, but given the big loopholes like confidence intervals, busing, etc, etc, in No Child Left Behind, it is at best premature to say no school with diversity will be able to escape sanctions in 2014.

Also, the facts are that a lot of Kentucky schools can’t meet the relatively low performance targets in our current Kentucky Core Content Tests, and they are doing a very bad job of getting kids ready for life. Many currently deserve to be identified as problematic when the proportions of kids scoring at or above benchmarks statewide for the EXPLORE, PLAN, and ACT tests – tests which are tied to what kids need next – remain low.

You read the title correctly. An article posted on The Huffington Post a couple days ago discusses the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act and it’s dangers.  Don’t be fooled by the title of this act…it’s a trap!

Basically, this act gives the government the power to put web domains on a blacklist if they are under  suspicion of “infringing activities”.  Wasn’t it just a few months ago that the current administration of the United States called out Iran for web censorship during their national elections? 

The internet is one of the most powerful modes of free speech we have, let’s not let this domino fall.  The Bluegrass Institute fought against this type of activity in Kentucky just last year!

One of the very interesting additions to the new academic reporting from the Kentucky Department of Education is a new series of data on College and Career Readiness. This shows the percentage of graduates from the school system that score high enough on the ACT college entrance test to avoid needing any remedial course work in math, reading or English upon entering a Kentucky public postsecondary institution. In addition, for 2010, a student who earns an industry recognized “career certificate” is also counted as a success. If you want more information, I provide that and some caveats in the “Read more” section, which you can access from the link below with the same name below.

But, this is largely straight-forward, so let’s look at how Kentucky did in 2010 on this new indicator.

• There is a huge variation in school performance on getting kids ready for college and careers.

o The top school, DuPont Manual High in Jefferson County, prepared 81 percent of its 2010 graduates for college and careers. This school is expected to achieve a 91 percent college and career readiness rate for its graduates in 2014.

 DuPont Manual is a highly selective magnet school. The fact that it still fails to prepare one in five students is very disturbing.

o The bottom performing schools – The Academy @ Shawnee, Valley Traditional High School, Western High School, all in Jefferson County and Deming High School in Robertson County – are only expected to have a 52 percent readiness rate in 2014. I seriously doubt they will reach that goal given their current, dismal performance.

 In 2010 only 4 percent of the three Jefferson County schools’ graduates are college ready!

 In Deming High School, only 3 percent are ready for college and careers.

 These are gruesome numbers after 20 years of KERA.

• In 2010 only 15 of the 228 high schools in Kentucky adequately prepared half or more of their graduates for college and careers.

• High school size doesn’t matter much.

o The correlation (a statistical calculation involving the correspondence of data) between the number of graduates and the percentage that are college and career ready is a rather low 0.32. There is a slight benefit to being a larger high school, but not much. For example:

 Among the top 10 schools for percentage of students who are college and career ready, six exceeded the state median figure and four had much lower numbers of graduates.

 In fact, all four graduated 74 or fewer students in 2010, and two tied with graduates totaling only 44.

 At the other end of the performance spectrum, only one high school exceeded the state median number of graduates, but this could be due to large numbers of dropouts in these very low performing schools.

 Out of the 10 bottom performing schools for college and career readiness, seven are found in Jefferson County.

• Many districts did not report that any students completed any industry-recognized career certificates. Does that mean that in many districts such alternate career pathways are totally unavailable or that programs don’t do an adequate job of preparing students to obtain such certifications?

o No high school in the enormous Jefferson County Public School system reported any student earning such certification.

This is how the Kentucky Department of Education describes the data presentation in its web site (slightly edited):

A readiness percentage is calculated by dividing the number of high school graduates that have successfully met an indicator of readiness for college/career with the total number of graduates. For 2010, the indicators of readiness include student performance on the ACT or attainment of an Industry-Recognized Career Certificate.

The ACT scores used for benchmarking adequate college preparation come from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE). These benchmark scores for 2010 are: Reading (20), English (18), and Mathematics (19) on any administration of the ACT.

Currently, the Career Measures indicator includes students who missed CPE’s Benchmarks on the ACT or College Placement Tests, but who received an Industry-Recognized Career Certificate.

The KDE web site also explains:

The goal for Readiness in 2014 is for schools, districts and the state to improve their 2010 Readiness percentage by at least fifty percent (50%). The improvement goal is derived by subtracting the 2010 readiness percentage from the maximum of 100% readiness, then dividing by two. This value is then added to the 2010 percentage to establish a 50% improvement goal for 2014.

There are a couple of important notes. The college and career readiness data may not show all graduates. Also, students who drop out before graduation are definitely not included in the numbers. Furthermore, the results do not consider students with learning disabilities who take the ACT with testing accommodations that Kentucky allows, but which the ACT won’t allow for testing where scores are transmitted to colleges.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, back in 2008 four Jefferson County Elementary Schools were in the worst NCLB performance Category – Tier 5. They are:

o Atkinson Elementary
o Hazelwood Elementary
o Maupin Elementary
o Okolona Elementary

These schools all failed consistently to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for at least six years by 2008.

So, what is happening to those schools today?

According to the NCLB Media Report for 2009, all four schools were reconfigured after the end of the 2008-09 school year and prior to the start of the 2009-2010 school term. That reset their 2009-10 NCLB accountability status all the way back from a worst possible Tier 5 classification to having no accountability classification what-so-ever today – NONE!

Do you believe that?

Here is one example. This table summarizes the Maupin Elementary School’s NCLB performance by year since this program started.

Note that Maupin never, EVER, met the Annual Measurable Objective score for reading under NCLB. By my estimate, Maupin would be a No Child Left Behind Tier 5, Year 3 school in this new school term of 2010-11 (Note, the department of education had to rename the “Tier” system to avoid confusion because the federal government is now using that name for something else. The correct new term would be Restructuring, Year 3).

Never-the-less, Maupin faces no consequences what-so-ever in the current school term. It won’t face consequences until after the 2010-11 NCLB scores come out around August or September of 2011.

Maupin’s entire school staff got a “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the district’s parent- and student-hostile busing nonsense simply because the enrollment in the school changed by at least 20 percent. Do you think an enrollment change that small should wipe out all accountability?

Still to be decided – what happens if Maupin fails NCLB again. Will it go to a “Restructuring” classification, or just start NCLB all over at the least severe category of School Improvement, Year 1 (The old Tier 1)? I’ve been talking to the Kentucky Department of Education about this very serious question. So far, no answers, but the department is sensitive to this obvious problem.

By the way, I have similar tables to the one above for the other three Tier 5 schools from 2008. Click the “Read more” link to see that.

Atkinson is unique among the four schools in this list in that it actually met AYP in the 2008-09 school term. If it had met AYP again in 2009-10, it would have earned its way out of the NCLB sanctions program (schools exit sanctions if they make AYP for two successive years).

As you can see, that didn’t happen for Atkinson. But, thanks to Jefferson County “Bus-ting” NCLB, Atkinson got a “Get Out of Jail Free Card,” anyway. Is that in the best interests of this school’s students?

Hazelwood Elementary is interesting for a different reason. It has blazed a trail of grief for its students in reading ever since NCLB began. But Hazelwood actually started to perform badly under an earlier accountability program from the previous version of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act that preceded the NCLB version.

That is why Hazelwood was already in Tier status by the time NCLB reporting started in 2002-03 on this table.

Okolona Elementary School, like Hazelwood, started down its trail of grief even before NCLB was enacted.

Because Okolona’s NCLB status got wiped clean in 2009-10, it will have to fail NCLB again next year before any consequences are felt in the school.

Here are some interesting questions:

Can Jefferson County play “NCLB BUS-ted” any time it wants? Will that happen over and over again in the future?

Busing has been going on in Jefferson County for decades. That clearly hasn’t done much to improve academic performance in the schools discussed here. All we are doing is subjecting different children to bad schools. Meanwhile, the educators in those schools have never really had their feet held to the fire. Neither has the local school board been held to account for continuing to impose its parent- and student-hostile busing scheme on everyone even thought the court mandate to do so was eliminated years ago and there is no evidence that this improves schools. Do you think it is time to demand better?

Tech notes:

You can access the individual school NCLB reports I used to assemble the tables above from pull down menus here.

Access the NCLB Media Reports (and all other by year NCLB reports) by year here

2008,

2009

and

2010

We agree

I doubt you’ll ever see a link from the Prichard Committee’s blog to our site, but when they get something really right, we are happy to acknowledge that.

In this blog Prichard takes a good shot at the Jefferson County School District’s lousy performance in the newly released state testing data for its many kids in poverty.

Someone in Jefferson County really needs to wake up.

Note: I have not double-checked the exact numbers in the Prichard post, but they usually get this sort of data correct.

It’s no surprise. The Jefferson County Public School District’s chaotic busing plan – supposedly justified by needs for diversity – thoroughly trashed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability for the district’s elementary schools. Is this the real reason educators in Jefferson County continue to defend this child- and parent-hostile mess?

Here are some of the gruesome statistics for the district’s 89 standard configuration (Primary to Grade 5) elementary schools:

• THEN: In 2008 a total of 21 Jefferson County elementary schools were in NCLB improvement categories ranging from Tier 1 to Tier 5. Another five schools lacked enough high needs students to be considered federal Title 1 schools, so they were not held accountable. However, these five schools also failed to make the NCLB targets.

• NOW: In 2010, only 10 elementary schools face consequences in the latest NCLB report. That is true even though NCLB standards got tougher during the past two years. In the new report, the non-Title 1 schools can also face state-level sanctions, but few did in Jefferson County.

Thus, in 2008 there were 26 Jefferson County elementary schools that would face sanctions, then in 2010, with the standards raised, only 10 schools faced sanctions?

Does that sound credible?

Consider this:

• In 2010 out of the 89 standard configuration elementary schools in Jefferson County, 67 (that’s 3 out of 4) were “reconfigured” and got excused from all NCLB accountability thanks to busing.

• Of the 67 reconfigured Jefferson County elementary schools in 2010, 56 (that’s 84 percent) actually failed to make overall adequate yearly performance in reading for at least two years in a row. WITHOUT BUSING, THEY SHOULD HAVE FACED CONSEQUENCES.

• Many of the same 56 schools that failed in reading also failed in mathematics.

• Out of the remaining 22 schools that were not reconfigured, 10 faced NLCB consequences. Thus, for those few elementary schools in Jefferson County that were held accountable, nearly half (45 percent) failed to escape NCLB sanctions in 2010.

Any way you slice this, a lot of schools that should be held accountable, were not.

It gets much worse.

• In 2008, four Jefferson County Elementary Schools were in the worst NCLB performance Category – Tier 5. They are:
o Atkinson Elementary
o Hazelwood Elementary
o Maupin Elementary
o Okolona Elementary

These schools all failed consistently for at least six years.

All four schools were classified as reconfigured in 2010 due to busing. That zeroed out all their NCLB accountability.

But, what do you think happened to the academic performance in these schools? Are kids being served well enough that the faculty should be able to avoid all sanctions?

Stay tuned for more on that.

Tech Note:

The data above came from extensive analysis of the 2010 No Child Left Behind reports and spreadsheets in the Kentucky Department of Education’s web site.

Access the entry portal page to all those reports here.

The Associated Press is reporting on a huge MSNBC interview with President Obama this morning on the crisis in education in the United States.

The article links to a section of the MSNBC web site with a video of the events so far.

Interesting comment from the MSNBC interview:

According to a recent Time survey, 67 percent of the US population now believes the public school system is in crisis.

And, in his videoed comments, the president says that:

Teachers union can’t defend a status quo where one-third of the students are dropping out and 2,000 schools are dropout factories.

Also, the president endorses firing teachers who don’t perform.

Finally, even our president now admits that just throwing more money at education isn’t going to work.

Check it out for yourself.

Then, keep up to date in this blog. There is more than ample evidence in the new test results I am writing about (lot’s more to come) to support that nationwide concern at an even higher level in Kentucky.

• I’ve already touched on some of the most disturbing data, such as the decline in our high schools in nearly every subject tested last year.

• Later today, I will next show how the elementary schools in our largest school district escaped any accountability what-so-ever under NCLB in 2010.

• Finally, we are going to look at the grim performance in many of our lower grades on the new Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which was given for the first time during the 2009-10 school term. Wait until you see how poorly some of our schools are doing in even teaching the basic stuff that children must master before they really are prepared to take on higher order thinking assessments.