Jefferson County Board of Education member Linda Duncan is one confused lady.

She writes in the Courier-Journal that she is upset because the state’s educators want kids to at least score “Proficient” in math and reading on the state’s assessments.

Ms. Duncan mistakenly thinks the level of performance considered “Proficient” as determined by Frankfort is somehow equivalent to the much higher, but necessary, level of performance defined by the National Center of Education Statistics and the National Assessment Governing Board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Where did Ms. Duncan get such a completely wrong idea? Soon to be departing Jefferson County superintendent Sheldon Berman, perhaps?

In fact, the low level of student performance required to reach “Proficient” in Kentucky’s testing program is NOTHING like the requirements to be scored “Proficient” in the NAEP.

We discuss this extensively in our new reports on KERA @ 20, available here.

Here is Figure 8 from the full report. This shows how seriously inflated Kentucky’s fourth grade reading proficiency rate has become in comparison to reported rates based on higher standards for the NAEP. NAEP proficiency rates are shown by the dark blue bars, while the reading proficiencies reported by Kentucky’s KIRIS (to 1998) and CATS testing (actually from the CATS Kentucky Core Content Tests, or KCCT, from 1999 on) are shown by the pink bars.

Notice how the proficiency rates from Kentucky’s tests exploded over the years. Kentucky’s fourth grade reading proficiency rates now run over twice as high as those reported for the same students by the NAEP.

Clearly, the CATS KCCT for reading has become grossly inflated. And, the CATS KCCT proficiency standard is NOTHING like the NAEP’s.

Still, even though Kentucky set low standards for itself – nothing like NAEP’s – Ms. Duncan is whining.

Ms. Duncan, please read our reports and get better informed. The kids in Louisville are depending upon you to do a better job, but your letter shows you are not doing your homework.

Comments from the lead article in this Sunday’s Business Section of the Kentucky Enquirer are stunning.

“Even as the region’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, well-paying jobs across Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati have gone unfilled.

“The talent gap, Stevens says, is the direct result of the failure of public schools across the region to prepare students for the jobs of the future.”

Changes the NKY Chamber would like:

• More business practices in the school system to enhance accountability and raise the performance bar

• Merit pay for teachers

• More superintendent control of principal hiring (which requires changes to the SBDM rules)

• Districts working more effectively together

• A better plan for innovative processes (the lack of which caused us the loss of Race to the Top money)

• More business-education collaboration

• Moving beyond acceptance of the status quo

The full, thought-provoking article should be mandatory reading for everyone in Kentucky. It certainly provides dramatic support for many of the comments made in the Bluegrass Institute’s recently released set of reports about what we have learned about KERA in the past 20 years (access here).

I don’t know if the N KY Chamber folks had a chance to read our reports before the Enquirer ran their article, but I know they’ve heard a lot of the information in the reports before, from me. I’m a NKY Chamber member and serve on its education committee.

“State policymakers who have kowtowed to the KEA now have a choice to make. They can continue to do the bidding of the teachers’ unions and punish Kentucky’s children, or they can tell the teachers’ unions to start looking out for the good of students, teachers, and schools by approving charter schools.” –Martin Cothran, The Family Foundation senior policy analyst.

Kentucky’s senior senator didn’t apologize for the buckets of Washington-produced pork he’s brought back to the commonwealth throughout his long tenure in Washington. But he does recognize that “the abuse of this practice has caused Americans to view it as a symbol of the waste and the out-of-control spending that every Republican in Washington is determined to fight.” That’s about all you can ask for from a politician who’s spent more than a quarter-century in Washington.

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Beacon.

Chris Derry, Bluegrass Institute founder and board member, had a letter published in Sunday’s Bowling Green Daily News offering an argument for repealing the 17th Amendment, which changed the process for electing United States senators.

Previously senators were elected by state legislatures; now, of course, they are chosen by popular vote.

Give the article a read and let us know: Do you agree or disagree?

As regular readers already know, the Bluegrass Institute released a major set of reports about Kentucky’s 20-year history with KERA on Monday, November 22, 2010. One, “KERA (1990-2010): What have we learned?” is a full-length report, and the second, “KERA@20,” is a quicker reading “Commentary” on some of the key points in the main report plus more information.

You can access both from our freedomkentucky.org Wiki KERA Portal page.

You can also find more in the Portal.

One of the challenges in creating these reports was deciding what we didn’t have space to cover. We just couldn’t fit everything in to a reasonably sized report.

Also, the reports are not intended to be just dull history, but rather they offer policy-makers and citizens background to inform future decisions as we move forward with Kentucky education.

Thus, we intend that the reports will “live” through additions to the KERA Portal page. You will want to check there for updates to the “See Also” section of the portal.

You can check there now for some early additions on such topics as how Kentucky’s assessment history has cautions for the two efforts under way now to create new Common Core State Assessments (articles titled “SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium” and “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)”). We see potential danger that both those efforts could be repeating mistakes we made in Kentucky, and we’d like our educators to avoid them.

We’ll be adding another link soon to an already existing article about how Kentucky’s teachers didn’t get a fair share of the huge increase in spending that took place after KERA was enacted in 1990, so stay in touch.

And, once you have read our reports, if you think we need to add something else (e.g. parent involvement has already been mentioned), let us know. And, don’t forget, with the freedomkentucky.org Wiki, you can even add articles yourself. If you think your article, or any other existing article, needs to be listed on the KERA Portal page, let us know.

Let’s get this clear.

There is no CATS accountability program in Kentucky anymore. There hasn’t been one since early 2009.

The CATS assessment program was thrown out by Senate Bill 1 during the Kentucky Legislature’s 2009 Regular Legislative Session when legislators realized that CATS and its academic tests were not giving us accurate information about how well kids were being prepared for college and careers – in other words, the things that really matter. CATS was just generating ‘feel good’ numbers.

Sadly, the official, legislative recognition that the CATS accountability program was a failure didn’t stop some members of the “KERA Amen Chorus” from fabricating their own numbers. These are unofficial numbers from a private group. They are not from an authorized, formal accountability program. And, they are based on tests that are being phased out – for cause – as rapidly as possible.

But, that isn’t stopping some school systems from making all sorts of misleading claims that they are still making progress with CATS.

Case in point is covered in this Casey County News article about Liberty Elementary School.

Nowhere in this article does it explain the truth – These are not CATS accountability index scores at all. Those index scores don’t exist anymore.

The school is crowing about a private ranking scheme that is totally dependent upon dubious scores from a discredited set of tests. If the school were at least honest with the public about what these “accountability indexes” really are, I wouldn’t be so upset.

But, apparently, the school isn’t telling anyone that their index was generated by an unofficial, private ranking scheme that has never been approved by any official entity.

This week, Norton Health Care and Humana joined to create Louisville’s first accountable care organization, referred to more commonly as an ACO.

The new Louisville ACO is one of four sites selected to be a part of a pilot program conducted by the Brookings Institution and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

So what does the mean for Kentucky health care?
The ACOs are a response to the gigantically intrusive health care reform law passed last May. They are defined as “a related set of providers … that can be held accountable for the cost and quality of care delivered to a defined population.”

Proponents tout that ACOs are “innovative” and will work to improve care and preventative services. However, not all health experts hold the same view.

The Heritage Foundation reported in August that ACOs force consolidation and “would prompt more doctors in small-group practices to leave medicine altogether.”

John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis wrote in The Heartland Institute’s November’s edition of Health Care News that the main problem with an ACO is the fact that the “patient is not the customer.”

“The third-party payer is the [real customer],” Goodman writes. “The ACO is not trying to meet your needs. It’s trying to meet the third-party payer’s needs.”

In order to improve true health care quality, we need a patient-centered approach to medicine. When a third-party gets involved, patient treatment and needs will be neglected.

Time will tell just what the impact of the new Louisville ACO on Kentucky’s health care system will be, but for now, the prognosis to “fix” health care this way does not look good.

On November 2, in perhaps the biggest victory for the Tea Party, Dr. Paul of Bowling Green won the race for U.S. Senate. Senator-elect Paul of Bowling Green has not left the Tea Party message in Kentucky. In fact, he’s taking the entire Tea Party with him to the nation’s capital.

“Enacting reform is difficult. There is a huge difference between the theory of reform and the reality of it — it is a lot harder than it looks. It requires full transparency, unyielding tenacity, continuous communication, relentless advocacy, and the courage to measure progress and then deal with the results, whatever they may be.” –Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida