The New York City Independent Budget Office just released an interesting report on charter school student mobility. Here are some of the findings: • On average, students at charter schools stay at their schools at a higher rate than students at nearby traditional public schools. About 70 percent of students attending charter schools in school…
May be inflating Kentucky’s College and Career Ready rates Taking a responsible action, the Kentucky Department of Education is investigating whether the use of smart calculators on the COMPASS test from the ACT, Inc., could be inflating scores. The findings could impact the state’s reported College and Career Ready rates and could have national implications,…
The legislature in New York just enacted laws that end a dubious relationship between that state’s department of education and an Internet Cloud service provider known as InBloom, which is a nonprofit funded by the Gates Foundation. New York’s new law provides: • The state department of education cannot store identifiable student data in the…
How did the media miss this story???? The story about Maya Angelou criticizing President Obama’s education policies actually ran in the MSNBC Web site half a year ago, but I don’t recall any other media – especially media here in Kentucky – picking up on this extraordinary situation. Do you? That leads to the second…
We hear a lot of back and forth complaints about parents not getting involved in their children’s schools and about schools not helping parents to stay involved. Well, that doesn’t seem to apply to New Haven School, an elementary in Nelson County. Thanks to some clever use of digital communications, the father of one Kindergartener…
The Kentucky School Boards Association’s news service reports that rules for annual audits of the state’s public school districts are being tightened in the wake of a series of problems uncovered by the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts. Normally, local school districts contract with a private auditing firm to conduct their required annual audit. That…
Breitbart has an interesting article up about the latest Common Core State Standards skirmish between the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and the Fordham foundation. The HSLDA released a very powerful documentary video about Common Core on Monday. Common Core supporter Fordham (which has received money from the Gates Foundation) was seriously stung by…
Kentucky Senator Katie Stine has always impressed us as one of the most informed and intelligent members of the state’s legislature. She reinforces our impressions again with her new Herald-Leader Op-Ed about the problems with Kentucky’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. Sen. Stine co-sponsored Senate Bill 1…
The News-Democrat from Carrollton ran a story yesterday, “Girls’ group provides focus on technology, mathematics, science,” that caught my attention. The article says that a new, girls only club for science is being established at the Carroll County Middle School. We hear a lot about how girls don’t do as well as boys in science,…
In one of the most interesting challenges to the validity of Common Core State Standards so far, education historian Diane Ravitch took a big shot three days ago in this Huffington Post Blogs article. Ravitch charges the Common Core State Standards “were written in a manner that violates the nationally and international recognized process for…