To be sure, No Child Left Behind had some serious problems, but one of its real strengths was its focus, as the name implies, on improving education for all the country’s students. Under No Child, schools that didn’t perform for special student groups got identified even if their overall average scores looked OK. Sadly, when…
It’s a puzzle – a paradox! The effect is so well known, it even has a name. Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday knows about it. And, it explains why I consistently say that you cannot rely on overall average scores to get a good picture of the true performance of Kentucky’s public education system.…
Find out how your local school’s graduates perform in college The Kentucky Center on Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS) has released a new series of high school feedback reports for all the regular high schools (Sorry, nothing for alternative programs) in Kentucky. These 6-page reports have a lot of interesting data that compares things like…
Will big bucks facility at EKU produce for kids? A news article in the Richmond Register about Eastern Kentucky University’s $83 million plan to build a new combined facility for its education college and the special, on-campus K to 12 Model Laboratory Schools raises interesting questions. Is this EKU model really the right approach, and…
Back on November 1, 2013 I wrote about concerns with the first round of scores from Kentucky’s new Writing Program Reviews. I pointed to some extreme examples where the scores from the new reviews didn’t match well with other data related to student writing performance. Apparently, our concerns are raising some awareness. On Friday, November…
To add to the discussion about the privacy and security of sensitive student data collected by school districts across the country, longisland.com reported on November 8, 2013 that sensitive student data housed in the Sachem School District in New York was leaked to a web site. What kind of data? One NY blogger claims to…
Probable impact on scores One of the really good things that showed up in the recent release of the 2013 National Assessment (NAEP) reading scores is a large reduction in the number of Kentucky’s students who were excluded from this national assessment due to learning disabilities. The Kentucky Department of Education did a yeoman job…
The recent news release about the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results from the Kentucky Department of Education omitted some of the early state data from this important program. That probably was done to keep the size of the tables manageable; however, omitting test results from 1996 and earlier creates a misconception about…
The new math and reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have unhappy news for Kentucky’s predominant racial minority. As this set of tables shows, scoring gaps increased (though supposedly by statistically insignificant amounts) for Kentucky’s whites and African-Americans in reading in both the fourth and eighth grade and in math in…
Are similar tests being used in Kentucky? The Washington Post’s chief education blogger, Valerie Strauss, is drawing considerable attention to nuts and bolts problems with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. She posted “A ridiculous Common Core test for first graders” a little over a week ago. It is actually written by the…