An October 23, 2013 post in the Hechinger Report says: “In Kentucky, for instance, the first state to adopt the Common Core and begin introducing the standards in classrooms, there is still large variation in how devoted teachers and principals are.” Wow! There is another Common Core myth in trouble. And, no, I didn’t write…
I share those thoughts, but I didn’t write them. They actually come from an October 25, 2013 Education Week Blogs piece from Marc Tucker. Tucker actually says of the recent study that attempted to match scores for the states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to scores from an entirely different international test: “Nice,…
The American Thinker just published an excellent article by Bruce Deitrick Price about “Sages on Stages Desperately Needed.” Price summarizes the pitfalls in supposedly “new” education methods being ushered in as a result of the Common Core State Standards. The problem is, these education ideas are not new. Worse, these education philosophies were already tried…
It seems a little ironic. A new report came out today claiming that US eighth graders in most states score somewhat above the international average on math and science tests. Aside from some concerns about the methodology employed in this report, somehow I cannot get excited about the US scoring somewhat above the international average…
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has been a darling of many in the Kentucky education community of late, getting favorable comments from a number of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) supporters like the Prichard Committee’s Stu Silberman and Bob King, the President of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary…
In another example of how Kentucky’s complex and time-consuming to grade Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) assessments lead to long turn-around times for results, the Courier-Journal just announced that parents in Jefferson County are just now getting the results for their children from the last school term’s assessment cycle. How is a parent…
While Kentucky’s educators crawl along with hand-slap reforms that do little to fundamentally shake up our existing, school-choice and true-reform-hostile public schools, down river in Memphis, Tennessee, a true revolution is under way – a revolution that won Tennessee an enormous first round grant from the Race to the Top competition (Kentucky’s relative lack of…
I already mentioned the excellent presentation by Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts to the Interim Joint Education Committee on Monday. Now, KET has posted a video of Adam Edelen’s outstanding October 14, 2013 presentation. Click here to watch that. Edelen’s comments begin at 9 minutes and 56 seconds into the webcast.
I suspect that the New York Times knows more about its city’s charter schools than a statistics guy from Jefferson County Public Schools, so a new article from that newspaper about the Big Apples’ charter schools caught my eye today. While admitting that charters in New York can still be improved, the Times says: “There’s…
Education Week reports in “Is There Empirical Evidence That Charter Schools ‘Push Out’ Low-Performing Students?” that a new study says: “There is no statistical evidence that charter schools are ‘pushing out’ low-performing students at a rate higher than for regular public schools.” The new report was written by Ron W. Zimmer, an associate professor of…