It’s no secret. I don’t much care for US News and World Report’s dubious ranking scheme for high schools around the nation. However, that publication did stumble onto a really good Kentucky school when it named the Gatton Academy of Math and Science the number one high school in the nation. While Gatton’s exact true…
The New York Times is reporting on a potential school test cheating problem in New York City’s schools. It seems that teachers in at least two NYC elementary schools may have engaged in improper practices with students during state testing. The whistle got blown by teachers in the intermediate school where these students later were…
This past December the Kentucky Board of Education voted to remove the option of providing readers on the state’s reading assessment for children with learning disabilities. It was an important move to bring Kentucky in line with current policy in virtually every other state in the country, where using readers on reading tests is almost…
Kentucky’s ‘Ungraded Primary’ – it was easily one of the most controversial features of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990. ‘Ungraded Primary’ did away with the traditional school configuration of Kindergarten through the third grade. Instead, early learners were supposed to be grouped according to their performance in each academic area. Students would be…
WFPL reported yesterday on the new National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade science results for 2011. Among other things, the on line article includes a map similar to this one which shows Kentucky’s performance on NAEP Grade 8 Science did not improve between 2009 and 2011 testing while a number of states did increase…
The 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 8 Science Assessment results have been released, and when you look at overall scores across states, Kentucky is ahead of the national average. Sadly, that isn’t true for by far our largest student group, our white students. This first map (created with the Main NAEP Data…
As I write this, testing with the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) program is under way in the state’s public schools. K-PREP is completely different from the past CATS program and its Kentucky Core Content Tests, and those differences have generated a lot of questions, and not a little confusion, among both…
We talk frequently about charter schools here at the Bluegrass Institute, so I thought you might like to see where they are most frequently found. This list comes from US Department of Education data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. Notes to the table As an additional note, I calculated the percentages in…
The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice just released results from a new poll of adults which includes something rather special, a separate set of data on what moms want for their kids. Here’s a survey question about school vouchers and what moms and non-moms responded. So, what else do moms want? Freidman’s press release says:…
Honest principal in Nevada points to gross error in data for his school US News and World Report’s (USN&WR) annual ranking of high schools came out only a few hours ago. Already, controversy is brewing about this dubious ranking program. This time, part of the problem is that some of the data stored at the…