Don’t think all of our teachers buy the positions of the National Education Association and its various state affiliates. That includes buying into the pending union-sponsored “Save our Schools” march on Washington, DC tomorrow. The march is mostly to fuss about funding for our schools with a few jabs at attempts to create some real…
Someday, even to your state This AP news story, which is cropping up like mushrooms in news outlets all over the country, is going to play out in Kentucky, as well. Bluntly put, now that education agencies around the nation are finally being forced to get honest about high school graduation rates, the inflated claims…
Over the past few weeks, school districts have been responding to a Kentucky Board of Education decision that new end-of-course exams in Algebra II, Biology, English II and U.S. History should count 20 percent of each student’s final grade. Local boards that don’t want to weight the new tests that heavily are required to tell…
Probably too many rookie teachers Management of the turn-around of Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Jefferson County looks awfully shaky. The Courier-Journal reports that 60 of the 135 teachers brought in to the second group of the district’s schools to be tagged as Persistently Low-Achieving are first-year teachers with absolutely no prior experience. They are going…
Schools in the Daviess County School District are now all upgraded to a super-fast fiber-optic web connection, which the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer (subscription) says is 200 times faster than the three T1 lines each school formerly used. As I recall, T1 lines run at about 1.5 Megabytes per second, so the new connections are on a…
In the aftermath of the huge cheating scandal in Atlanta’s public schools – where educators, not students, stepped over the line – the Kentucky Department of Education is getting very proactive to preclude similar problems on Kentucky’s new assessments. Those new assessments go into use in the spring of this coming school term. According to…
$5 billion later, he says, “It’s hard to improve public education—that’s clear.” In a recent Wall Street Journal interview Gates admits laments that his first major foray into school reform – the creation of small enrollment high schools – didn’t make much of a difference where it counted with greater numbers of students going on…
Here is a NY Times/David Brooks Op-Ed that is well worth your time to read if you care at all about certain elements in the public school system who would mislead us about the need for real reform.
We’ve been fans of the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning (BAVEL) ever since issuing our report last year about “Virtual schooling in Kentucky: Great promise with challenges.” Now, BAVEL is expanding its program thanks to a three-way partnering with the Florida Virtual Schools and Pearson Virtual Schools. This new partnership could allow BAVEL…
New federal testing results for geography were released today, and the results are not impressive. In fact, Education Week’s headline pretty much sums it up. “Students Lose Way in NAEP Geography Test” Between 1994 and 2010 scores rose a bit for fourth grade students but stayed flat for eighth graders and declined by a statistically…