I’ve written plenty in the past few months about Kentucky’s 10 Persistently Low-Achieving Schools and how some adults in the system seem to be in denial that there is anything really wrong in their schools. Just search the blog with the keyword phrase “Low-Achieving School” to find that. Some of those whining educators have friends…
“We won’t be able to change education in Kentucky without some type of disruptive innovation.” Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday speaking to the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents in Bowling Green The commissioner went on to explain part of the motivation for such a shakeup is to do a better job for minority and…
The Education Action Group’s Ed Reform Radar highlights an egregious example of a teachers’ union gone wild, trying to bypass the decision of the voters in Anderson, Indiana. This story shows how excessive teacher union control of local school boards can get out of hand in a hurry even if voters want a change. You…
The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and the Bluegrass Institute generally agree. Some Kentucky schools do a good job for students despite high poverty rates. However, when it comes to measuring that performance, we have our differences. Over at Prichard, they cooked up a “Transition Index” that attempts to carry on tradition with the remaining…
It was never intended that all charter schools would be successful. As charter school expert Caroline Hoxby points out, the charter concept anticipated that some of the imaginative models adopted in individual schools would not work out for kids. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToVLYZOwxDk] According to the Center for Education Reform’s Annual Survey of America’s Charter Schools (requires free…
The New York Times gets it right on this one. School apologists frequently whine that high stakes testing pushes teachers to cheat. But the Times doesn’t buy that nonsense, saying: “Groups that dislike standardized tests — and teacher accountability systems based on them — are blaming both for the cheating problem. But that’s like blaming…
Newsweek’s annual excursion into the statistical nonsense of ranking the nation’s high schools is out, and the big joke on everyone is that the Holmes Junior/Senior High School in Covington, Kentucky is ranked at 927 out of the thousands of high schools in the United States. Here are a few facts about how Newsweek’s ranking…
Out in California the Green Crowd is excited about generating electricity from geothermal sources – using hot subsurface conditions to create electric power. But, these interesting efforts have run into a real world snag. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers on line IEEE Journal edition reports, “In the American Southwest, the Energy Problem is…
Add another lawsuit to the problems confronting Jefferson County’s extreme ideas about busing. This lawsuit was triggered by another parent who didn’t want his child travelling an hour, one way, to a school much farther away from home than the closest available school. There has to be a more child-friendly way to do this than…
Logan has been writing about Grant County Public Schools lately, so let’s use that school district as a way to introduce all of you to a neat on-line tool from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability. This tool is called the “Kentucky District Data Profiles.” It is a PDF document listing two pages of statistics…