Apparently, the Jefferson County Board of Education just doesn’t get it. Here’s the deal: the public’s right to know trumps the seemingly incessant desire of some in the education complex to hide their actions from public view. Now, the Messenger-Inquirer (subscription) chides the Jefferson County board for trying to get a special law passed so…
The US Census Bureau has a different, politically correct way of saying it, but the bottom line in a December 8, 2009 press release from this agency is that one out of five kids aged 12 to 17 in the United States isn’t attending classes with their age group, but has instead been held back…
I have written on several occasions (such as here) about deceptive test score reporting practices in the Jefferson County school system. For several years, Jefferson County has turned the CATS Kentucky Core Content Test results on their ear, claiming that any child who scores above the “Novice” level is doing “At or Above Grade Level”…
Over at the Prichard Committee’s blog, they are waxing ecstatic about a new report that Prichard head Bob Sexton and Prichard number cruncher Susan Weston just released called, “Substantial and Yet Not Sufficient: Kentucky’s Effort to Build Proficiency for Each and Every Child.” I think they only got the title half right. This graph shows…
The North Lawndale College Prep Academy in Chicago is another public charter school. Its enrollment is also heavily inner city. But, the school graduates 90 percent of its students, and those who graduate go on to college. We recently looked at some inner city Louisville regular public high schools with graduation rates only around half…
Here’s a school that makes it a point to fight the soft bigotry of low expectations in incoming students. Result – this is a National Blue Ribbon School! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEvix-Mvl4E] Don’t look for any schools like this in Kentucky – unless our legislature votes to join the 40 other states with charter schools.
Here’s a middle school in Hartford, Connecticut that is a charter public school. The school’s enrollment is 100 percent low income and 100 percent African-American or Hispanic. It ranks: #2 for Performance Gains#2 for African-American Student Scores#4 for Low Income Student Scores#5 for Overall Middle School Improvement [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS3fblZNIjw] Hartford kids can get access to outstanding…
This charter school, located in a formerly underperforming public school’s building in a rural area of Georgia, is meeting kids needs because it has the flexibility to do new things. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK2SZkNBcHo] Why is Kentucky continuing to deny our kids this sort of education advantage that public charter schools have provided to students in 40 other…
Another local newspaper reports that a school has gotten its NCLB scoring changed due to errors in the initial 2009 report. Adding information to my earlier post, the Manchester Enterprise (subscription) reports that the Paces Creek Elementary School has had its NCLB criteria upgraded to meeting all goals. The Enterprise says Paces Creek Principal David…
We first surfaced this story here on September 28th, one week after the 2009 NCLB scores were released. Schools were complaining that their NCLB results were wrong because those test results didn’t have the right student counts for kids with learning disabilities. We added to the story here, here and here. Now, the first findings…