The Alliance for Excellent Education just published an analysis of the economic costs of high school dropouts for 50 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That includes this report for the Louisville area. High schools in Louisville and the surrounding 13 counties lost over 30 percent of their students prior to graduation according to the…
WAVE 3 TV in Louisville has an excellent, two-part video series on charter schools. You get both the great positives, including a look at two concrete charter school examples from Indianapolis, and the shots thrown at charters by the naysayers. Here’s the link to the WAVE 3 text article. The links to the two videos…
– Yeah, Right! I was really surprised by this one. A new report from the National Association for Gifted Children actually says, “In the 21 states that reported data, the percent of students identified as gifted ranges from less than 2% in Utah and West Virginia to over 25% in Kentucky.” How’s that again? Here…
Educators are quick to forget the past, but the rest of us sometimes have better memories. A new Gates education grant to the Pittsburgh public school system has the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ‘going back in time’ to discuss a similar, large grant the district got in 1988. That effort just didn’t pan out. This time, Gates…
I wrote yesterday about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarding a $10 million grant to charter schools in Houston. Now, a consortium of charter schools in the Los Angeles area is getting a whole lot more than that, $60 million to be exact, to develop data oriented teacher evaluation programs that will rely, in…
– Not a dime for Kentucky because we don’t have any Down Houston, Texas, way, they just got a huge influx of money, $10 million worth, from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The cash will double the number of Knowledge is Power Program charter school seats in the city. That money will enable the…
Far too many Kentucky kids are mired today in high schools that are not meeting their needs. These students often lose hope and often drop out. In some of the state’s most challenging high schools, the situation is so bad that studies by Johns Hopkins University actually label the schools as “dropout factories.” Meanwhile, charter…
We’ve discussed inaccurate graduation rate reporting in Kentucky many times such as here and here. According to the latest Kentucky Department of Education nonacademic report, covering the Class of 2008, Kentucky supposedly graduated 84.52 percent of its high school students. Keep that figure in mind. Well, the fact is that the formula used to fabricate…
– Quick answer – no-one is really sure Over at the Prichard Blog they are happy about a simplistic comparison of the performance of Kentucky’s students with learning disabilities on the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Let’s temper that enthusiasm a bit. As recently reported in Education Week (subscription), the people…
– How come only a “handful” of Kentucky school districts use it? Kentucky schools have chronic problems with teaching math. For example, white eighth grade students – they comprise the vast majority of all students here – were recently outscored in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress by their peers in 42 other…