“A child’s opportunity to attend a high-performing school should not depend on the family’s zip code.” Quote from: Dr. Terry Holliday, Doc H’s Blog, Friday, August 28, 2009 Dr. Holliday, the Bluegrass Institute has said the same for many years. Once again, welcome to Kentucky!
– Merit pay works – in Kentucky! I wrote yesterday about the very nice increase in Kentucky’s Advance Placement Test (AP) performance that was announced a few days ago. In this post, I discuss a dramatic contribution to that increase that came from just 12 of the 230 or so high schools in the state…
The Kentucky Enquirer reports that a law aimed at increasing safety for students in public schools, “grew into a wide-ranging, omnibus law of too many costly regulations that strayed far from the original intent of protecting school children from obvious dangers.” As a consequence, the Ohio legislature, in a rather remarkable action, repealed legislation known…
A couple of days ago, the Kentucky Department of Education released new public school Advanced Placement Test (AP) data for 2009 along with a notable amount of older data from earlier years. The table below, which comes directly from the department’s news release, shows that the number of students who got a college credit level…
The plan to give a coordinated set of tests from the ACT, Incorporated to boost college preparation of Kentucky’s students seems to be working, at least for three of four academic subjects. These tests, known as “EPAS tests,” have been given to all of Kentucky’s eighth grade and tenth grade students since the fall of…
The Courier-Journal’s news article about the Bluegrass Institute’s news conference yesterday concerning the new report on Kentucky’s lowest performing schools under No Child Left Behind contains a remarkable set of comments from the Kentucky Department of Education. Says the Courier, Kentucky’s new education commissioner, Dr. Terry Holliday, is actively considering bringing charter schools to Kentucky.…
– Report: Five-year olds experiencing two to two and one half hour bus rides Check the story out here.
Here is WAVE 3 TV coverage of the press conference for the release of the new Bluegrass Institute report on the performance of Kentucky’s No Child Left Behind Tier 5 schools. There is a link on this page to the one-minute On-Air coverage from August 24, 2009. You can read the report itself by clicking…
As we mentioned in earlier blogs such as here, President Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are stressing that states that want a part of the more than $4 billion second-tier education stimulus money, known as the “Race to the Top Fund,” have to meet some conditions. One mentioned frequently is “increasing the…
An interesting article from New York shows how a state can corrupt a testing program to create an image of school success that does not exist. Don’t snicker too much at New York, though. Educator attempts to fool the public have not been confined to that state. Kentucky’s “good ole” CATS assessment was pretty inflated,…