I haven’t spent much time looking at how the educational achievement of Kentucky’s poor kids compare to poor kids in other states. For one thing, the data on poor student performance isn’t as extensive as I’d like. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) does list separate state scores for students eligible for the federal…
I am amazed by confused news articles popping up around Kentucky supporting retention of open-response questions in the state’s CATS school accountability tests. How can so many intelligent people be falling for this CATS bait-and-switch deal? Even if these questions do test higher order thinking, that knowledge isn’t being effectively transmitted back to schools. To…
Click the play button on the left side of the audio slider to hear this interesting commentary. It’s gratifying that even Bob Sexton over at the Prichard Committee now agrees with a long-standing BIPPS position that our CATS school assessments need extensive reworking. Also, note that Susan Weston continues to contend that Kentucky’s kids score…
While I was putting together a response to another blog, this grammar correction ‘gem’ popped up in Microsoft Word. This example of computer grammar correction run amuck relates to writing instruction in Kentucky. Until very recently, Kentucky’s teachers graded writing on a “holistic” basis, meaning that the grade was based only on an overall impression.…
A new US Census news release says, “A larger percentage of foreign-born than native-born residents had a master’s degree or higher in 2007, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationally, 11 percent of foreign-born — people from another country now living in the United States — and 10 percent of U.S.-born…
A couple of days ago I posted “NAEP – Beware Those Pesky Cautions” with some interesting data on how our kids’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress looks after you separate data for Whites and Blacks. I have now had a chance to run some statistical significance tests on the White eighth grade…
The National Council on Teacher Quality recently released “No Common Denominator,” a report on the preparation of elementary school teachers to teach mathematics. The report lists five standards that “would be the mark of a high quality program of teacher training.” Standard #3 is catching attention in some national Listservs that deal with mathematics issues.…
Earlier today, I posted a blog about a Position Paper on Assessment from the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). That paper deals with changing the state’s CATS accountability system. That first Blog focused on the fact that while the KDE’s news article says the Kentucky Board of Education “released” this paper, in reality the board…
Like it or not, Senate Bill 1, which makes extensive revisions to Kentucky’s CATS public school assessment program, is stirring a lot of discussion. It just triggered a mistake over at the Kentucky Department of Education. Senate Bill 1 is likely to pass in the Senate this week. In a possible attempt to forestall that,…
The Institute has a number of You Tube videos on subjects of interest in Kentucky. For those of you who want an easy way to find these videos, here is a directory with hot links to every one of them. You will find all sorts of material here. There are simple explanations of the incredibly…