Kentucky endured an excess of editorial hand-wringing recently over the demise of the state’s CATS school assessments. Those one-sided rants fuss about newly enacted plans for a three-year pause from CATS school accountability. Instead of even considering that there might be a bright side to temporarily halting high stakes accountability, these editors just whine that…
Kathy Gornik, the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions board chair, testified today before a Senate Republican Conference on the potential adverse impacts of the proposed “Card Check” legislation. You can find the full testimony from Kathy and the other speakers by going to this link and then clicking on the item “Senate Hearings on…
Check it out. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2H8xHFXC8U] You can find the lyrics here if you want to sing along.
– Great Success for Leland Conway and WLAP Radio! Congratulations to host Leland Conway and WLAP Radio for a super anti-tax tea party in Lexington on Saturday. Check it out here. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJUFdjk8hQI] And, don’t forget to join us for the BIPPS Tea Party on April 18th. Get details at www.bipps.org.
Over at the Prichard Committee’s Blog, Susan Weston recently pointed at a really interesting “Bang for the Buck” graph that depicts the efficiency of turning out college degrees in Kentucky’s postsecondary institutions. This graph comes from a Kentucky Chamber of Commerce report that discusses a number of ways that the state’s public college system could…
— But, CATS has confused people since 1999 Hand-wringing continues in the media about pending changes to the CATS school assessments. These changes will soon take place as a result of the recently passed Senate Bill 1. Sadly, in a ruffled feathers reaction to the bill, some of its critics are now going too far.…
Readers are probably surprised that I didn’t jump out right away this past weekend with some sort of gloating Blog item about the passage of Senate Bill 1 last Friday. This bill will significantly revise and improve Kentucky’s public school assessment program, something I have recommended doing for some time. Actually, I figured most of…
– Now we can cover the good news Now that the department of education’s fabricated-national-scores-that-don’t-exist are under control, we can finally cover some good news about PLAN and EXPLORE in an objective and realistic manner. These are the corrected scoring tables from the department. Notice the bogus and non-existent national average data for 2006 through…
It took two blog items here, and here, plus several phone calls, but the Kentucky Department of Education finally e-mailed corrected national scores for its new release of EXPLORE and PLAN readiness test data for Kentucky yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, the department didn’t own up in time to stop at least one news report from making…
The Kentucky Enquirer just released results of its survey on “Can you contact your school board?” This front page, top of the fold article makes it clear that far too many local school boards are not responsive to the public that elected them, often even omitting very basic things like member contact information in their…