– May not mean what you think! – Do we want schools to test political opinions? House Bill 508, the Kentucky House’s alternative to Senate Bill 1 to change our CATS assessments, requires the Kentucky Department of Education to consider international benchmarks when it revises the state’s public school education standards and tests. That sounds…
Back last August when the overall average ACT scores for all 2008 high school graduates came out, I cautioned that the overall scores might be impacted by the performance of students who didn’t attend public schools. I was right. Finally, through the good offices of State Senator Jack Westwood (Thank You to this supporter of…
– What we mean in just three sentences 1) Can you find the information? 2) If you find it, can you read it and understand it? Finally, 3) Does it tell you what you need to know? Hon. Maurice McTigue Former New Zealand Member of Parliament and Cabinet MemberVice President, Mercatus Center at George Mason…
I don’t think anyone disputes the value of writing. The issue is whether our teachers will continue to teach writing, or even teach it better, if we pull Writing Portfolios out of CATS. So far, I would argue that the combined evidence from extensive teacher complaints about awkward CATS Writing Portfolio scoring rules (69 percent…
Blame this one on the weather – at least in part – but a bill just out of the Kentucky House to allow schools to delete up to 10 days from this school term is now headed towards the Kentucky Senate. It looks like a proposal to delay the CATS testing commensurately may be added…
Too Many Still Ignoring Them “One of the first steps for anyone wanting to reduce the dropout rate in a community may be to convince others that a dropout problem exists.” From: Reducing Dropout Rates – “Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis” Education Week Subscription Required). It’s nice to see…
The “Keep CATS at All Costs” crowd is clearly getting desperate. Their latest shot, fired from the pen of Jack D. Foster, former secretary of education and humanities and a major architect of KERA, is a prime example. While our economy shatters and we need government to reign in costs before we all go bankrupt,…
What Happens When Your K to 12 Schools Don’t “Carry the Mail” It looks like a national trend has come to Kentucky. The Herald-Leader reports that Lexington’s public school system has been hiring Filipinos as teachers to fill key shortage areas in math, science and technology and even special education. It seems the district is…
Never has so much nonsense been assembled by so few to attempt to bamboozle so many Today’s Courier-Journal opinion piece establishes a new low for factual ignorance. To wit: (1) The Courier charges that former Education Commissioner Jon Draud started the current process to revise (flatten in the Courier’s words) CATS. Nonsense! CATS was under…
Even as discussions about revising Kentucky’s CATS school assessments continue here, a national movement seems to be gathering more steam to push for one, US-wide set of education standards and tests. The movement to standardize the current 50-state hodgepodge of public education standards has been around for some time, but even the Fordham Institute, a…