NC choices especially help African-American males Unlike Kentucky, North Carolina already has some great school choice options for low-income students including a charter school system. Thanks to those options, that state now has evidence that especially for African-American males, schools of choice are proving far more successful at overcoming significant achievement gaps faced by these…
Sounding more like a BIPPS scholar than a member of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Prichard analyst Susan Perkins Westin just had a rather interesting Op-Ed published in the Lexington Herald-Leader. She points out that a bill passed in 2002 to address the achievement gaps situation in Kentucky’s public schools has been largely ignored…
WKMS public broadcast radio from Murray State University says that Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin is calling for charter school legislation for the Bluegrass State in 2017. And, it looks like Kentucky could get financial help to establish charters from the federal government. Even the Prichard Committee admits that Kentucky’s chronic achievement gaps continue after more…
I’ve recently been writing about a highly problematic report from Johns Hopkins University titled “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students.” The Hopkins report has many problems, but the biggest issue is fundamental. The report assumes that diplomas awarded in different states require the same level of…
As Kentucky’s education leaders debate education reforms again, a thought-provoking article in the Denver Post is worth consideration. In “If educators don’t buy in, education reform fails” author Dick Hilker points to an obvious history of remarkable resistance within the nation’s education system to making substantial changes. Although there have been massive efforts at education…
It took a lot of questioning and independent research, but the authors of a recent report from Johns Hopkins University called “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students” finally admitted – only after we collected some rather compelling evidence – that they altered high school graduation rate…
We have written several times in the last month (here, here, here and here) about a recent report from Johns Hopkins University titled “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students.” It appears Hopkins is starting to listen – a little. After Hopkins and GradNation ran a webinar…
One of the most confusing things for the Kentucky public to understand about results from the ACT college entrance test is what do the scores really mean. So, in this blog we will first look at how the scores are reported and then take a look at how Kentucky’s public school students are doing with…
Do Common Core State Standards Play a Role? News articles about 2016 ACT performance in individual school districts are starting to appear, and a comment from the Henderson Gleaner’s coverage of the Henderson County Public School District’s scores caught my eye. Per the Gleaner: “While Algebra II is a graduation requirement, most Henderson students don’t…
We took a look last Wednesday at Kentucky’s ACT college entrance test achievement gaps computed across all the state’s students from public, private and home schools combined. The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) also released some data about the Kentucky public school graduates’ 2016 ACT performance, and that data allows a limited (Composite Score Only)…