Last year the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University published a report on the way charter schools perform for inner city students in some of the nation’s major urban areas. In its “Urban Charter School Study, March 2015” report, CREDO provides two graphs that show the relative performance of those urban…
I’ve been writing about obvious quality control problems with the award of high school diplomas in Kentucky for several years. Now, I am updating that work with results from the 2016 Unbridled Learning reports, and the situation remains very serious. I opened this blog series yesterday with comments about how Kentucky’s official high school graduation…
I’ve been writing about obvious quality control problems with the award of high school diplomas in Kentucky for several years. Now, I am updating that work with results from the 2016 Unbridled Learning reports, and the situation remains very serious. Quite simply, there continues to be extensive evidence that Kentucky schools are handing out a…
“Kentucky’s Achievement Gaps: Our Collective Failure” In one of the most remarkable addresses ever from a Kentucky Secretary of Education to the Kentucky Board of Education, Secretary Hal Heiner made it crystal clear that after a quarter of a century of education reform: • “Kentucky’s gaps between the academic performance of Black and White students…
One of the major credibility issues with Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning school accountability system has been the obvious inflation in the Program Reviews. Program Reviews are self-scored by the staff in each school, which naturally sets up a chance for human nature to inflate scores. So far, that has been exactly what seems to be happening,…
One of the myths we hear from opponents of charter schools is that these schools of choice disproportionately take money away from traditional public schools. Up in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe says a new report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation shows that just isn’t so. The report summarizes: “Examination of school funding trends in districts…
I always get a perturbed when school folk seem to be misleading me. I think others do, too. A case in point is a back and forth going on in Elizabethtown. On September 25, 2016 the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown wrote an editorial about “School Boards see silence as golden.” The editors at the News-Enterprise were…
I recently blogged about the overall trend in high school graduation rates found in Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning school accountability results for 2016. Now, we separately examine graduation rates for Kentucky’s whites and blacks. We also examine the white minus black graduation rate gaps and the changes in those gaps over time. As we did in…
One of the bright spots in the official release of the 2015-16 Unbridled Learning report is the high school graduation rate situation. The official rate for on time graduations all students rose again from 87.9 percent last year to 88.6 percent in 2016. This rate, officially called the Four-Year Adjusted Cohort High School Graduation Rate…
Part of the massive Unbridled Learning data package includes academic test score results across the state for both white and African-American students (hereafter black students for brevity). That allows us to look at the changes in the white minus black achievement gaps since last year, material that didn’t get much coverage elsewhere. Sadly, that picture…