In his weekly e-mail to district and school personnel Kentucky Commissioner of Education Stephen Pruitt made it clear that while the state’s social studies standards won’t change for the 2016-17 school year, he and his staff are still working on what he refers to as “Social Studies Standards for the Next Generation.” He also says…
Yesterday, we took a look at how the latest high school graduation rates in Kentucky’s school districts match up, or don’t match up, to proficiency rates on the state’s Algebra II End-of-Course Exam. We learned that there are notable discrepancies for most school districts when common sense would indicate there should be fairly close agreement…
We posted a press release yesterday about disturbing evidence the Bluegrass Institute has collected that the quality control for Kentucky’s high school diploma is very inconsistent across the state’s school districts. Today, we dig deeper into a portion of the data in one of the Excel spreadsheets included with that press release. We are going…
(LEXINGTON, Ky.) – Even as some cheer about a recent Johns Hopkins University report that claims Kentucky leads the nation for low-income students’ high school graduation rates, new research from the Bluegrass Institute raises very serious questions about the quality control behind those impressive looking numbers. In fact, it looks like thousands of the Bluegrass…
I missed this a couple of weeks ago when Education Week reported that “Publishers Get Poor Marks on Common-Core Math Texts.” The story covered a new analysis of high school math textbooks from EdReports.org. An earlier report from EdReports.org covered textbook alignment to Common Core for lower grades. Of particular note to Kentucky, Pearson Publishers…
Erroneous data in report misrepresents performance in several Kentucky school districts I have already written here and here about credibility problems with the recently released “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students” from Johns Hopkins University and Civic Enterprises. This week the report’s credibility slipped even more.…
I have written a number of times about evidence that Kentucky’s Common Core aligned KPREP tests are showing signs of inflation over time. That includes this four-part series which compares the KPREP to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for Kentucky: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 I also summarized findings from…
A new report from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Civic Enterprises is generating considerable media attention due in no small measure to a favorable Op-Ed from former Kentucky First Lady Jane Beshear and a press release from the Kentucky Department of Education. Unfortunately, the attention might be rather misdirected due to a number of problems…
A couple of days ago, Civic Enterprises and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University released a rather problematic report about “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students.” This Hopkins report says that Kentucky leads the nation in high school graduation rates for poor students and…
I’ve been writing about how Kentucky’s white students performed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress Math Assessments. Today, we’ll look at how the state’s white eighth graders fared in reading. While the state looks its best on fourth grade reading, we will see a lot of that reading advantage is lost by the time…