Education Week reports in “One Set of PARCC Test Results, Two Different Descriptions in Ohio” that Ohio’s state education department just decided to use its own scoring scale on the Common Core aligned PARCC tests. The impact will be enormous. EdWeek says that in Ohio: “…on the 4th grade English/language arts exam in PARCC, only…
A few days ago, the Herald-Leader caught up to us with their story about “State audit report says schools are rating themselves too high in program reviews.” At issue: the unavoidable fact that the Kentucky Department of Education’s new Unbridled Learning Program Reviews are suffering from massive score inflation – something that’s just about inevitable…
One of my favorite examples of how private-sector involvement can improve public education is the AdvanceKentucky program to improve participation and course quality in Kentucky’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Kentucky’s AP participation is up again this year with more students earning scores that can lead to college credit for their courses. And AdvanceKentucky gets a…
BIPPS staff education analyst Richard Innes will participate at the Louisville Forum’s September luncheon discussion about “Common Core: The Debate Continues.” Joining Innes will be Brigitte Blom Ramsey, the new executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. Innes has raised many concerns about Common Core while Ramsey was formerly a member of the…
In his farewell interview with the Kentucky School Boards Association, now-departed Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday touted the increase in college readiness in Kentucky as his shining achievement, saying: “To this day, we’ve gone from 34 percent being college ready to this year when we will exceed 67 percent.” That got me thinking about…
This past summer the Home School Legal Defense Association jumped into a nasty attempt by Gallatin County Public Schools to intrude into the homes of local home schools. During the summer, a letter from the Gallatin County Public School District went out to all of the county’s homeschooling parents. The letter threatened a number of…
Despite what some school folks would like to believe, the people in our school systems are no different from the rest of society. Most are great, but some are not. And, that does not apply only to charter school folks who in a few cases have corruptly cheated both students and taxpayers. There is too…
The news article is pretty self-explanatory. It says: “What began as an effort to increase transparency and allow parents and school leaders to assess performance nationwide has largely unraveled, chiefly because states are dropping out of the two testing groups and creating their own exams.” ABC News also says: “Even when all the results are…
Interesting testimonies as New Orleans schools celebrate 10 years of post-Katrina recovery. Charter schools played a big role, as you will hear from these students and young adults who were caught in the chaos of Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago.
The Economist has published an interesting article, “Try Again,” about the generally unreliable quality of many research papers in the psychology area. The problem is that many such papers get only a “peer review.” No one actually tries to replicate the research to see if the results can be reproduced, which is the way real…