This may sound like a funny question, but after attending today’s meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education, I’m really not so sure. You see, the board discussed a number of different topics, but in a number of cases it turned out the board’s hands were being tied by strings from Washington curtesy of the…
(CREDO) “studies are an amusing Rorsarch test for charter critics. The ones about places where charters are underperforming are widely cited and CREDO is presented as an august institution to be heeded in a Solomon-like fashion. When one comes out showing a city or state where charters are dramatically outpacing other schools it’s crickets or…
“States have had measures of teacher education programs’ outcomes for years. But they haven’t acted on them. They have administered licensure exams for decades, for example. But they have set passing rates way too low and have rarely taken any action against schools whose graduates have the lowest scores.” Susan H. Fuhrman, president of Teachers…
“Yet the most astounding statement I have read is the claim that Common Core standards are ‘internationally benchmarked.’ They are not. The Common Core fails any comparison with the standards of high-achieving countries, just as they fail compared to the old California standards. They are lower in the total scope of learned material, in the…
Former BIPPS staff member Caleb Brown, now at the CATO Institute, passed along his recent video on how scholarship tax credits are working in New Hampshire. Under this program, also known as tuition tax credits, business and industry can contribute to a non-profit scholarship granting organization. That organization then provides scholarships to parents who want…
A new national poll from the American Federation for Children shows a solid majority of likely voters in the United States favor school choice. Some key findings: – 69 percent support school choice, including 45 percent who strongly support it while 27 percent oppose it – 63 percent support private school choice, specifically “opportunity scholarships,…
In a stunning development, the central committee of the Washington State Democratic Party just adopted a resolution against Common Core State Standards. Suddently, Common Core is rubbing more than just Republican Party groups the wrong way.
Could a charter school system have worked better? Louisville’s Robert Frost Middle School and Myers Middle School have been a major problem for years. Frost was tagged as a Persistently Low-Achieving School (PLAs) in the very first “Cohort” named in the spring of 2010. Myers followed into Persistently Low-Achieving status about a year and a…
Is that really right? Could a true rate only be around 47 percent??? New data from the US Department of Education indicates that Kentucky’s 2012-13 high school graduation rate of 86 percent was only exceeded by nine other states. This rate is also notably higher than the US average of 81 percent. Those new numbers…
Herald-Leader columnist Merlene Davis posted interesting comments about charter schools in an interview she recently conducted with Jessica Hiler, president of the Fayette County Education Association. The union leader trotted out most of the union’s anti-charter arguments, but Ms. Davis clearly wasn’t buying. When Hiler said that charter schools don’t produce higher achievement than traditional…