Hundreds of groups nationwide will celebrate the benefits of educational freedom this week (Jan. 23-29) as part of National School Choice Week.
Unfortunately, there’s not much to celebrate in Kentucky, one of only a handful of states without public charter schools.
Click here to read the rest of the News Release.
Jim Waters, the Bluegrass Institute’s vice president of policy and communications, will appear on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight” at 8 p.m. (EST) tonight (Jan. 24)to debate a proposal to enact a government-mandated statewide smoking ban.
The program is hosted by Bill Goodman live on KET and www.ket.org/live, and will be replayed Wednesday at 2 a.m. (EST).
Waters will be joined in his call to protect individual liberty and the property rights of business owners by Rep. Jim DeCesare, R-Bowling Green, who is leading an effort in the Kentucky House of Representatives to make government more transparent and accountable to citizens.
During the live Monday broadcast, viewers with questions and comments may participate by calling 1-800-494-7605 or by e-mail at kytonight@ket.org or use the message form at www.ket.org/kytonight.
Other panelists include Rep. Susan Westrom, D-Lexington, the primary sponsor of the smoking-ban legislation–House Bill 193, and Amy Barkley, advocacy director with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
There has been a lot of discussion about whether charter schools do, or do not, work better than public schools.
Part of the confusion has been a result of the difficulty in finding a fair comparison group of students in the traditional public school system to compare to students in the charter schools.
All sorts of methods have been concocted to generate suitable public school comparison groups to lay beside charter school data. So far, the best method we have seen takes advantage of the fact that in some areas charter schools are so desired that they have to conduct random lotteries to select students. Those students who don’t win the lottery wind up in the traditional system, and they are indeed a randomly selected sample that can be compared to the students who do get accepted to the charter school.
One of these ‘lottery studies’ was released by The Boston Foundation in 2009 and is titled: “Informing the Debate, Comparing Boston’s Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools.”
The findings from The Boston Foundation’s team of Duke, Harvard and MIT researchers are unequivocal. Both charter middle school and high school students performed notably better than their traditional public school lottery losing counterparts performed. For middle school math, in particular (a weak area in Kentucky), the report says:
“The estimated impact on math achievement for Charter middle schools is extraordinarily large. Increasing performance by .5 standard deviations is the same as moving from the 50th to the 69th percentile in student performance. This is roughly half the size of the black-white achievement gap.”
This graph, taken from the report, shows the dramatic increased performance of charter middle school students in Boston over time. Note that initially, there isn’t much difference between charter school students and traditional public school students who lost the lottery. But, as charter school students spend more time in those charters, their relative performance in both math and English Language Arts (ELA) starts to really stand out, rising well above the performance of the lottery losers who were trapped in traditional public schools in Bean Town.
This brings up another important point about charter school research. If that research largely looks at students who have only spent limited time in a charter school, it isn’t going to very fairly show how charter schools really perform.
It simply takes time for charter schools to work. It is unfair to expect them to create miracles in only one or even two years.
This issue of time in charters helps explain why some reports don’t show much of a charter school impact. Such findings often are due to the report taking an inadequately long look at what is happening. More on that tomorrow.
Jim Waters, the Bluegrass Institute’s vice president of policy and communications, will appear on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight” on Monday, Jan. 24, at 8 p.m. (EST) to debate a proposal to enact a government-mandated statewide smoking ban.
The program is hosted by Bill Goodman live on KET and www.ket.org/live, and will be replayed Wednesday at 2 a.m. (EST).
Waters will be joined in his call to protect individual liberty and the property rights of business owners by Rep. Jim DeCesare, R-Bowling Green, who is leading an effort in the Kentucky House of Representatives to make government more transparent and accountable to citizens.
During the live Monday broadcast, viewers with questions and comments may participate by calling 1-800-494-7605 or by e-mail at kytonight@ket.org or use the message form at www.ket.org/kytonight.
Other panelists include Rep. Susan Westrom, D-Lexington, the primary sponsor of the smoking-ban legislation–House Bill 193, and Amy Barkley, advocacy director with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Except, Kentucky isn’t a player
This week parents, students and schools around the country are celebrating National School Choice Week.
Except in Kentucky
Our state really doesn’t have school choice: no charter schools, no voucher programs, no special scholarships for learning disabled students to go where they can get the best support. Basically Kentucky offers nothing except for a few, ever decreasing options to send children across school district lines or to ask (with no guarantees) that a child be accepted in a magnet school (generally, only an option in our very biggest school districts).
That’s really sad. Kentucky trusts parents to find the right doctor for their children; but, our state’s leaders have convinced themselves that faceless bureaucrats – who often don’t even know the child – are somehow better equipped to mandate where a student will attend school.
There are consequences for such closed-mindedness.
About 85 percent of Kentucky’s school population is white, so it is very relevant to see what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows about how our white students compare to whites elsewhere.
In math, the answer is: not very well.
This map shows states in green where white fourth grade scores were statistically significantly higher than Kentucky’s in the latest NAEP math testing. There are a lot of states in green, including many in the South. Only two states, West Virginia and Alabama, got statistically significantly lower scores than Kentucky’s whites.
Things look even worse when we examine the eighth grade math results for whites. Now, only one state got scores that were statistically significantly lower than Kentucky’s.
Could more school choice options help improve this picture?
We hear a lot from Kentucky educators that parents are not engaged in their children’s schools. I think there is something to that, but there are reasons for parent disengagement that our educators either don’t understand, or don’t want to admit.
There is evidence that a lot of Kentucky parents feel disconnected from their schools. But, consider this from the parents’ viewpoint.
Other than by moving a residence into a desired school zone, an expensive proposition for some, parents everywhere in this state have virtually no ability to change where their child goes to school.
In Louisville, parents don’t even get the choice-by-real-estate-selection option. This option has been overruled as faceless bureaucrats dictate to parents where their kids will attend school, even if that school winds up being over 25 miles away. It’s a ‘no-brainer.’ Louisville parents living so far from their children’s school have limited opportunities, in many cases, to do anything meaningful in their child’s school.
Aside from limited or no ability to choose a school, parents across Kentucky have no real say about what happens in their child’s school.
Schools in Kentucky are ruled by School Based Decision Making Councils or SBDM. Those councils are firmly controlled by teachers and the school principal. Although two parents do serve on each council, they always have only a minority vote and cannot prevail in any decision.
The usually very low parent turnout for SBDM parent member elections provides stark testimony that parents are not fired up about this mirage of parent control in schools.
For example, consider the latest data for the highly selective Dupont Manual magnet high school in Louisville. The school’s 2008-2009 Report Card (get from menus here) shows that a grand total of 28 parents voted for the parent SBDM members in that school term. The school enrolled 1,870 students that year (Data from the ‘Growth Factor Ethnicity Report for School Year ending 09’ from Kentucky Department of Education, not available on line). Only 28 of the parents showed up to vote for SBDM representatives. Even if each student only has one parent, that would be a voting percentage of just 1.5 percent.
Basically, with the SBDM scheme, schools are run at the convenience of the staff, not parents or students. Even the locally elected school board cannot override the SBDM on most important matters. It’s not the kind of situation to encourage parent involvement, and the results are almost inevitable.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Right now, the Kentucky Senate has already passed Senate Bill 3, which will allow charter schools to form in Kentucky and will also permit parents to choose to send their child to the closest neighborhood school (a right currently denied by those faceless bureaucrats in Louisville). These charter schools would not have to follow some of the parent-restricting rules such as bureaucrats selecting schools and mandatory, teacher-dominated SBDM governance.
By creating parent choices, parents will have to get more involved in their student’s schooling. That can’t help but improve the sorts of statistics shown on the maps above.
The Hazard-Herald reports on new details in the cheating scandals at the Perry County Central High School and the Buckhorn High School in Perry County.
According to a letter from ACT to Perry County school officials, ACT found evidence that answers on the multiple choice test were erased and then changed by persons other than the students. The answer sheets also apparently had evidence of multiple persons’ writing on them. Finally, ACT talked to students, as well.
ACT found problems on both the ACT college entrance test and on the ACT PLAN test, which is given to all 10th grade students in Kentucky.
The Perry County Superintendent, John Paul Amis, is still denying anything is wrong. The Hazard-Herald outlines his comments in some detail. Somehow, those comments don’t seem very convincing.
The facts are that once the Perry County students were retested, significant numbers of them had notable drops in their scores.
ACT says they don’t engage in punitive action (other than cancelling test scores) when testing abnormalities are discovered. However, that doesn’t mean Perry County educators are off the hook. Apparently, the Kentucky Department of Education forwarded the ACT findings to the Kentucky Attorney General, the Office of the Inspector General and the Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board. The latter office could take actions against the professional certificates of teachers and principals if misconduct is found.
