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Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free market think tank, will speak at the Southern Kentucky Tea Party rally at the National Corvette Museum convention hall in Bowling Green this Sunday at 5 p.m.

Calling all patriots in south central Kentucky: Come out and show your support for lower taxes, limited government, state sovereignty and individual liberty.

Other speakers at the event will be U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Rand Paul and Nashville radio talk show host Steve Gill, author of “The Fred Factor.”

Improvement is unlikely if only the high schools get involved

It looks like educators in the Bullitt County Public School District are catching on – strong performance on the ACT college entrance test is important for all students in the district, and real performance improvement will take involvement of all schools: elementary, middle and high schools.

Bullitt County educators are not happy about their current ACT performance, nor should they be. As the Pioneer News reports, their district ranks in 111th place for their 11th grade students’ performance on recently released ACT testing from the 2009-10 school term. That is not an impressive rank among the 169 Kentucky school districts that have high schools (Note: the news report got the number of districts wrong). Furthermore, Kentucky Department of Education data show only 16.2 percent of the district’s students scored high enough on the ACT math test to be considered likely to do well in a freshman college algebra course.

But, Bullitt County’s reaction to the sobering news is rather remarkable, and hopeful.

The district brought in Dr. Debbie Powers, Executive director of the University of Louisville’s Kentucky Principals Academy, to lead a meeting of all the district’s elementary, middle and high school principals, vice principals, counselors, instructional coaches and data managers.

Let me reemphasize that: Bullitt County is getting ALL of its key school leaders involved, not just the high school teams.

Both Powers and Bullitt County clearly understand that the district needs to address ACT performance with a coordinated program that involves every school, not just the high schools.

Better ACT performance doesn’t magically appear in the high schools. It is a long-term proposition where the efforts from elementary school to high school must be carefully coordinated if really dramatic improvement is to occur.

Hats off to Bullitt County for taking these important first steps!

WAVE-3 TV reports a federal judge has ruled Kentucky’s special interest election law that limited individuals’ contributions to candidates for local school board races is unconstitutional. The law restricted contributions from individuals to $100 while the union could give hundreds of thousands to its chosen candidates. That unbalanced rule gave the state’s teachers’ union a hugely unfair advantage in controlling those political school board races.

U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves noted that in 2008 the Jefferson County Teachers Association spent nearly $150,000 to support one candidate for the Jefferson County School Board. He also said the union spent “well over $100,000” in support of other individual candidates in other races. “In contrast”, Reeves wrote, “candidates who rely on individual donations must raise support in $100 increments.”

Basically, under Kentucky’s crazy rules, a candidate who wanted to oppose the teachers’ union’s candidate had to find at least 1,000 donors who each would give the maximum of $100 in order to compete. This unfair situation led to a union lock on the Jefferson County School Board and school boards in a number of other parts of Kentucky while the rights of students and parents got trampled.

The judge’s ruling is only temporary, applying to this year’s elections, but let’s hope the injunction becomes permanent since our teachers’ union-dominated legislature so far has been unwilling to end this travesty.

Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free market think tank, will speak at the Southern Kentucky Tea Party rally at the National Corvette Museum convention hall in Bowling Green this Sunday at 5 p.m.

Calling all patriots in south central Kentucky: Come out and show your support for lower taxes, limited government, state sovereignty and individual liberty.

Other speakers at the event will be U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Rand Paul and Nashville radio talk show host Steve Gill, author of “The Fred Factor.”

Leftist elites in the media, academia and government try to make the TEA party about the messengers. However, it’s really the movement’s message of lower taxes, less government and more liberty that critics loathe.

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Beacon.

Education Week reports (subscription?) that the number of special education students in the United States has been declining recently.

Several explanations are offered.

Ed Week says:

“About 80 percent of children who are classified as learning-disabled get the label because they’re struggling to read. So, scholars say, the dropping numbers could be linked to improvements in reading instruction overall; the adoption of “response to intervention,” which is an instructional model intended to halt the emergence of reading problems; and a federally backed push toward early intervention with younger students.”

Amplifying this point of view, Alexa E. Posny, the assistant secretary overseeing the US Department of Education’s office of special education and rehabilitative services says, “I believe we over identify children as learning-disabled. A number of students have just not been taught how to read.”

Ms. Posny talked about her experience in Kansas. She says that after the state adopted a “multi-tiered system of supports,” which is Kansas’ version of ‘Response to Intervention (RTI),’ enrollment in the learning-disability category dropped from 56,328 in 2005 to 55,834 in 2008.

RTI is a learning program for students who are encountering early learning problems. It is just starting to take hold in Kentucky. Under RTI, educators look first at their teaching methods rather than almost automatically blaming the child for having learning disabilities.

Of course, some nay-sayers have chimed in to blame No Child Left Behind, saying schools are just trying to avoid identifying too many kids as learning disabled so they won’t be held accountable for them separately under the federal accountability system. Maybe, but schools lose money when they don’t identify kids who need extra help. I’ll bet this is only a factor in a few schools that are right on the edge with their learning disabled student count.

For most schools, I think Ms. Posney’s comments are more on target. For years we over-identified kids as disabled when the real problem was bad teaching approaches like Whole Language Reading that didn’t work. Now, with better reading programs slowly coming into more widespread use, the learning disabled landscape is coming into sharper focus. The data are starting to show that there never really were all those learning disabled kids, just bad teaching programs.