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For too long, Kentucky parents have had to settle for the status quo in their children’s public education. It’s time to put parents back in charge of their kids’ futures.

Thirty nine other states allow for charter schools – independent public schools that are run locally, with input from parents and members of the community.

It’s time to ask our Kentucky lawmakers – “Where are our independent public schools?” We have a unique opportunity right now to give back Kentucky’s public education system to the people of Kentucky.

Click here to tell your legislator – now is the chance to get this right.
Let’s not settle for anything less than the best for Kentucky students.

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday’s office has just released the following:

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday issued this statement today, after the U.S. Department of Education’s announcement of the federal Race to the Top funding winners:

“Although I’m disappointed that Kentucky’s application was not selected for funding in the first round of the Race to the Top allocations, our work to improve the state’s P-12 system of education will continue. We’ll begin reviewing the scores and comments on our application and planning for the second round immediately. This does not mean that the work outlined in Kentucky’s plan will not be done – it just means that we’ll have to work harder to ensure that every funding source is tapped. Kentucky’s Race to the Top plan is more than just an application for federal funding. It is the roadmap for the state’s next move forward in public education, and we will not abandon that.”

Both of the winning states, Delaware and Tennessee, have charter school laws.

In addition, Tennessee has a tremendously successful school assessment program known as the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System.

While Kentucky created and crashed two testing programs known as KIRIS and CATS, since 1992 Tennessee’s assessment has continually provided that state with rich trend lines of data on how schools really perform. Tennessee has data right now that will clearly show longitudinal changes as it spends its RTTT winnings. Kentucky simply can’t do that because we wasted many valuable years on a series of misleading assessment programs that ultimately crashed.

While some thought it was a ‘plus,’ another factor may actually have worked against Kentucky. The state made a lot of noise about how there was very wide “buy-in” to our RTTT proposal by all sorts of groups from teachers unions to local school boards. The problem is that making real changes that work isn’t likely to come from a wide consensus. Real change will require doing things that some groups – like Kentucky’s always objecting teachers union – just don’t like. Maybe the people judging RTTT realized that, as well.

And, maybe not having charter schools will knock us out of the RTTT Phase II awards as well if our legislature doesn’t get smart about what real change in education looks like.

The Bluegrass Institute’s Jim Waters will be on ”KY GrassRoots Radio”, an online blog-talk radio station, tonight at 6:30 p.m. (eastern) to talk about “Obamacare” and Thursday’s rally in Frankfort. Listen here. The show is hosted by Matt Singleton, Clint Hardy and David Caldwell.

In an effort to make our sites more user friendly we have added Google search functions for FreedomKentucky.org and BIPPS.org.  In the case of FreedomKentucky, the Google search function has simply been added to the page.  Over at BIPPS.org, the Google search engine has replaced the local search function.

This should provide much more accuracy and ease in searching for the information that you want to find!

Good luck!

NAEP shows Kentucky’s eighth graders aren’t making ANY!

Quite frankly, I was shocked.

With all the hype this week about Kentucky being the only state to show reading progress in both fourth and eighth grade in the new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Assessment results, I thought I could show you a graph that would project when we could expect to reach a 90 percent rate of reading proficiency for our eighth grade students.

Well, forget that.

You don’t have enough paper, or computer screen area, to print that out. What I found is that our rate of progress in teaching reading at the eighth grade level is so slow that at our current rate:

That’s right, several thousand years from now (Note: this is corrected from an earlier estimate)!

How can this be? Read on.

Look at this graph. It plots the percentage of Kentucky’s eighth grade students that scored at or above the NAEP “Proficient” level by year since the NAEP started reporting that information in 1998. The data comes straight from Table A-19 in the new 2009 NAEP Reading Report Card.

I used a standard statistical process called linear regression analysis to determine the formula for the best fit straight line that matches this data. The slope of that line rounded to three significant digits is only 0.0263. This is almost a perfectly flat line (This updated number adjusts a number in an earlier post to reflect use with a percentage point scale instead of a straight decimal proportion scale).

So, the NAEP data implies Kentucky averaged only a tiny, 0.0263 percentage point improvement in its proficiency rate each year between 1998 and 2009. It will take several thousand years at this miniscule rate of progress for us to get anywhere close to the kind of reading performance our eighth grade students need.

It gets worse.

Table A-19 in the NAEP report card also identifies proficiency rates for earlier years that are significantly different from the new, 2009 proficiency rate of 33 percent.

For Kentucky, only the 2007 rate is listed as statistically significantly different from the 2009 rate.

Most specifically:

You haven’t been reading about that elsewhere, either. But, the truth is right there in the NAEP report, buried where even the US Secretary of Education apparently missed it.

So, here’s the bottom line for Kentucky:

All that progress we supposedly made in NAEP reading – it didn’t happen in eighth grade. Since 1998 we have made NO statistically significant improvement in our NAEP eighth grade reading performance.

By the way, this further supports my earlier post about the eighth grade scores where I looked at the results from Kentucky’s performance on the EXPLORE test for reading.

EXPLORE also showed flat performance even when the NAEP showed a five point jump up from 2007 to 2009.

Here’s another thought. Could it be that the statistical sampling errors in the NAEP are actually much larger than officially reported? That is a national issue I will be asking about.