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Gov. Steve Beshear created The Transforming Education in Kentucky Task Force – a 33-member group of teachers, superintendents, legislators, business leaders, education advocates and others. Members were appointed in October 2009 but it was 3-1/2 months before the group’s first meeting – on Feb. 2, 2010!

Urgency is absent in the task force’s guidance – which doesn’t include achieving dramatic student achievement gains within a short time.

Unless something is drastically different, this task force will use up a lot of time, be accountable for nothing and watch from the sidelines as real action takes place elsewhere.

For example, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and New York are participating in a public-private partnership to create scalable and sustainable strategies for turning around clusters of their lowest-performing schools.

They are committing to reform failing schools by empowering people but also holding them accountable to achieve dramatic student achievement gains within two years.

The new “Zone schools remain inside the district, and are able to tap into the scale efficiencies of many central office services. However, Zone schools also give school level leaders the freedom to make staffing, scheduling, curriculum and related decisions, in return for being held accountable for dramatic student achievement gains within two years.”

The Zone approach puts kids first and facilitates flexibility for real reform. People are signing up to be accountable for dramatic improvements with a sense that time is of the essence. Wow.

Kentucky education leaders could still just be talking about the same old things two years from now. Maybe Kentucky really doesn’t have leadership with the courage to make a difference in failing schools because of Kentucky’ very effective lobbying pressure and entrenched operational constraints.

Without change there is no change. Kentucky kids continue to lose as adults play their big people, self-serving power games.

While educrats fight to maintain the failure of the status quo, parents strive to secure a better education for their children.

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Beacon column and here to see the disparity in spending between Knox County and Corbin Independent Schools.

SBDM councils: All the power, little accountability. Administrators: All the responsibility, insufficient authority.

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Bullets.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the use of cell phones, particularly texting, while driving. Is is safe? Can we stop it? Where is the line? How much say does the government have?

In the 2010 General Assembly that is currently in session, there are several bills related to using personal communication devices when operating a vehicle.  All of these bills restrict drivers’ actions.

BIPPS columnist Jim Waters said House Bill 43, which bans texting while driving, is unenforceable and low on the list of legislative priorities. Western’s public radio aired a two-part series on the issue, featuring interviews with lawmakers on both sides of the issue.

We want to know what you think!  Share your thoughts on this issue in the comment section below.

• Should Kentucky’s legislature being spending their time on this?
• Should we ban texting while driving?
• Should we ban talking on phones?
• Is the government overstepping it’s boundaries and infringing citizen’s rights OR
• Is the government looking out for it’s citizen

Answer: Kansas

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw]

Yesterday, Kentucky’s education leaders tried to get a leg up on the Race to the Top (RTTT) federal education funding sweepstakes by jumping the gun on adopting the Common Core Standards.

Those education standards are being created by a 48-state consortium under the sponsorship of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

While I am hopeful that the final Common Core Standards will be a good step forward, the draft standards adopted yesterday are not ready for prime time and adopting the current draft may be counterproductive.

Consider this:

Just a few days ago, the Boston Globe opined on the current draft standards’ problems.

Among other things, the Globe says the standards are not in a format that is really useful to classroom teachers. That’s a pretty serious problem. It was a constant problem with our old standards, as well. No education standards will work if teachers can’t use them.

The Globe’s comments come from a state that many believe currently has the country’s best education standards. As evidence of that, Massachusetts leads the nation in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress testing. Certainly, the Globe’s concerns cannot be idly dismissed.

Furthermore, we know the draft standards Kentucky’s educators just adopted are not yet good enough for the NGA and the CCSSO. The current draft generated so many comments following its release that representatives from both those organizations tell us another draft revision for comment is coming, probably in March. We likely won’t see the final Common Core Standards document until April, although that schedule is only tentative at this point.

We do know that the final document had been expected before now. Yesterday’s combined meeting of Kentucky’s education boards was scheduled based on that expectation. Unfortunately, the standards creation process didn’t cooperate. Anxious to look good in the Race to the Top competition, and given the challenges of gathering all the members of all the different boards at one time, Kentucky’s educators decided to press forward with the meeting as scheduled, anyway.

Thus, in what is mostly a symbolic act of faith, Kentucky jumped in, adopting a draft product that still has known issues and possibly may not look very much like the final version of the standards.

Meanwhile other states are taking a much more orderly approach to adopting these very critical standards.

Other states are still asking a lot of questions, as well.

In any event, to reiterate what I said above, I think the Common Core Standards could turn out to be a really good product. Certainly, some of the best education expertise in the country has been involved in the process, expertise Kentucky never could have afforded on its own.

But, making a big show out of adopting something that isn’t ready may backfire. Could RTTT judges consider adopting something that isn’t finalized as a reckless action, and treat our application accordingly?

And, requiring our educators to starting working now with draft standards that will go through at least one more public comment period before being finalized might take us down some dead end streets, as well. With money tight, that could be a problem, as well.

Of course, if some of the critics cited by the Boston Globe and in other sources turn out to be right, and the final Common Core Standards documents don’t turn out to be as good as I think they will, then there is the possibility that we could have made a mistake yesterday. That can happen when you sign a blank piece of paper which will have the contract language added at a later date.

In any event, in an attempt to make a publicity splash, our educators decided not to wait.

Here’s hoping that gamble pays off. The bottom line is that our kids’ futures are the chips in this high stakes game.