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A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics on “Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2009” has just been released. We still need to worry about what our kids are not learning.

Figure 12a in the report, shown here, indicates that for children who come from wealthy households, shown by the light gray bars, the US Science score of 541 only exceeded children of wealthy parents in the Russian Federation and Italy.

For students whose parents come from the least wealthy families, in each country, shown by the blue bars, our kids only beat out Italy.

In addition, I looked at the poor-to-wealthy score gap for each country. Our gap of 96 points (541 minus 445) was only exceeded by France. That raises equity issues, as well.

Ohio’s open records laws apparently do not allow that state’s citizens to access work done by private contractors – even if that work is for public organizations.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Ohio’s governor Strickland is currently working this loophole to hide his plans for school funding from both the public and their elected officials.

We don’t know if a similar ploy could work today in Kentucky, but that doesn’t mean it could not be snuck into legislation in the future. Certainly, what is going on in Ohio isn’t what we want for government transparency.

The dust is settling from the final signing of Senate Bill 1 (SB-1), which marks the well-deserved end of Kentucky’s second unsuccessful attempt to incorporate Progressive Education Theories into a valid assessment program. The demise of the CATS assessments, which never changed enough from the original KIRIS assessment to be successful, reminds me of other ideas that back in the 1990s we were told the “research shows” work best for kids.

Here is a short list of some of those “research shows” ideas that real experience proved were off the mark.

1) Multi-age Classrooms

Technically, the multi-age classroom law is still on the books, but an intentional legal loophole added in 1998 means no-one bothers to observe it. An interesting back and forth on why multi-age didn’t work out is going on over at the Prichard Blog, with two folks who usually fuss about the Bluegrass Institute challenging each other, instead. It’s an interesting read.

2) Writing Portfolios

SB-1 also marks the demise of the dubious idea that writing portfolios, which are a great writing instructional tool, could be forced down every teacher’s throat by putting them into the state’s accountability system.

3) Math Portfolios

Anyone remember those? Writing about math instead of doing math was such a bad idea that these were gone within four years.

4) Performance Events

These died in part due to extraordinarily horrible management. One of the basic rules of large scale test creation is that you need to do trial runs with the test questions. But our testing contractor got cheap and stopped proofing the performance events. The performance events they foisted on Kentucky the next year were so incredibly hard that the middle school results were totally unusable. This KERA darling crashed around 1996.

5) Multiple Choice Questions

The folks who set up Kentucky’s testing program back in 1992 hated multiple choice questions. They thought these led to overly scripted teaching and that multiple-choice questions could not test students’ higher order thinking skills. Thus, while the old KIRIS initially had multiple-choice questions, they were not counted. In fact, if memory serves, the multiple-choice questions were totally dropped from the test for a time after 1994. That misguided decision didn’t last long, though. By the time CATS came along, multiple-choice was back, and this time they counted.

One point to this reminiscing is that education research doesn’t have a stellar record for accuracy. As we gin up the third attempt to create a good school assessment program in Kentucky, the people who will be doing that will need to keep a wary eye on the things they are told “research shows.” You see, in education, what passes for research often doesn’t show anything.

By the way, how’s your recollection of “research showed” education “stuff” that didn’t work in Kentucky’s reform? Comments welcome.

When the Kentucky legislature raised cigarette taxes last month, they did it promising to raise nearly $150 million in new tobacco taxes to go toward the old overspending.

Also part of the rationale for the tax hike was that it would incentivize people to quit smoking.

Today, though, we get the first public acknowledgement from Frankfort that it was all a smokescreen on the path to bigger government.

The Kentucky Department for Public Health is setting up a “free” quit smoking counseling service accessible to the public via 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

So, rather than change government’s overspending behavior with higher taxes we raised taxes with a promise to change taxpayer behavior while maintaining government’s behavior. Now we are spending more to do a “better job” of changing taxpayer behavior.

Any bets on how long it will take for demands of greater smoking cessation funding and “necessary” tax increases to pay for it? We are incentivizing ourselves in circles.

Sen. Damon Thayer changed his vote on tax increase bill HB 236 yesterday from yes to no. It’s a move that will add to Thayer’s already-solid reputation with the Kentucky Club for Growth, though way too few of his fellow Senators came along and Gov. Steve Beshear has already signed the tax increase.

Kentucky taxpayers could have used a few more vote changers.

Speaker of the House Greg Stumbo sent out a press release Thursday evening including the following:

“This has been a highly productive time for all of Kentucky, from resolving the current budget crisis to enacting a multi-billion dollar road plan and greatly improving school testing. We have done our work efficiently and transparently.”

It’s hard to get too excited about the way legislators dealt with “the current budget crisis.” It would be more accurate to say that they pushed off the current year’s overspending to future years.

And as far as the transparency goes, we should just consider ourselves fortunate that Stumbo’s and Senate President David Williams’ twin legislative power grab and secrecy bill efforts weren’t “highly productive.”