In another example of how Kentucky’s complex and time-consuming to grade Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) assessments lead to long turn-around times for results, the Courier-Journal just announced that parents in Jefferson County are just now getting the results for their children from the last school term’s assessment cycle. How is a parent…
While Kentucky’s educators crawl along with hand-slap reforms that do little to fundamentally shake up our existing, school-choice and true-reform-hostile public schools, down river in Memphis, Tennessee, a true revolution is under way – a revolution that won Tennessee an enormous first round grant from the Race to the Top competition (Kentucky’s relative lack of…
I already mentioned the excellent presentation by Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts to the Interim Joint Education Committee on Monday. Now, KET has posted a video of Adam Edelen’s outstanding October 14, 2013 presentation. Click here to watch that. Edelen’s comments begin at 9 minutes and 56 seconds into the webcast.
I suspect that the New York Times knows more about its city’s charter schools than a statistics guy from Jefferson County Public Schools, so a new article from that newspaper about the Big Apples’ charter schools caught my eye today. While admitting that charters in New York can still be improved, the Times says: “There’s…
Education Week reports in “Is There Empirical Evidence That Charter Schools ‘Push Out’ Low-Performing Students?” that a new study says: “There is no statistical evidence that charter schools are ‘pushing out’ low-performing students at a rate higher than for regular public schools.” The new report was written by Ron W. Zimmer, an associate professor of…
Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts Adam Edelen made an outstanding presentation to the Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education yesterday, and WYMT TV picked up on the story here. The auditor overviewed the disturbing results of 14 education-related audits that his office has recently performed in various local Kentucky school districts. One of the…
One of the biggest problems in analyzing the performance of charter school students versus traditional public school students is finding an appropriate comparison sample of traditional public school students for the study. To date, one of the best research approaches to deal with that problem takes advantage of the fact that many charter schools are…
We’ve written many times in the past about deceptive reporting in Jefferson County’s “Every1Reads” program such as here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and even here, way back in 2008. The issue: the Jefferson County school system – in an attempt to grossly inflate its true performance on teaching students to read…
One of the more important tests taken by Kentucky’s public school students is the ACT’s PLAN test, which is given to all the state’s 10th grade students. Like the K-PREP test results for math and reading I discussed earlier, the new PLAN results also show African-American students generally falling farther behind whites than they did…
Education Week just posted an article titled “Common-Core Rollout Ripe for Studying, Experts Say.” This article makes it quite clear that much of the “stuff” coming with the new Common Core State Standards (and the Next Generation Science Standards) is untested, and research about what will work is badly needed. Concerning Common Core, Pascal D.…