Report: The College Board, which operates the SAT college admissions test, says it is delaying implementation of new tests until 2016. The new head of the College board says people in the field asked for more time, but the article says: “Jed Applerouth, founder of a national test-prep service, said he was scratching his head…
New results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) came out this morning, and once again US students were left behind by overseas competition. I’m still going through the report, which covers testing administered in 2012, but some scholars had a chance to review an advance copy, and their comments are already circulating by…
Join me today at 11 a.m. on the “Brooks & Company” radio show on Bardstown’s 1320 WBRT-AM. Listen live here. We’ll discuss the Bluegrass Institute’s upcoming “Free to Learn” debate series and why Kentucky needs school choice. The show, which airs each Tuesday from 11 a.m. to Noon, is hosted by Jim Brooks, editor of…
A new report from the respected Brookings Institution focuses on economic well-being related to manufacturing growth potential in the Bluegrass region, specifically the “Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement,” or BEAM region. This region includes counties in Indiana near Louisville along with Jefferson County and its surrounding counties and other counties running east to Lexington. In “Seizing…
Heritage Foundation’s blog is reporting the Massachusetts Board of Education “decided to delay implementation (of the Common Core State Standards) for two years while it compares the Common Core aligned Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests to their existing—and widely praised—Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam.” Massachusetts’ former standards and…
In the early days, school-choice opponents frequently got away with baseless allegations that usually carried some variation of the following theme: public charter schools and private school voucher and tax-credit programs are radical ideas that harm traditional public schools and fail to offer their students a better education. Then the school-choice idea, which once was…
And, the “system” never caught it! Several years ago, the Bluegrass Institute started warning the citizens of Kentucky that oversight of the public school district superintendents in Kentucky was highly problematic. Local boards of education in too many cases were handing out annual superintendent evaluations that just didn’t jibe with the performance in their school…
MUCH longer for racial minorities One of the more valuable features in Kentucky’s new Unbridled Learning public school accountability program is the fact that the state is now tracking how well our public high school graduates are being prepared for college and careers. Attention to college and career readiness was all but totally absent from…
For Immediate Release: Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013 Contact: Jim Waters 270-320-4376 (LOUISVILLE, Ky.) — “Free to Learn,” a series of three debates designed to tackle the issue of charter schools in Kentucky, will begin with the first debate at Southern Baptist Seminary’s Heeren Hall in Louisville on Tuesday, Dec. 3, at 6 p.m. The debate…
One of the biggest issues to surface during on-going discussions about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has been a growing tendency for public officials and other standards supporters to avoid thoughtful discussions about valid concerns. Instead, officials are engaging in personal attacks and ridicule for parents and…