I was honored to be a guest on Kentucky Tonight on January 28, 2013 to talk about proposals to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18. A number of interesting things came up during the discussions, and I have been doing some follow-on research as a consequence. If you listen starting…
The Bluegrass Institute recently sat down to talk about public education in Kentucky with Billy Harper, who is president of Harper Industries, a Paducah-based construction company. Harper has a long record of involvement in education in the Bluegrass State. He recently completed a four-year term on the Kentucky Board of Education, which develops policy and…
Yet another attempt to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18 is going to be debated during the current legislative session in Frankfort. This idea stalled at least twice before, but that doesn’t seem to stop some non-data oriented, feel-good folks from wanting to try again. Several years ago when this…
The Bluegrass Institute recently sat down to talk about public education in Kentucky with Billy Harper, who is president of Harper Industries, a Paducah-based construction company. Harper has a long record of involvement in education in the Bluegrass State. He recently completed a four-year term on the Kentucky Board of Education, which develops policy and…
The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst Richard Innes will appear on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight” show on Monday, January 28, 2013 to discuss proposed legislation to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18. Show host Bill Goodman’s other guests are scheduled to include: State Sen. Mike Wilson, R-Bowling Green, chair of the…
There is a new push on to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18. We have some major problems with that idea, like it doesn’t really work very well. Here is one reason why, which we first wrote about back in 2009 when an Associated Press (AP) article came out about…
The Eminence Independent School District is one of our four “Diamond in the Rough” school districts in our recent report “Bang for the Buck 2012” because it gets remarkably good academic performance despite relatively low funding and above state average student poverty. Now, the word about Eminence’s progress and its dynamic superintendent, Buddy Berry, is…
This past Monday, Dr. Eric Schansberg – economics professor at Indiana University Southeast and member of the Bluegrass Institute board of scholars – was interviewed on KET’s Kentucky Tonight program by Bill Goodman. Attica Scott, District 1 representative on Louisville Metro Council, and Terry Brooks of Kentucky Youth Advocates were also guests on the show. Watch…
Education Week just published an article about states where the college system is producing too many elementary school teachers for the available jobs (subscription?). Kentucky is an over-producer. Per EdWeek, Kentucky has a demand for 730 new elementary school teachers but the supply from colleges is 1,275. That means 545 Kentucky college graduates won’t have…
Is Common Core good enough? This is a very important question for Kentucky, because we were the first to jump on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) bandwagon for math and English language arts. Will our kids learn enough math and language skills to compete with the emerging fierce competition from overseas? One commentator who…