As the Lenten season draws to a close, the Kentucky legislature has managed to find one more way to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the country passes by before Easter Sunday. Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed Gov. Bobby Jindal’s school voucher expansion by a vote of 60-42. This comes just one day…
Kentucky is still two years away from being able to calculate its first, high quality high school graduation rates; however, most other states are reporting high quality rates for the first time this year. And, there is a lot of ‘sticker shock’ out there. Education Week reports that more accurate reports in some states like…
Kentucky gets left behind again. The Heritage Foundation is reporting that the New Hampshire legislature has passed a voucher program and joined the ranks of the most states by embracing school choice as a viable option for education reform. Kentucky still does not have school choice legislation. Interestingly this is not the first time that New Hampshire…
It looks like the situation in some big city public schools is getting so critical that even city mayors from the Democratic Party are breaking away from the teachers unions to challenge “teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.” That’s the story in the Washington Post, which says Democrat mayors in…
After House Bill 37 passed the Senate Education Committee earlier this week, optimism was high that Kentucky legislators would join 41 other US states in embracing true educational choice and charter schools by passing the proposal through the full Senate. By Thursday morning that optimism turned to a feeling of same-ole, same-ole thanks to “the…
The rally to show support for a proposal to bring charter schools to Kentucky originally planned for today has been cancelled. Instead, charter school supporters will meet with their legislators to show their support for a proposal to create a pilot program of 20 charter schools in Kentucky, with at least half of those schools…
From the American Family Association of Kentucky: GREAT NEWS for School Choice in Kentucky! The KY Senate attached an amendment for a Pilot Program for Charter Schools, to House Bill 37 (Schools and Districts of Innovation). The bill will be voted on in the Senate Wednesday March 28. We hear it has enough support to…
Well, maybe not Recent touting of Kentucky’s high school graduation rates, which rose above the national average in the latest available data for 2008-09, seems to be really good news. Or, maybe not. This New York Post article points to the problem. Increased awards of diplomas may just be ‘phantom school gains’ if the graduates…
Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) took a huge swipe at the credibility of public school educators all across the nation. Based on its own research of state testing results from all 50 states and somewhere between 69,000 to 70,000 individual public schools, the newspaper has identified 200 school districts across the nation where the pattern…
It’s not rocket science to figure this out, but the quality of education certainly has serious implications for the economic prosperity and national security for any nation, the US most definitely included. I’ve said it for years. Now a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations reiterates these common-sense truisms. What makes findings from…