The current fight in Kentucky about trying to get a handle on the apparently excessive number of students with learning disabilities who get reading tests read to them has now spilled over into the federal arena. Education Week reports that there is a dispute between two agencies that control the federal National Assessment of Educational…
There is a contentious battle under way about how Kentucky teaches students with learning disabilities to read – or not. This includes sharp dissention over what seems to be excessive use of readers on the state’s so-called reading assessments for these special students. Believe it or not, each year thousands of Kentucky students have the…
Non-readers are getting regular high school diplomas A disturbing issue inadvertently came to light during a contentious August 14, 2012 meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee (EAARS). The news spilled out during a sharp discussion about a regulation that would end reading of the state’s reading assessment to many students…
Indiana Public Radio reports that a recent conference on how we educate new school teachers found the process is “fractured.” David Steiner, Dean of the Hunter College of Education at City University of New York said: “We have not agreed as a population about what it is that is worth teaching.” The radio system reports…
Over at the Prichard Committee’s blog, Susan Weston just posted data she worked up for her recent presentation to the Louisville Forum about the condition of Jefferson County’s public schools. Weston claimed that while Jefferson County’s elementary and middle school students notably lag behind their counterparts in the vast majority of other Kentucky school districts,…
In recent years Kentucky’s teachers have gotten some of the best salary increases in the nation according to recently released data in the Digest of Education Statistics 2011. Table 84 in that new release shows teachers’ salaries across the nation for the 2004-05 and 2010-11 school years in each state and the District of Columbia.…
During the first day of its two-day meeting, the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) got good news about the high school graduation rate in Kentucky for the 2010-11 school year. The rate improved a bit. A news release from the Kentucky Department of Education and associated documents have more details, as summarized in this table.…
The chickens will soon come home to roost for Kentucky’s state assessment program, substantiating years of Bluegrass Institute research and comments. We’ve consistently shown you evidence over the years that the scores from the Kentucky Core Content Tests (KCCT) used for CATS accountability were seriously overstating the real performance of the state’s public school students.…
High school dropouts are a major problem all across Kentucky. Nearly one out of four students fails to earn a high school diploma within four years of high school entry. Even if we count all students who eventually get either a diploma or a certificate of completion, Kentucky’s public schools still loose one in five…
I didn’t see any media coverage, but the Kentucky Legislature launched a new “2012 Task Force on Student Access to Technology” on July 24, 2012 to determine the state of the state in digital learning in our classrooms and how we can enhance that. One task force goal will be to develop legislation to enhance…