US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was in Mason, Ohio on November 9, 2011 and made some surprisingly candid – and disturbing – comments about the state of education in US schools. Duncan certainly wants more money to feed his bureaucracy’s interest area (what bureaucrat ever wanted different?), but WCPO TV also reports: “Duncan says…
Recent NAEP Report Cards advise us to pay attention to data disaggregated by race because there now are tremendous differences in the racial makeup of different states. That demographic disparity can give a very “white” state like Kentucky (still 84% white in our classrooms) a big advantage in simplistic comparisons of the scores. Also, it…
We hear a lot about all the progress that has been made since the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 was enacted. Except, the problem is that worthwhile tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) don’t support those claims of substantial progress. The graph below shows the earliest available and most recently available…
The Jefferson County Public Schools audit was released yesterday and the findings were not rosy. The short version of a long story is that the audit recommends that the central office of the district be radically restructured. Let me state the obvious: this audit should have happened a long time ago. Over the years there have…
Apparently, the expensive audit that the Jefferson County Board of Education commissioned to find problems in their school system didn’t have any difficulty finding some. WAVE-3 reports: “The question right now for JCPS – who is in charge?” “The audit found that some people are in charge of too many while in interviews other employees…
I have now had a chance to examine the change in Kentucky’s white minus black proficiency rate achievement gaps on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math and reading assessments. I assembled the percentages of whites and blacks scoring at or above NAEP’s “Proficient” score using the NAEP Data Explorer. I obtained data for the…
I knew the education crowd in Kentucky and elsewhere would not take long to jump on statistically insignificant score increases on the new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math and reading results to puff up unsupportable claims of progress. My first example out of the gate is the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) news…
The National Assessment of Educational Progress just released the 2011 results for math and reading for all 50 states. Certainly, the 2011 reading and math results for Kentucky don’t look good. We already took a first look at reading. Now, let’s see what the new NAEP Math Report Card shows for the fourth and eighth…
The National Assessment of Educational Progress just released the 2011 results for math and reading for all 50 states. Certainly, the 2011 reading and math results for Kentucky don’t look good. Let’s look at reading first. In both forth and eighth grade reading, as these maps taken from the new NAEP Reading Report Card show,…
If charter schools not part of answer, then what is? Kentucky needs to find out The Louisiana Department of Education recently released its public school only analysis of ACT college entrance test scores for the graduating class of 2011. There is some remarkable data in this release for the ‘Recovery School District’ schools in the…