As we get ready to enter the 2018 legislative season, Kentuckians have been continually hearing about supposed large reductions in education funding. The latest hand-wringing example was an article titled “Schools face uphill financial picture in face of state, local cuts” published on December 10, 2017 in Ashland’s The Daily Independent. The article contains a…
“When children perform near the bottom of the distribution of scores on standardized assessments in the early grades, there is minimal likelihood that they will ever make up enough academic ground to perform at significantly higher levels in later years. Put succinctly, Kentucky students who in early grades perform in the Bottom Third in reading…
More evidence that averaging test results can hide serious gap problems As the Kentucky Board of Education works through trying to revise Kentucky’s public-school assessment and accountability system following the demise of Unbridled Learning, a new example from the Dunn Elementary School in Jefferson County shows that just averaging scores for groups of students can…
How much does your school district really spend per pupil on education? I wish I could tell you. Want to know why I am bewildered? Click the “Read more” link. But, be prepared to be surprised. The sometimes enormous discrepancies between two of the Kentucky Department of Education’s online financial reports are absolutely shocking. Even…
There was lots of hand-wringing going on in Washington on Tuesday following the release of new scores from the 2016 administration of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Some takeaways from the Washington Post’s coverage include: “The United States tumbled in international rankings released Tuesday of reading skills among fourth-graders, raising warning flags…
This is no surprise to our regular readers, but LEX18 in Lexington just posed “Kentucky Schools Becoming Less White, But Inequities Persist,” which further substantiates what we’ve been saying for years. However, there is a warning buried in the news item’s title that everyone in Kentucky needs to heed. With the state slowly becoming less…
A new tool just showed up in the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission’s web site that you will find really interesting. It is an interactive state map that allows you to click on a local school district and see its average rate of school chronic absenteeism (CA) between 2012 and 2016 (Note: be patient – this…
Back in 2010 one of the major reasons we heard for adopting the Common Core State Standards was that the results from new Common Core-aligned tests would be comparable across states. It’s now 2017, and as Chalkbeat points out, this is yet another promise from the education community that hasn’t been kept. Kentucky, of course,…
A major goal of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA) was getting parents more involved in their children’s schools. Towards that end, KERA required that virtually all regular schools in Kentucky had to install School-Based Decision-Making Councils (often referred to as SBDMs) no later than December 1996. These councils would take on major…
The Kentucky Department of Education’s new director of charter schools, Earl Simms, talks to WDRB in Louisville about his new role and what is coming with charter schools in Kentucky. Check the video interview here: WDRB 41 Louisville News Kentucky’s charter school regulations have been approved by the Kentucky Board of Education and are now…