For Immediate Release: Monday, August 28, 2017 (WILLIAMSBURG, Ky.) — Bluegrass Institute president and CEO Jim Waters urged the Interim Joint Committee on Education to return balance to the process governing Kentucky’s public schools by reexamining the scope, authority and impact of School-Based Decision Making (SBDM) councils. The SBDM policy, implemented as part of…
I don’t follow the Atlantic, but one of their writers, Alia Wong, has a very interesting article up in the Education Writers Association site about the problems of teaching school kids about fake news. Unfortunately, Wong’s article makes a lot of sense. Wong begins by posing a very interesting question: “During and after the 2016…
Gallup just polled the American public about which schools do the best job of educating students. The results show a clear win for school choice options. This interesting table from the new Gallup Report makes an important case. It is interesting that just about every school choice option listed, including charter schools, is favored by…
The Kentucky Legislature’s Office of Education Accountability (OEA) presented an interesting report to the Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee on August 15, 2017 with some really attention getting information. I already discussed one stunning OEA finding that a majority of Kentucky’s public school students meet the legal definition of being truants. Today, I briefly…
The Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee heard a report in Frankfort today about “School Attendance in Kentucky” from the Legislative Research Commission’s Office of Education Accountability. And, it didn’t take long for a real shocker to surface. As the one of the OEA’s briefing slides puts it: “The majority of Kentucky students…
Americans are frequently assaulted with amazing claims that our country has one of the highest poverty rates in the entire developed world. We get it from sources like the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF, sometimes just the United Nations Children’s Fund), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and a host of…
And, how does Kentucky’s education spending rank against other states? We hear it all the time. Kentucky’s educators frequently complain that they are not getting enough resources (think dollars) to do their job well. And, we’ve often heard that per pupil funding for education in Kentucky ranks low compared to what other states spend. But…
Chatter on social media started up several days ago from several Kentucky educators about a LEX18.com news report that Kentucky’s education system had been ranked by a group called WalletHub as the 5th best in the nation. Based on the tweets starting on July 28th linking to the LEX18 article, I initially thought the WalletHub…
We often hear excuses from Kentucky’s educators that our state has one of the worst child poverty rates in the nation. I knew – based on school lunch data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – that actually hasn’t been true for some time. However, by 2015 the NAEP’s school lunch statistics were…
Over at the Prichard Blog, Susan Perkins Weston discusses some puzzling material that is part of the Kentucky Board of Education’s agenda package for its meeting tomorrow. This material is called the “Kentucky Accountability System, Long Term and Interim Goals for Public Reporting,” and it includes a series of tables like the one below that…