I had the pleasure yesterday to attend the inaugural meeting of Kentucky’s new Charter School Advisory Council in Frankfort. This is something very new for Kentucky and marks an important step along the road to bringing some real school choice to the state. The new council, chaired by UK Professor Wayne Lewis, wasted no time…
Even monkeys get it! This message could pertain to the current effort to revise Kentucky’s school accountability system. You see, right now, there are draft proposals for different schools to have different elements in their accountability calculation. That won’t create a fair and uniform system. For example, one of the proposed achievement gap calculations would…
California is the land of high tech innovation, but according to the San Francisco area based Mercury News, “Immigrants are 42 percent of California’s STEM workforce.” If you have not kept up with education fad acronyms, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics – in other words, all the “stuff” that high tech comes…
Alison Ross, a top-notch education reporter at the Courier-Journal, raises a question in “Why are teens going to school so early? Research shows educators may need a wake-up call” that has interested me, too. Research has been accumulating for some time that shows the average teen’s bio clock isn’t well aligned to the standard school…
In “A’s on the rise in U.S. report cards, but SAT scores founder,” USA Today reporter Greg Toppo discusses how trends in high school grades and SAT scores show grading in the country is getting inflated. This isn’t news to us, of course. In fact, we talked back in February about research from the Kentucky…
Unbridled Learning, Kentucky’s current public-school assessment and accountability system, is on the way out, and Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt and the Kentucky Department of Education have been working on an as-yet unnamed replacement accountability system for some time. Pruitt and his team have held two sets of public hearings seeking Kentuckians’ input into the new…
The Courier-Journal echoes a report from its sister paper, the Indianapolis Star, that another college in this country will no longer require applicants to take either the ACT or SAT college entrance tests. According to the article: “Hanover College in Southern Indiana will join nearly 1,000 public and private accredited institutions across the nation that…
During yesterday’s meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Stephen Pruitt made it very clear that Unbridled Learning, Kentucky’s Common Core era assessment and accountability program, has been ended by Senate Bill 1 from the 2017 Regular Legislative Session. So, what comes next? The new assessment and accountability…
The Bluegrass Institute has been raising strong, evidence-based concerns about the quality of Kentucky’s standard high school diploma for well over half a decade. Our concerns about possible inflation in Kentucky’s high school graduation rates stretch back at least to 2010 when we compared the state’s claimed graduation rates to much lower rates being reported…
On July fourth the National Public Radio affiliate at Western Kentucky University published a highly ironic article, “Charter School Concerns Voiced by KEA President.” Hopefully, our students are learning better ways of providing supporting examples than the one Stephanie Winkler, the head of the Kentucky Education Association, stumbled over in her interview. Trying to counter…