FINALLY! WDRB just ran a short article, “Teachers create, attend inaugural ‘EdCampJCPS’” that really caught my attention. It talks about teachers in Jefferson County taking professional development into their own hands, running their own seminar program where teachers can share success and failure programs with their colleagues. Now, this is encouraging. Teachers acting as real…
Prichard Committee and KY Chamber get their rankings wrong Back in January, I wrote a fairly extensive blog about the poor ranking processes in two then new reports from Education Week’s Quality Counts series and from the UK Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER). Just as in many years past, these rankings are clearly…
A new tool from the Education Trust allows quick state-to-state comparisons of 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores and changes over time from 2003 to 2015. Of course, as we have pointed out before, it’s essential when doing such comparisons to break the scores out by race, which the new tool allows, in…
The Courier-Journal reports that “Kentucky ranks 19th in higher ed spending!” The Courier references a report from Wall Street 24/7 that shows Kentucky’s annual higher ed. spending per student is $6,898. The highest spending state is Wyoming, with annual higher ed. spending per student of $17,300. The lowest spending state is New Hampshire with annual…
Common Core supporters have pushed the ideas of student-centered and group learning across the country. That is why it was especially interesting when veteran reporter Maureen Downey wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about: “What teens resent: Classrooms controlled by students rather than teachers.” Things teens told Downey they don’t like include: Classes where learning is…
The National Center for Education Statistics’ What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was established a number of years ago to find valuable needles in the incredibly large haystack of mostly unscientific, if not outright garbage, studies on education. WWC applies fairly rigorous rules to evaluate the real quality of research. Reports that don’t meet minimum quality standards…
The Los Angeles Times just ran a very good article concerning the failure of a number of education programs that have received massive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The title says a lot: “Editorial | Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn’t be setting America’s public school agenda” This is a solidly thought…
After finishing up on the Common Core State Standards project, a key writer of those standards moved on to take over the College Board, which creates the SAT college entrance test. Critics of Common Core were quick to charge that the SAT would become watered down. A new SAT was indeed created and came into…
Wow! It looks like the US Department of Education has now gone too far. Even the ever-federal-tax-dollar-chasing Kentucky Department of Education has had enough! WLKY has the details of this remarkable development where federal demands for Kentucky to do nonsense things like testing with obsolete tests are getting the cold shoulder in the Bluegrass State.…
I blogged a few days ago about “KY education is required to be Efficient!” This is actually a constitutional requirement in Kentucky. That should be sufficient, but history to date shows it has not been. Now, however, an article from the Brookings Institution indicates requirements in the new regulations for the new Every Student Succeeds…