The title of the Prichard Committee’s blog says it nicely. “ACT results show far too few Kentucky high school graduates have academic preparation they need for postsecondary pursuits.” No, we didn’t write this for them. But, we agree. Clearly, Kentucky needs some fresh ideas. While the Prichard Committee probably won’t ever include charter schools in…
Our Wednesday, August 24, 2016 blogs only cover overall average scores for all students from public, private and home schools combined. Today, we dig deeper into the data, looking at performance over time separately for Kentucky’s overall student scores, public school only scores, and non-public school only scores (including both private and home school students…
Bluegrass Institute staff education analyst Richard Innes’ analysis in Thursday’s Lexington Herald-Leader of the latest ACT college-entrance test results released this week includes disaggregating the scores, which reconfirms both the seriousness of Kentucky’s white minus black achievement gap and the need for charter schools in the Bluegrass State, one of seven states without a…
Education Week just reported on an astonishing study of the proportion of high schools in each state that offer high school physics. With all the “Happy Talk” we’re hearing from educators about getting kids ready for careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and given that physics is essential to enter those STEM careers,…
Now that I explained in an earlier blog why you cannot get a good picture of Kentucky’s true performance on the ACT college entrance test versus other states by only looking at overall average scores, let’s examine how the Bluegrass State’s white students stacked up against whites in the 17 other states where 100 percent…
Before we get into comparisons of the data between Kentucky and elsewhere on the just-released 2016 high school graduates’ ACT scores, I need to point out again why it’s important to break the data out by race when you compare relative state-to-state performance in education, ACT scores most definitely included. To explain why you have…
The ACT scores for 2016 high school graduates were released today. Thanks to heightened interest in the state’s achievement gap issues due to Common Core (see here, here and here for some examples), I decided to look at the trends in white minus black achievement gaps on this college-entrance test first. This table summarizes what…
Last week I started this blog series, which shows why we’re concerned at BIPPS about the quality of high school diplomas being awarded in Kentucky. I looked at two separate indicators of diploma quality in each of Kentucky’s 168 school districts that have high schools. One approach analyzed the variation between high school diploma award…
Feel-good reports like the Johns Hopkins School of Education and Civic Enterprises’ study, “For all Kids: How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students,” simply drive the volume of happy talk backing the status quo up another level. It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that since there are no…
What do you think about this? Whirlpool Corporation installed clothes washers and driers in a small number of schools with lots of disadvantaged kids – and attendance and grades went up. Could boosting school attendance and grades in high needs schools really be this simple? Someone needs to try it in Kentucky! GE, are you…