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…
The Wall Street Journal often takes an interesting look at public education topics. In this editorial, it is clear that the Journal is impressed with the performance of charter schools in New York. It is also interesting to read the reader comments for this article. It seems like there is a lot of understanding that…
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, if it did nothing else, a recently released, rather disappointing report about For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students did focus attention on how Kentucky’s low-income students are faring. So, my Part 3 blog in this series took a look at…
If it did nothing else, a recently released, rather disappointing report about For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students did focus attention on how Kentucky’s low-income students are faring. So, for Part 3 of our blogs about the problems with Kentucky’s high school diplomas, let’s take a…
In his weekly e-mail to district and school personnel Kentucky Commissioner of Education Stephen Pruitt made it clear that while the state’s social studies standards won’t change for the 2016-17 school year, he and his staff are still working on what he refers to as “Social Studies Standards for the Next Generation.” He also says…
Yesterday, we took a look at how the latest high school graduation rates in Kentucky’s school districts match up, or don’t match up, to proficiency rates on the state’s Algebra II End-of-Course Exam. We learned that there are notable discrepancies for most school districts when common sense would indicate there should be fairly close agreement…
We posted a press release yesterday about disturbing evidence the Bluegrass Institute has collected that the quality control for Kentucky’s high school diploma is very inconsistent across the state’s school districts. Today, we dig deeper into a portion of the data in one of the Excel spreadsheets included with that press release. We are going…
(LEXINGTON, Ky.) – Even as some cheer about a recent Johns Hopkins University report that claims Kentucky leads the nation for low-income students’ high school graduation rates, new research from the Bluegrass Institute raises very serious questions about the quality control behind those impressive looking numbers. In fact, it looks like thousands of the Bluegrass…
I missed this a couple of weeks ago when Education Week reported that “Publishers Get Poor Marks on Common-Core Math Texts.” The story covered a new analysis of high school math textbooks from EdReports.org. An earlier report from EdReports.org covered textbook alignment to Common Core for lower grades. Of particular note to Kentucky, Pearson Publishers…