Multiple news agencies such as the Bowling Green Daily News and WBKO are reporting that a student in the Warren County Public School System hacked into sensitive data held by the school system. That database reportedly included social security numbers for both staff and students, among other things. This will add to growing concerns about…
I wrote several days ago about generally growing achievement gaps for Kentucky’s black students in the new 2014 Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) testing. KPREP is Kentucky’s three-year old assessment program, and the math and reading KPREP tests are Common Core aligned. The gaps between white and black proficiency rates on KPREP reading…
I wrote a few days ago about Kentucky History Teacher of the Year (2011) Donnie Wilkerson’s testimony to the Kentucky Board of Education about problems with the state’s proposed revisions to the social studies standards. Now, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports more educators are concerned about the draft social studies standards, as well. Here are a…
The Courier-Journal just ran a story about a report out of Washington that claims Kentucky cut education spending more than most states recently. I don’t think so. This graph shows Kentucky’s total education revenue by year from the Kentucky Department of Education’s receipts and expenditures reports. As you can see, from the year prior to…
The new Unbridled Learning results contain some generally unhappy news about chronically problematic gaps in reading and mathematics proficiency rates between Kentucky’s white and African-American students. The table below, which captures the last two years of proficiency rate data for whites and blacks from the Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress’ (KPREP) Common Core aligned…
Thanks to massive numbers of way out of line, clearly inflated scores for the new Program Review element in the 2014 Kentucky Unbridled Learning school accountability program, the accountability program’s overall scores are coming into question. From school superintendents to private citizens, I am seeing and hearing compelling evidence that the Program Reviews have a…
There was an interesting surprise during the public comment segment of the Kentucky Board of Education meeting on October 7, 2014. Donnie Wilkerson, a fifth-grade teacher at Jamestown Elementary School in Russell County, traveled to Frankfort on his own to share his deep concerns about proposed revisions to the state’s social studies education standards. Wilkerson’s comments make…
The new state assessment results were released last week, and while you’ve been reading claims of progress in the media, I have some reservations. I’ve been assembling information on how the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) test results for math and reading compare to other testing results for Kentucky. KPREP math and…
A lot of creative thinking has gone into Kentucky’s still relatively new Unbridled Learning school accountability system. However, Unbridled Learning is also running up against some tough “facts of life” that sometimes interfere with the picture this program presents about school performance. Things might get even more problematic when the new Unbridled Learning results for…
Prominent American architecture critic Martin Filler once observed: “The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.” Filler was talking about art, of course, but his…