Got a report over the weekend that the Utah GOP just adopted a resolution against the Common Core State Standards. To read it, go to this link and scroll down the page a bit to read:
“Utah GOP Anti-Common Core Resolution PASSES”
The Utah resolution is heavily researched and referenced. It is very interesting reading for anyone regardless of political affiliation.
Education Week’s State Edwatch Blog just picked up on the major story we have been covering on the problems with Kentucky’s high school end-of-course exams.
As we reported last week here, here and here, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has run into major problems with the state’s high school end-of-course testing program.
One major problem is the computer servers from ACT’s Vantage testing system became overloaded and crashed when students from Kentucky, Ohio and Alabama simultaneously tried to access tests on line.
Following a week of unsuccessful fixes, KDE News Release 13-049 admits the department has thrown in the towel and cancelled all attempts at on line end-of-course test administration for 2013.
KDE says paper and pencil testing packages for end-of-course tests are being distributed now, but the printed materials may not reach all of the approximately 60 percent of Kentucky high schools that formerly planned to test on line before May 13, 2013.
The on line testing failure thoroughly disrupts KDE’s plans to require counting end-of-course test results in each student’s final grade in English II, Algebra II, biology and US History classes. The news release says incorporation of all end-of-course results is now totally optional at local school district discretion.
This adds to other, very different, testing woes revealed by the Bluegrass Institute last week concerning the quiet collapse early this year of the constructed-response questions (sometimes called written answer questions or open-response questions) in the same end-of-course exams.
It looks like the massive school test cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia could get pushed aside by an even messier affair that seems to be unraveling in Columbus, Ohio.
The Columbus Dispatch reports in an article datelined May 3, 2013 that, under police escort, the state auditor’s office entered numerous high schools in that community to serve dozens of warrants to seize large quantities of student records.
According to the news article, the auditor has already uncovered evidence that:
“Columbus school administrators ‘scrubbed’ low-performing students from the rolls to make schools and the district look better.”
That would inflate school averages on state tests, of course.
The next phase of this extensive audit is now focused on what seems to be massive alterations of student grades to boost high school graduation rates.
The newspaper reports that in 2010-11:
“School employees made more than 311,000 grade changes during that school year. The district, which is Ohio’s largest, has about 50,000 students.”
That averages out to over six grade changes per student in just one year! Wow!
Meanwhile, we know the Kentucky Department of Education instituted a forensics program to check for problems with our state testing. So far, there has been no announcement of whether our program is running clean or also has issues. Let’s hope Kentucky’s teachers have not bitten from the same apple that is apparently on the menu in Atlanta and Columbus.
While I don’t believe in trial by the press, it’s possible that Atlanta may soon be able to say, “Thank goodness for Columbus!”
Maurice McTigue – Citizen Education Seminar from the Bluegrass Institute on Vimeo.
Recently the Bluegrass Institute partnered with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to host its Citizen Education Seminar at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Lexington. The event included both Bluegrass Institute and Mercatus scholars discussing the most pertinent barriers standing in the way of Kentucky’s economic competitiveness.
Today, we present remarks from the Mercatus Center’s distinguished visiting scholar, Mauirce P. McTigue, in part 2 of of our weekly series delivering exclusive video footage from the event.
McTigue’s message was simple: no country in history has ever created prosperity through spending, consumption and government dependency. In order for jobs to be created and prosperity to grow, capital saving and investment must first occur –a truth often ignored by politicians looking for short-term political favor.
But since capital is so easily moved from one region of the country to the next, Kentucky’s mission is clear: create the friendliest business environment in the nation to attract business resources essential for growth in the commonwealth.
So just how has Kentucky been performing in that regard? According to McTigue, it really doesn’t matter which index of economic competitiveness or business friendliness you look at, because Kentucky ranks in the bottom half of all of them. In fact, according to CNBC’s “Top States for Doing Business” index, Kentucky comes in at No. 45 for “access to capital” — the key ingredient to job creation.
McTigue raised the obvious follow-up question: ”Why the hell do you hate business here? Because to be in the 40s, you have to be doing a lot of really bad stuff.”
Unfortunately, Kentucky has a long way to go to become economically competitive with neighbors on either side of our borders. McTigue succinctly summed up Kentucky’s economic backwardness:
“Kentucky is a state that has been stagnating for a long period of time. Why would it be stagnating? Because I think your governments have just been satisfied with how we did things in the past and have not been prepared to think in an entrepreneurial way about how we might do things in the future. I get the picture that your government is very protectionist — is trying to stop people from making mistakes that might hurt them. Well, you have to get away from that.”
Join the chair of the Bluegrass Institute Board of Scholars, John Garen, Ph. D., tonight LIVE at 8 PM ET on KET for a special edition of Kentucky Tonight, hosted by Bill Goodman.
The topic will be the hotly debated issue of the federal budget and the clearest way out of the fed’s unsustainable spending traps.
Viewers with questions for Professor Garen can call in live at: 1-800-494-7605
And please support the Bluegrass Institute so we can continue promoting free markets, individual liberty and limited — and transparent — government over the airwaves! Please go to www.kentucky1792.com and help support the message of liberty across the commonwealth!
The Herald-Leader and other news sources are reporting Representative Carl Rollins (D – Midway) has announced he is leaving the Kentucky Legislature to head the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority and the Kentucky Higher Education Student Loan Corporation.
While Rollins shepherded a number of education bills during his tenure, he was instrumental in blocking key legislation submitted in multiple years that would have created charter school programs in Kentucky. Rollins’ actions leave Kentucky as one of only eight states that still have not adopted charter schools, thus denying the benefits of these special public schools to the state’s many disadvantaged students.
The Jefferson County Teachers’ Association (JCTA) seems to not understand who the other party is to their collective bargaining agreement. Instead, JCTA president Brent McKim keeps trying to suck Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday into dealing directly with the union, but Holliday correctly points out that the union needs to work with the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), instead.
As WAVE-3 TV points out, Holliday just reiterated his unwillingness to improperly step into the middle of that contract.
Instead, Holliday provided JCPS several days ago with an expanded, eight-page listing of the ways the contract between the union and the district has interfered with turn around efforts in many Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (now called Priority Schools) found in that district. Thus, Holliday continues to strengthen his case that the union is damaging children in Louisville.
Meanwhile, the union’s deny, deny, deny tactics about their interference are becoming more and more absurd, seriously undermining already seriously doubtful union credibility.
Dr. John Garren – Citizen Education Seminar from Bluegrass Institute on Vimeo.
Recently the Bluegrass Institute partnered with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to host its Citizen Education Seminar at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Lexington. The event included both Bluegrass Institute and Mercatus scholars discussing the most pertinent barriers standing in the way of Kentucky’s economic competitiveness.
Speakers at the event included the Mercatus Center’s distinguished visiting scholar Maurice P. McTigue and senior research fellow Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D., along with John Garen, Ph.D., the Gatton Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky and chairman of the Bluegrass Institute Board of Scholars.
During the following weeks, we will bring you exclusive video footage of what each speaker had to say about Kentucky’s efforts toward economic competitiveness with its neighboring states, as well as special extra footage of the Q&A session that followed.
Today, we offer Garen’s presentation in which he compares Kentucky’s recent economic performance to that of its neighboring states.
As Garen notes, becoming more competitive with our neighboring states is vitally important for economic recovery in both rural and urban areas of the commonwealth. He shows how Kentucky currently lag behind surrounding states in nearly every important key economic index:
But dollars and cents figures aren’t the only areas in which Kentucky is lacking. Compared to the rest of the nation, our health and dependency stats are also abysmal:
In almost any relevant category one can think of – levels of education, health, GDP per capita or even transfer payments – Kentucky outranks only West Virginia.
According to Garen, there are two roads Kentucky can take in our efforts to become economically competitive with our neighbors: the road toward increased economic productivity or the path toward increased economic dependency. The former would increase Kentuckians’ labor-force participation, income and productivity. The latter would increase the size of government, amount of taxpayer funds redistributed and our reliance upon the welfare state.
What’s worse is that the feds actually make the situation worse by luring Kentucky by offering goods and services to Kentuckians for far less than what they could purchase them for otherwise. Meanwhile, our elected officials rush to accept the seemingly free lunch.
The only problem is that the feds are doing the same thing for every other state in the union, and where do they find the resources to pay for those handouts? They find a large chunk of it in our pocketbooks right here at home.
Check out Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.
Education Week reports that Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers, (PARCC), of which Kentucky is a partner, is running into significant controversy about how its pending nationwide Common Core State Standards assessments will deal with students who have learning disabilities.
The fight has already played out on Kentucky’s own state assessments, including the new K-PREP reading assessments, since the early days of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA). And, the state has produced thousands of illiterate or nearly illiterate adults as a consequence.
The issue: lots of learning disabled student teachers want to be able to read the reading assessment to many of these students.
Sadly, that action destroys the ability of the public and state leaders to know how many students are being carried through the public school system as illiterates.
Kentucky already made a bad decision on this. Under KERA it has been permissible since the beginning of reform testing in 1992 to create education plans for learning disabled students that stipulate all tests, including reading tests, will be read to the student. That led to what many consider a significant abuse of this accommodation, with abnormally high percentages of Kentucky’s students getting the reading accommodation on reading tests.
According to data presented to the Kentucky Board of Education in December 2011, the state’s reading tests are read to around 45 percent of the students with disabilities in all grades from fourth to eighth grade. That same presentation noted this is way above averages for reading accommodation use elsewhere.
Of course, if schools can simply read all tests to a student, this destroys any motivation and accountability in those schools to continue to try to teach reading to those students. Those kids wind up leaving school as near to total illiterates. And, too many undoubtedly walk right into jail as a consequence.
PARCC now wrestles with the question: to read, or not to read. While it appears PARCC wants to impose very strict limits on the use of the reading accommodation, the EdWeek article reports some teacher groups are pushing back. So, at this point, there is no guarantee the Kentucky reading malaise won’t be forced down the throats of more enlightened educators across much of the rest of the nation.
On the other hand, if PARCC does uphold very strict restrictions on the reading accommodation for its reading assessments, would that lead to Kentucky dropping out of PARCC?
After all, Kentucky already has Common Core State Standards aligned reading tests. Of course, we read them to far too many of our learning disabled students.
