For Immediate Release: Friday, October 5, 2018 (FRANKFORT, Ky.) — A recent legal victory for the Bluegrass Institute Center for Open Government affirms that a closed-door meeting of the Kentucky House of Representatives last year to discuss public-pension reform violated the Open Meetings Act. House leaders attempted to avoid transparency requirements by characterizing the closed-door…
The Kentucky Board of Education approved new/updated education standards for computer science, reading and writing, health, math and physical education yesterday. Now, the regulations that formalize that approval go into a 30-day public comment period, and it’s your turn to comment. Still think the math, reading and writing standards look too much like Common Core…
Earlier today the Kentucky Board of Education voted to approve a revised regulation that for the first time implements some badly needed quality control over the Kentucky high school diploma. While the new criteria are rather modest, they at least start a process to reverse a situation we have been writing about since 2015 and…
The governing board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has paid us some nice attention. They just Tweeted about our recent blog about “More on Kentucky’s true reading performance.” We are pleased that NAEP’s managers find our work of value and worth mentioning to others.
And, they didn’t start with the current commissioner of education, either For those who think the current proposal to increase the quality control over Kentucky’s high school diploma just got started in August, think again. Way back in February 2018 Kentucky Teacher ran, “Pruitt unveils five-point plan aimed at bolstering student achievement.” The article specifically…
End-of-Course requirement not always bad As I mentioned in a previous blog, the Kentucky Board of Education will consider adding some quality control measures to the state’s high school diploma, and the evidence shows it’s high time to do something better. However, we are recently hearing that one of the measures the board will consider,…
On Wednesday the Kentucky Board of Education considers a final rule for actual, enforceable standards for what it takes to earn a high school diploma in Kentucky. And, while there probably will never be a perfect answer to exactly what those requirements should be, recently released assessment and accountability results for 2017-18 reinforce the very…
For Immediate Release: Friday, September 28, 2018 (FRANKFORT, Ky.) – The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s first and only free-market think tank, is asking all candidates campaigning for General Assembly seats during this fall’s election to pledge support for bringing a greater level of transparency to Kentucky’s troubled public pension system. The Institute…
Kentucky’s new assessment and accountability information was released to the public today, and one area of great interest involves the schools that were identified as lowest performing under the “Comprehensive Support and Improvement” (CSI) category. The issue to be addressed here is that not all of the new CSI schools are really equal. In fact,…
Drop is notable Is this fallout from Common Core? I am just starting to decode the rather different Excel spreadsheets that show the Kentucky assessment and accountability results for 2017-18, but something just jumped off the pages of an Excel about ACT scores that needs a quick note. One of the new Excels contains the…