Jim Waters testifies for BIPPS KET captured today’s meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education, which held a hearing today on the condition of SBDM in the state. You can access the video here. Jim Waters, the CEO of the Bluegrass Institute, begins his comments at about 16 minutes and 30 seconds…
Two middle schools in Kentucky’s Boone County Public School District adopted the Summit Learning program – one of the more frequently discussed digital learning programs – in the 2016-17 school year. We now have two years of KPREP test results for those schools to examine, and I start that process with mathematics changes. For a…
As the election coverage rolled on yesterday, CNN at one point provided a great example of why getting Kentucky’s new social studies standards right really matters, fouling up the labels for Kentucky and Indiana on an election coverage map. The Kentucky/Indiana blunder quickly went viral in multiple places on the web, such as here, here…
(FRANKFORT, Ky.) — The Bluegrass Institute released the bipartisan list of candidates for Kentucky House and Senate seats in the 2018 General Election who publicly and courageously expressed support prior to Election Day for making the commonwealth’s public pension benefits subject to the Open Records Act by signing the organization’s Pension Transparency Pledge. “Taxpayers have…
Fordham Institute says “Parental engagement: A promise, not a program” Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli is on to more than he knows with his latest Flypaper Blog item about “Parental engagement: A promise, not a program.” First, let’s talk about parent engagement. I learned an interesting lesson about parent engagement years ago when my older daughter…
One of the dirty secrets about some outspoken opponents of school choice is that they actually exercise choice for their own children while trying to deny it to other, less well-off, folks. Check out Kate Hardiman’s “School choice opponent sends her kids to charter school” for “the rest of the story” about a Save Our…
Reports from the ACT, Inc. and the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) give us information about how all Kentucky students averaged together and just Kentucky’s public school students alone perform on the ACT college entrance test. However, there are no agencies reporting about ACT scores for those Kentucky students who didn’t go to public schools.…
Well, not in Kentucky! In case you missed my earlier blog about high school grade point averages (GPAs) versus the ACT college entrance test as predictors of college performance, there is an effort underway across the country and in Kentucky to reduce attention to the fairly disappointing scores from the ACT college entrance test. While…
Not in Kentucky! There is an effort underway across the country and in Kentucky to reduce emphasis on and attention to the fairly disappointing scores from the ACT college entrance test. The argument being made is that high school grade point averages (GPA) are better predictors of college performance, so emphasis on the ACT is…
Education Week just released an interesting article by Stephan Sawchuk with the rather pertinent title for Kentuckians of “How history class divides us” (subscription). Kentucky is currently going through the process of revising its public school social studies standards, and these standards must contain everything about history that the Bluegrass State’s students are expected to…