Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. A consistent charge leveled against reformers who want to adjust the benefit structure of the commonwealth’s Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) is that we overstate the generosity of those…
Topic: New high school graduation requirements The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard Innes, appears tonight on Kentucky Tonight to discuss the state’s new high school graduation requirements. These pending requirements will establish new quality control standards for the state’s standard high school diploma. Those requirements include new minimum competency testing in math and reading.…
I blogged several days ago about “Which Kentucky school districts grade too hard or too easy?,” discussing evidence in the 2018 High School Feedback Workbook assembled by the Kentucky Center for Statistics. The data, which is for the graduating class of 2015-16, includes ACT scores and high school Grade Point Averages (GPA) for each school…
Here is a video clip from the Kentucky Board of Education’s October 2, 2018 meeting where former Kentucky History Teacher of the Year Donnie Wilkerson briefly outlines why he opposes the current draft of the social studies standards. Donnie talks pretty quickly in this because so much is wrong and he only is being allowed…
A new report from the Fordham Institute about “Grade Inflation in High Schools (2005–2016)” relates to topics like “Hollow Diplomas” that we have been concerned about at the Bluegrass Institute for some time (see here and here for some examples). The new study, which looks at results for North Carolina, contains some interesting findings, including:…
I wrote a little while back about the very disappointing condition of the current draft for Kentucky’s social studies standards. I thought the standards might show up at the Kentucky Board of Education’s October 3-4 meetings, but except for some very negative comments during the public comment period, that didn’t happen. But, other standards did…
Thanks to some interesting work by a think tank in Arizona, I got a heads up that their state also shows charter schools doing better on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress. It turns out that scores were reported both for the entire group of students enrolled in charters and non-charters but also for…
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…