One benefit of forced retirement is the opportunity to monitor what is happening on the state and national open government stage that extends beyond the narrow confines of my cramped office in the basement of the Capitol. Sunlight, which my co-workers and I rarely saw in the winter months, has exposed a deeply troubling level…
The Richmond Register reports that the Madison County Board of Education has adopted a resolution in favor of Senate Bill 55. Senate Bill 55 would bring more rationality to the way Kentucky’s schools are governed under the current School Based Decision-Making laws (SBDM). For more about why such a change is needed, check our new…
Interest in the administration costs associated with Kentucky’s public education system increased recently, so I decided to explore some available data. Several days ago, I wrote about “Are Kentucky’s education administration costs out of line?” That blog looked at education funding breakdowns from the US Census Bureau’s annually issued Public Education Finances series and found…
Does choice work? EdChoice just issued a nice summary of research on the impacts of school choice programs, and I think you will find their comments easy to understand and interesting. Some points from EdChoice: “Given enough time, school choice programs create small, positive test score gains for participating students.” “School choice programs appear to…
The quick answer is that the state does appear to spend an unusually high amount on general education administration. In fact, if the state could just reduce those general administration costs to match the overall US average, annual savings on the order of $20 million seem possible. That would be about enough to give every…
In October 2017, we reported on a decision issued by the Kentucky attorney general in an open meetings dispute between The State Journal and the Finance and Administration Cabinet. The dispute centered on a State Journal reporter’s unsuccessful attempts to learn the identities of the members of the Capital Plaza Redevelopment Project Built-to-Suit Selection Committee…
The January 17, 2018 edition of Education Week includes an update to an electronic article titled “Majority of Teachers Say Reforms Have Been ‘Too Much‘” that was posted on December 19, 2017. It’s an interesting “read.” And, it appears teachers generally are unsettled by all the changes that have been going on recently thanks to…
Along with Kentucky, Washington, DC was one of the first school systems to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards and then move to create a new test to measure those standards. Unlike Kentucky, which has delayed its implementation of new science tests due to various challenges, students in DC began taking their new science tests…
Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. Getting sued and seeing the glass half full is an obvious oxymoron – unless the lawsuit leads to a court decision establishing judicial precedent ensconcing a more open,…
A recent article in the Corpus Christi Caller Times heralds the release of “The Post”–Steven Spielberg’s dramatization of the internal and external battles that accompanied the Washington Post’s 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers–and reminds us of the importance of the courts in protecting the public’s right to know at the federal, state and local…