I blogged several days ago about the major problem of too many elementary school teachers across the country not really knowing how to teach reading properly. According to reports from both Forbes and American Public Media (APM), years after the “Reading Wars” were supposedly settled, far too many of today’s teachers and the education schools…
It’s pretty obvious that our schools really struggle to teach kids how to read because many students never learn to read very well. For example, in the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the NAEP Data Explorer online web tool shows fewer than half of the nation’s white public school fourth grade students (46…
The Richmond (VA) Register has a recent article about “Commentary: Bogus barns and administrative excess: How school district fraud and waste cuts into teacher pay.” It discusses recent research from the Heritage Foundation into the ways fraud and abuse eats into tax money meant to educate children. The article points to several examples of these…
An article about performance problems with preschool programs is circulating in multiple sources (The American Spectator and The National Pulse). The focus is the release of a new report from the Brookings Institution that compares preschool enrollment across the states to the performance of those children five years later on the National Assessment of Educational…
I’ve been in an interesting Twitter discussion about charter schools and the relative education performance of Kentucky and Tennessee. Supposedly, Kentucky does better. Really? Because charter schools are reported to do especially well for black students – an area where Kentucky faces serious challenges – I fired up the NAEP Data Explorer to see how…
Yesterday, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis presented the State of Education briefing for Kentucky. As I wrote yesterday, the presentation was direct and revealing. And, nowhere was it more revealing than in the rather disturbing story about what happened to the Kentucky public school senior class of 2010. The table below tells this somber…
Late this afternoon, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis delivered a highly candid and on target presentation on where Kentucky’s public education system stands today. A considerable portion of the message won’t surprise regular BIPPS readers. Others around the commonwealth, however, are going to be shocked and disturbed. Dr. Lewis started by pointing out that…
Evidence from Kentucky shows this, too The Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board, which recently was reorganized under the Kentucky Department of Education instead of operating as a separate state agency, just removed the old requirement for all Kentucky teachers to earn a Master’s Degree prior to the end of their 10th year in the classroom.…
Back on August 14, 2018 I posted “Kentucky’s Priority Schools all going away…or are they?” which discusses the plan for ending Kentucky’s Priority Schools program for the state’s very worst performing schools. In that blog I looked at the 47 schools listed below that have at least at some time been Priority Schools and what…
It is announced that the reformed Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board, which moved from being a separate agency to being part of the Kentucky Department of Education, has voted to drop the mandate for all Kentucky public school teachers to earn a Master’s Degree by their 10th year in the classroom. This move is generating…