The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests for 15-year olds have been around for a long time, comparing results for teens in different nations around the world on tests of math, reading, and science. Usually, US results are less than stellar. But…Baby PISA! According to Helge Wasmuth, an associate professor of early childhood and…
It’s easy to identify the most significant years in the history of the Open Meetings and Open Records Acts since I first professionally encountered them as an assistant attorney general in 1991. In 1992 and 1994, for example, the legislature dramatically overhauled the then nearly 20 year old acts, clarifying—among other things– the attorney general’s…
Few things are more familiar to regular television viewers than the one hour courtroom drama. The program begins with the commission of a crime, continues with the investigation—often accompanied by strategic legal maneuvering—and reaches its climax in a dramatic courtroom scene where justice prevails in the conviction of the guilty and the exoneration of the…
For Immediate Release: December 26, 2017 (FRANKFORT, Ky.) — The Kentucky House of Representatives has opted to waste more taxpayer money by filing a lawsuit against the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank, rather than acknowledge it violated the Commonwealth’s Open Meetings Act when it gathered behind closed doors last summer to discuss pension reform.…
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 the first year of KPREP test results for those schools to examine, and I’ll be doing that in a couple of…
In an interesting surprise, the Kentucky Department of Education has started yet another public comment period on revisions to the state’s education standards for math and English language arts (reading and writing). This new comment period is announced in NEWS RELEASE No. 17-173, which currently is only available to e-mail subscribers but shortly should appear…
I have been looking at the 2016-17 white minus black math proficiency rates in Kentucky’s schools and decided to see if there were any examples of schools where the achievement gap was less than five percentage points while at the same time both white and black students in the school outscored the statewide average proficiency…
As we get ready to enter the 2018 legislative season, Kentuckians have been continually hearing about supposed large reductions in education funding. The latest hand-wringing example was an article titled “Schools face uphill financial picture in face of state, local cuts” published on December 10, 2017 in Ashland’s The Daily Independent. The article contains a…
This one should make open government advocates stand up and take notice. Several recent reports, including this one in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, suggest that Missouri’s governor – and his staff – have downloaded the app Confide to their personal cellphones. The app “deletes messages and prevents recipients from saving, forwarding, printing or taking…
“When children perform near the bottom of the distribution of scores on standardized assessments in the early grades, there is minimal likelihood that they will ever make up enough academic ground to perform at significantly higher levels in later years. Put succinctly, Kentucky students who in early grades perform in the Bottom Third in reading…