“Being a former legislator, what’s been very popular is local control and flexibility. And I supported that from the perspective I was in at that time. But now that I’ve been in this role as state (education) chief, I see the fallacy there. … It’s almost un-American to say that the state department is better…
Let’s spend that money smarter In his budget address on Tuesday, Governor Andy Beshear included a request for an across the board $2,000 a year increase in all public education teachers’ salaries. Per an article in the Courier-Journal, that works out to costs of at least $90 million in each of the next two years.…
The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) just issued an important report, Teacher Prep Review, 2020, Program Performance in Early Reading Instruction, about the quality of teacher preparation programs in reading in colleges across the nation. The report shines a lot of light on one major reason why Mississippi just outscored Kentucky for both white…
The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE), with knowledge of the dubiously reformed Kentucky Board of Education, is running an online survey supposedly to find out what the public thinks will be important qualities in the new education commissioner. But, just like earlier SurveyMonkeys the department ran during the reviews of various academic area education standards,…
“We are often asked ‘What keeps you up at night?’ Here’s my answer: the abysmal record we as a nation have regarding reading. This was evident in the recent NAEP and PISA results. But it’s not just the poor scores that depress me—it’s that we haven’t made enough progress using known science, including rigorous brain…
I got another reminder in a message today that many in Kentucky, including a large number of individuals working with the state’s education system in some way or other, simply have no real clue about how little progress the state has made in education since the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 was enacted nearly…
This is basically a re-issue of an early December blog, but questions on Twitter indicate many missed it last month during the Christmas rush. So, here is an important story on school councils and School Based Decision Making (SBDM) as Senate Bill 7 gets ready to be heard in Frankfort. Kentucky is the only state…
I wrote on January 17, 2020 about a really bad action by the dubiously reconstituted Kentucky Board of Education (KBE), which just terminated its Finance Committee last week. As I pointed out in that blog, the terminated committee was engaged in some extremely important and badly-needed technical work to improve the currently very troubled state…
The questionably reconstituted Kentucky Board of Education isn’t wasting much time putting to waste one of the more important efforts of the board that was improperly replaced. Multiple reporters Tweeted out from the new board’s meeting today that the Finance Committee initiated by the ousted board is being disbanded. That’s a huge mistake. There are…
Senate Bill 7, an act relating to school councils, has been filed in the Kentucky Legislature by Kentucky State Senator John Schickel and nine other leading senators. The bill will make some badly needed revisions to Kentucky’s highly problematic School Based Decision Making (SBDM) system for governing the state’s public schools. Some of these major…