It looks like the message about dumbed down high school diplomas and watered down college degrees is sinking in to an important part of our society – business and industry! The “College” web site reports that while the practice is not yet widespread, a number of major employers are now requiring SAT scores as part…
Columbia Teachers College in New York City is one of the oldest and best-known teacher preparation institutions in the country. Selection as president there requires some degree of skill and experience, to put it mildly. And, Arthur Levine is a past president at Columbia. More recently, Levine has authored a number of remarkably candid reports…
There has been a lot of confusion generated at recent Kentucky Board of Education meetings about the actual college-going rates for our students. It was first reported the rate was down. In the December meeting of the board, it was reported that the rate was actually up. So, what was really going on? I decided…
The Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) got a lot of bad news during its meeting on Wednesday, December 9, 2015. This news isn’t just bad for Kentucky. It has rather serious implications for the national Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English language arts, as well. Very simply, scores are flat or in…
Kentucky has completed its fourth year of testing with the Common Core State Standards aligned Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) tests in reading and mathematics. It is time to start asking whether or not Kentucky’s new tests are showing signs of inflation. This post closes out our examination of this important concern with…
Kentucky has completed its fourth year of testing with the Common Core State Standards aligned Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) tests in reading and mathematics. It is time to start asking whether or not Kentucky’s new tests are showing signs of inflation. In Parts 1 and 2 of this blog series we examined…
Kentucky has completed its fourth year of testing with the Common Core State Standards aligned Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) tests in reading and mathematics. It is time to start asking whether or not Kentucky’s new tests are showing signs of inflation. In the Part 1 blog in this series we examined the…
Kentucky has completed its fourth year of testing with Common-Core-State-Standards-aligned Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (KPREP) tests in reading and mathematics. Because inflation in the state’s earlier reform test programs – the first one known as KIRIS and the second as the CATS Kentucky Core Content Tests – proved problematic, it is time to…
On Nov. 9 the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) made a presentation to the state legislature’s Elementary and Secondary Education Committee about how standards, curriculum and testing are supposedly created in Kentucky. The presentation was highly problematic. Two flow charts used in that presentation, “Implementation of New Standards” and the “Academic Standards Development Process” (both…
The Courier-Journal ran an Op-Ed a couple of days ago about “Why teachers embrace Kentucky science standards.” It was written by a teacher from Boyd County. The article says “Boyd County serves as a model – and hopefully a catalyst – for other district and school leaders.” If so, we might be in trouble. Boyd…