Says Show Me state cannot pay any money for the services In a stunning development in the on-going saga of the Common Core State Standards, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Daniel R. Green has ruled that the formation of the multi-state testing consortium known as the Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium violates provisions in the US Constitution as…
Kentuckians are well aware that “Performance” type testing creates all sorts of chaos for schools and students. It simply takes forever to grade this “stuff,” so results always come back too late. Kentucky now has a state law requiring testing be conducted near the end of the school year. As a consequence, the state’s KPREP…
Guest post by: Phyllis Sparks “…there are limits on a board’s authority and we are not permitted to usurp the authority of site based councils.” – Boone County School Board Member Ed Massie On behalf of the Board and Superintendent, December 2014 We often hear that local control is better. I firmly believe that government…
There is a lot of discussion going on right now about what tests to evaluate student performance under the Common Core State Standards should look like. A number of people, including some right here in Kentucky, are pressing for a return – yes, it will be a return – to something called “Performance Assessments.” The…
When it comes to judging school quality, we know that parents and legislators want to know how schools are doing with the “bread and butter” subjects of reading and math. We got more evidence of this priority when No Child Left Behind came along with its heavy focus on those two, pivotal subjects. So, my…
Were similar games already played with Kentucky’s high school graduation rates? There was a lot of “High Fiving” in Frankfort recently because the last school districts in Kentucky finally adopted a minimum high school dropout age of 18. It sounds positive. But, unfortunately, there is an obvious way for local schools to do an end…
Will this happen here? The Hechinger Report has a very disturbing article about how new replacement tests for the old GED are getting corrupted in New York. Per Hechinger, 20-year old Nurul Ali says he passed New York’s new replacement for the GED, the Test Assessing Secondary Completion, or TASC, even though he guessed at…
But, charter school bill advances, anyway The Kentucky Senate’s Education Committee voted on February 5, 2015 on the Senate Bill 8 to create a charter school pilot in Kentucky. During the discussion before the vote, Senator Reginald Thomas (D) Lexington, argued that charter schools are not required. Along the way he said several things that…
Education Week reports that testing for the Common Core State Standards isn’t going to be very “common” this year. According to EdWeek, only 46 percent of the nation’s public school students live in states that will use one of the two Common Core testing consortia tests this year. Those tests, now mostly known by their…
Yesterday the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Committee adopted what members of the Kentucky Department of Education characterized Wednesday as a “Cadillac Charter School Bill.” The bill, Senate Bill 8 next faces a vote in the Kentucky Senate. SB-8 contains many excellent charter school features. Professor Wayne Lewis from the University of Kentucky (a charter school expert…