In a stunning development, the central committee of the Washington State Democratic Party just adopted a resolution against Common Core State Standards. Suddently, Common Core is rubbing more than just Republican Party groups the wrong way.
Could a charter school system have worked better? Louisville’s Robert Frost Middle School and Myers Middle School have been a major problem for years. Frost was tagged as a Persistently Low-Achieving School (PLAs) in the very first “Cohort” named in the spring of 2010. Myers followed into Persistently Low-Achieving status about a year and a…
Is that really right? Could a true rate only be around 47 percent??? New data from the US Department of Education indicates that Kentucky’s 2012-13 high school graduation rate of 86 percent was only exceeded by nine other states. This rate is also notably higher than the US average of 81 percent. Those new numbers…
Regardless of your feelings about the Common Core State Standards, you have to admit that it has given the comedy crowd some interesting material. For example: The Colbert ReportGet More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive So, is it the Common Core itself that is bad? Is it only the attempt to…
We hear the question in this blog’s title a lot. It’s based on findings in a number of reports about charter schools such as the now famous (infamous?) 2009 CREDO study, “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.” The claim that only 17 percent of charter schools outperform traditional public schools comes from that…
Last week we examined Kentucky’s chronic problem with white versus black academic achievement gaps. We learned the problem is very long term from evidence in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We saw that EXPLORE, PLAN and even the ACT college entrance testing in Kentucky along with the Bluegrass State’s own KPREP testing show serious…
Oh, the irony! The Hechinger Report says, in 2009 and 2010 Jason Zimba was hard at work as one of the three major writers of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. Those standards were published in June of 2010 and Zimba moved on to other things. Flash forward to the present, and Zimba now…
This week we have examined Kentucky’s long-term problem with white versus black academic achievement gaps. We learned the problem is very long term from evidence in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We saw that more recently three tests from ACT, Inc., show serious and growing gap problems for our eighth and tenth grade students…
Kentuckians heard it until it came out of their ears. The 2013 edition of Education Week newspaper’s annual Quality Counts report dubiously ranked Kentucky’s education at 10th best in the nation. We heard this 10th place stuff from major newspapers. We heard it from the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. We heard it from the Kentucky…
Kentucky’s public education system continues to face a number of problems, but one of the most serious problems involves the state’s chronic white minus black achievement gaps. We previously examined long term gap trends from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the EXPLORE and PLAN tests from ACT, Inc. Today, we’ll look at test…