I share those thoughts, but I didn’t write them. They actually come from an October 25, 2013 Education Week Blogs piece from Marc Tucker. Tucker actually says of the recent study that attempted to match scores for the states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to scores from an entirely different international test: “Nice,…
The American Thinker just published an excellent article by Bruce Deitrick Price about “Sages on Stages Desperately Needed.” Price summarizes the pitfalls in supposedly “new” education methods being ushered in as a result of the Common Core State Standards. The problem is, these education ideas are not new. Worse, these education philosophies were already tried…
It seems a little ironic. A new report came out today claiming that US eighth graders in most states score somewhat above the international average on math and science tests. Aside from some concerns about the methodology employed in this report, somehow I cannot get excited about the US scoring somewhat above the international average…
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has been a darling of many in the Kentucky education community of late, getting favorable comments from a number of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) supporters like the Prichard Committee’s Stu Silberman and Bob King, the President of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary…
I suspect that the New York Times knows more about its city’s charter schools than a statistics guy from Jefferson County Public Schools, so a new article from that newspaper about the Big Apples’ charter schools caught my eye today. While admitting that charters in New York can still be improved, the Times says: “There’s…
One of the biggest problems in analyzing the performance of charter school students versus traditional public school students is finding an appropriate comparison sample of traditional public school students for the study. To date, one of the best research approaches to deal with that problem takes advantage of the fact that many charter schools are…
We’ve written many times in the past about deceptive reporting in Jefferson County’s “Every1Reads” program such as here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and even here, way back in 2008. The issue: the Jefferson County school system – in an attempt to grossly inflate its true performance on teaching students to read…
One of the more important tests taken by Kentucky’s public school students is the ACT’s PLAN test, which is given to all the state’s 10th grade students. Like the K-PREP test results for math and reading I discussed earlier, the new PLAN results also show African-American students generally falling farther behind whites than they did…
Heartland Institute’s Common Core State Standards expert Joy Pullman just posted a new article about what goes on in really top performing schools in this country. She says top public schools know they must teach “More than Core” for their kids to really be successful. How much more? Referring to the BASIS charter schools, Pullman…
Reports of the school-aged population in the United States scoring lower on international testing are old hat these days, but a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the mathematical and technical skill level of adults in its member nations is raising eyebrows from New York to the West Coast.…