Jefferson County School Board member Linda Duncan pulled out of last night’s “Free to Learn” debate at the last moment — leaving us scrambling for someone willing to defend the position that Kentucky should not implement a parental school-choice policy. Here’s Louisville Public Radio WFPL’s coverage of this story, including my quote: “We will debate…
New results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) came out this morning, and once again US students were left behind by overseas competition. I’m still going through the report, which covers testing administered in 2012, but some scholars had a chance to review an advance copy, and their comments are already circulating by…
MUCH longer for racial minorities One of the more valuable features in Kentucky’s new Unbridled Learning public school accountability program is the fact that the state is now tracking how well our public high school graduates are being prepared for college and careers. Attention to college and career readiness was all but totally absent from…
For Immediate Release: Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013 Contact: Jim Waters 270-320-4376 (LOUISVILLE, Ky.) — “Free to Learn,” a series of three debates designed to tackle the issue of charter schools in Kentucky, will begin with the first debate at Southern Baptist Seminary’s Heeren Hall in Louisville on Tuesday, Dec. 3, at 6 p.m. The debate…
WFPL Radio has an interesting article up in their web site with an interactive graph and map that discusses the wide variation in school performance across various areas of Louisville. The graph shows that within each of the 13 geographic school clusters the elementary school performance varies dramatically. For example, in Cluster 3, schools scored…
Will big bucks facility at EKU produce for kids? A news article in the Richmond Register about Eastern Kentucky University’s $83 million plan to build a new combined facility for its education college and the special, on-campus K to 12 Model Laboratory Schools raises interesting questions. Is this EKU model really the right approach, and…
The recent news release about the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results from the Kentucky Department of Education omitted some of the early state data from this important program. That probably was done to keep the size of the tables manageable; however, omitting test results from 1996 and earlier creates a misconception about…
The new math and reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have unhappy news for Kentucky’s predominant racial minority. As this set of tables shows, scoring gaps increased (though supposedly by statistically insignificant amounts) for Kentucky’s whites and African-Americans in reading in both the fourth and eighth grade and in math in…
We’ve talked before here and here about the remarkable programs in the Taylor County public schools that meet all their students’ needs, along the way producing perfect high school graduation rates. Just like charter schools, Taylor County provides students with options to meet different needs and ambitions. In fact, Taylor County’s superintendent, Roger Cook, proudly…
While Kentucky’s educators crawl along with hand-slap reforms that do little to fundamentally shake up our existing, school-choice and true-reform-hostile public schools, down river in Memphis, Tennessee, a true revolution is under way – a revolution that won Tennessee an enormous first round grant from the Race to the Top competition (Kentucky’s relative lack of…