While I work on some more about the current flare up over the lack of performance in Jefferson County’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools, you might want to take a look at this old blog from nearly two years ago.
Among other things, note the hollow promises from the former superintendent in Jefferson County, Dr. Sheldon Berman, that these schools “are going to post ‘phenomenal gains’ in test scores.”
Talk about a lack of insight.
Talk about setting up the school board.
Should the state take over schools in Louisville? Courier-Journal is polling right now.
Note: Jefferson County Board of Education has regular meeting tonight. Should be interesting.
Sunday’s Courier-Journal article about the latest problems in the Jefferson County Public Schools, “JCPS blasted in what education chief calls ‘academic genocide,’” has to be one of the most inflammatory articles about education that I have seen in the past 20 years.
It’s past time for such reporting to occur. It should wake a lot of people up about what is really happening in JCPS schools.
Some of the most ‘interesting’ comments in this news piece come from Brent McKim, head of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, the local teachers union.
McKim claims:
“As president of the union, I know we have been doing everything we can possibly do to support these schools. Everyone in the priority schools is cooperating with the requests from the state.”
Really?
Let’s talk about an official report on teachers union collective bargaining agreements from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA), which is on line as Legislative Research Commission’s Research Report #377.
This report shows the union was definitely involved with the restaffing of the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (PLAs) (Now Called Priority Schools), a process which left a number of the first round of schools with huge numbers of highly inexperienced teachers.
Want to see what the OEA had to say about this?
Just click the “Read more” link.
There is plenty of evidence that many teachers need to upgrade their skills if our kids are to achieve the kind of educational success we all want for them. So, there has been a lot of emphasis recently on making teacher evaluations more meaningful and useful. And, a number of states are ahead of Kentucky in introducing revised teacher evaluation programs.
Unfortunately, Education Week reports in “Teachers’ Ratings Still High Despite New Measures” (Subscription?) that early results from recently revamped teacher evaluations in states like Michigan, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia still are coming up short. Despite revisions, principals and others are still ranking enormously high percentages of teachers in those states as good or better. In some of these states with new programs, satisfactory rankings are being given to 97 percent or more of the teachers.
That just won’t work.
Take a look at what the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the ACT college entrance test results look like for some states with recently revised teacher evaluation systems.
Given that education statistics don’t usually change very quickly, and with such low percentages of students passing muster in both middle and high schools, it is clear that nowhere close nearly every teacher in these states is likely to be doing a really great, or even terribly good, job.
These teachers don’t necessarily need to be let go, but they desperately need someone to show them where their weaknesses lie and to insure something is done to deal with those weaknesses. Pretending there are no weaknesses is no way to make improvement.
As EdWeek points out:
“Those results, among the first trickling out from states’ newly revamped yardsticks, paint a picture of a K-12 system that remains hesitant to differentiate between the best and the weakest performers—as well as among all those in the middle doing a solid job who still have room to improve.”
While these are only early returns, it still could be that lots of critics are right and the traditional public school system simply isn’t up to the challenge of making real change where it counts – with our teaching corps.
The subject of Kentucky’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (PLAs) – which have been euphemistically renamed “Priority Schools” – came up in yesterday’s meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education. I am still sifting through a large amount of information that was presented, but the overall summation of this expensive program is disappointing.
Kentucky Department of Education Associate Commissioner Susan Allred said that only 17 of the 41 PLAs/Priority Schools were making progress despite massive amounts of money and external staff assistance. That means only 41 percent of the schools are getting bang for the considerable millions of bucks (over $32 million and still growing) that have been loaded into this program.
Overall, a clear majority of these very low performing schools – 22 of them – are not progressing.
Even the department of education admits it.
Many of the laggards are in Jefferson County.
Does anyone really need any more evidence that Kentucky needs to try something different? Throwing more money at the same old, “adult interests” (read – UNION) dominated traditional public school system isn’t working for far too many students.
If Kentucky had gone with charter schools models when the PLAs program started (which was done in other states) instead of trying to shoehorn something into the unresponsive, traditional public school system, might kids in all 41 PLAs now be getting benefits?
Turning around low-performing schools takes imaginative and talented leaders who have not just accountability but also the authority to select and manage, and yes, fire, staff when necessary without fetters of the “adult interests” getting in the way of what is best for kids. States with good charter school laws have that.
Meanwhile, kids in low-performing schools in Kentucky, which has no charter schools, simply are getting left behind. Even the Kentucky Department of Education admits that. How much longer will we go on treating “adult interests” as more important than our kids?
The Bluegrass Institute recently sat down to talk about public education in Kentucky with Billy Harper, who recently completed a four-year term on the Kentucky Board of Education
In this fourth segment, he talks about how better utilizing Kentucky’s alternative certification process for attracting quality instructors could help address the lack of science and math teachers. He also talks about the how “teaching to the test” is not a bad practice, “if you’re giving the right test, asking for the right information,” and the importance of our students learning foreign languages.
And although he supports a merit-pay system for teachers and that “student progress should be a critical part of that,” Harper also said it will take more time to properly implement such a system as administrators need training on properly conducting such evaluations.
Harper also shares interesting insights on curriculum, stressing that education fundamentals really do matter in the business world. He indicated that our teachers need more training on how to beef up their instruction in math, science and engineering, known as the STEM education areas.
View the other videos here.
The Eminence Independent School District is one of our four “Diamond in the Rough” school districts in our recent report “Bang for the Buck 2012” because it gets remarkably good academic performance despite relatively low funding and above state average student poverty.
Now, the word about Eminence’s progress and its dynamic superintendent, Buddy Berry, is finally getting around to education schools in the state.
Read about some of the exciting things happening for students in Eminence and why a lot more Kentucky educators need to catch Mr. Berry’s F.I.R.E., which is his “Framework of Innovation for Reinventing Education,” in this Murray Ledger post.
Education Week just published an article about states where the college system is producing too many elementary school teachers for the available jobs (subscription?).
Kentucky is an over-producer.
Per EdWeek, Kentucky has a demand for 730 new elementary school teachers but the supply from colleges is 1,275. That means 545 Kentucky college graduates won’t have jobs waiting for them in our elementary schools.
Kentucky’s education colleges clearly need to do a better job of explaining the job market to the state’s teacher candidates so those students can refocus on areas of short supply such as teaching middle and high school math and science.
Of course, you can’t effectively prepare to be a math or science teacher if your K to 12 schooling left you with deficient skills in those areas.
Indiana’s former state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett, lost his elected position in November 2012.
As an outgoing leader, Bennett was no longer under political pressure when he recently granted Indiana Star reporter Scott Elliot a 1-hour interview covering all sorts of education issues.
See for yourself how Bennett handles Elliot’s hard ball questions about education.
Along the way, you will learn some interesting things about charter schools in Indiana and a host of other issues such as the excessive interference of education unions with what works best for kids.
By the way, Indiana’s loss was quickly Florida’s gain. The Florida State Board of Education voted quickly – and unanimously – to hire Bennett as their chief state school officer.
Here’s something interesting.
Education Week is reporting (subscription?) on a new study that says elementary school age females get hurt in math if they are taught by a female teacher who isn’t strong in math.
In notable contrast, girls actually do better than boys when their female math teacher knows her stuff.
A strange finding that raises all sorts of interesting gender issues in the report is that elementary school boys taught by a female teacher weak in math don’t seem to be so adversely impacted as the girls.
Apparently, male math teachers who are not so well versed in math don’t have the same negative impact on either boys or girls.
Bottom line: kids are better off if teacher knows math, and since a strong majority of elementary school teachers are female, this is an important issue for almost every student.
