Newspaper: Jefferson County School Board flunking “Transparency 101” -- Continued

I wrote yesterday about the Jefferson County School system evaluating their superintendent behind closed doors.

I wondered why the board might want to do the evaluation in secret since, per the Courier-Journal, “Berman…thought his evaluation was positive.”

So, I did a little digging this morning on the district’s performance on CATS and No Child Left Behind. The graph summarizes what I found.


The 2007-08 Growth Factor Ethnic Membership Excel spreadsheet from the Kentucky Department of Education shows there were 648,628 students in Kentucky’s public schools in that school year and 93,941 of them – 14.5 percent – were in Jefferson County.

However, my analysis of the department’s 2008 NCLB Media Report shows 22 of the 34 schools in the lowest performance category, Tier 5, were found in Jefferson County. That’s 64.7 percent of all the Tier 5 schools (note that one school listed as Tier 5 in this report was actually Tier 4 per the KDE).

In CATS, the relevant Excel Spreadsheet titled “District Datafiles for importing into Databases or Spreadsheet Applications” shows 10 of the state’s 26 schools – 38.5 percent – that scored in the lowest performance category of “Assistance” were in Jefferson County. Among the very lowest CATS performers, those in “Assistance Level 3,” Jefferson County had a whopping 75.0 percent share.

But, Superintendent Berman felt his review from the Jefferson County School Board was positive. Since we have no clue what the board even looked at, and since so far no board member has challenged Dr. Berman’s opinion, I am left wondering exactly what they looked at and what they were thinking.