Prichard Committee starting to sound like the Bluegrass Institute

It’s been a long time coming, but the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence’s blog is starting to sound a lot like our site.

In the past few days, the Prichard blog has posted such items as “Joe Brothers' Mighty Question” and “Achievement gaps remain severe.”

The first item contains Kentucky Board of Education chair Joe Brother’s frustrated comments from October 9, 2009 about proposals to deal with Kentucky’s chronically failing schools. As quoted by Prichard, Brother’s poses a plaintive question, “I came on the local board in 1987. What you just said to me is no different than what I heard in 1987. So why should I be hopeful?” (Side note: you can listen to Brothers’ comments from the Kentucky Board of Education Webcast here. Set the time slider to 1:36:44 to catch the beginning of his statement of frustration).

The second Prichard post agonizes about the continuing education gaps in Kentucky, especially for African-Americans, Hispanics, low income students and students with limited English proficiency.

The sorts of things that Prichard is starting to say have been standard comments at the Bluegrass Institute for years.

In fact, the evidence has been obvious for some time. Now, it has become so overwhelming that even Prichard – a key intellectual source of those things that Mr. Brothers has been hearing for the past 23 years (Side note: the period from 1987 to 2009 includes 23 years, not 25 years as Prichard incorrectly computed) – can’t ignore the problems any longer.

If Prichard had joined with us back in the early days of the Bluegrass Institute, we could have started revising our education standards and the CATS assessments years ago. We could have joined the 40 other states that already have charter school laws. And, we could have seen innovative school models like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools already working in inner-city Louisville, helping to cut the achievement gaps the way similar charter schools are doing in New York City today.