Unfinished business

Penny Sanders, Kentucky’s first-ever director of the Office of Education Accountability, has been involved with KERA from the get-go.

So, comments in her post about “Unfinished Business” are worth everyone’s time to read.

I talked to Penny about “Unfinished Business,” and she definitely thinks it is time to look at charter schools as a way to deal with the chronic under-performing schools in the state.

By the way, Penny updates from her initial cursory analysis: there are actually several districts besides Jefferson County which had more than one Tier 5 charter school in 2009. Those are Christian County with three Tier 5 schools, and Floyd and Hardin Counties, with two Tier 5 schools each.

That doesn’t change Penny’s point that the bulk of the Tier 5 schools are in Louisville. Like us at the Bluegrass Institute, Penny says it is time to finally do something better for the kids in those schools and to start paying more than lip service to the idea that after so many years of failure, educators in chronically poor performing schools should be facing real consequences.