The Real ACT Deal

Back last August when the overall average ACT scores for all 2008 high school graduates came out, I cautioned that the overall scores might be impacted by the performance of students who didn’t attend public schools.

I was right.

Finally, through the good offices of State Senator Jack Westwood (Thank You to this supporter of government transparency), I have obtained a data disk with 2008 ACT scores and participation numbers for all the public high schools in Kentucky. When this data is combined with the overall averages and participation numbers for the state, it is possible to determine how the public schools did separately from the performance of other-than-public-school graduates.

The graph tells the tale.


As you can see, the public and other-than-public-school ACT Composite scores in Kentucky actually became equal in 1998. This was a time when many parents were “bailing out” of Kentucky’s KERA-driven public schools. Those poorly prepared transfer students dragged down the other-than-public-school average scores dramatically.

Times change. The greater flexibility in private and home school systems allowed these non-public alternatives to adjust to their vastly increased student load (which nearly doubled during the years covered in the figure), and the results since 1998 are obvious, and unmistakable.

Starting from the same point in 1998, Kentucky’s public school alternatives have significantly outperformed public schools on the ACT Composite.

Furthermore, because there are now notable numbers of Kentucky kids in other-than-public-school programs (which includes home schoolers), the non-public students' much higher ACT averages pulled up the overall average score notably in 2008.

As the graph shows, by themselves, Kentucky’s public schools only increased their ACT composite by 0.4 points since 1998.

In very sharp contrast, the other than public Composite skyrocketed from 20.2 to 22.2 in the same time interval. In fact, that 2008 Composite score for private schools was 0.4 points higher than the other-than-public-school Composite way back in 1993 (the earliest data I have). However, only 2,668 other-than-public-school students took the 1993 tests while 5,257 did in 2008, an increase in other-than-public-school enrollment of almost 100 percent. Often, as ACT participation increases, scores go down, but that obviously didn’t happen in Kentucky.

Well done, schools of choice!

Stupid is as stupid subsidizes

Hard to miss the irony of this past week when a Kentucky Senate committee had a hearing on government spending transparency just as twin legislative secrecy bills were offered by the leaders of each chamber (here and here).

By the same token, our lawmakers seem increasingly determined to give taxpayer money to motion picture productions just as Wisconsin is trying to dump their movie subsidies program and Pennsylvania has figured out that they are losing $57 million a year on their scheme to bring Hollywood to the Keystone State.

Obamulus for Kentucky won't touch this

When billionaire investor Warren Buffett speaks, people usually listen. Politicians at every level of government in Kentucky should hear this, from his annual letter to shareholders sent out yesterday:

"Local governments are going to face far tougher fiscal problems in the future than they have to date."
"The pension liabilities I talked about in last year’s report will be a huge contributor to these woes. Many cities and states were surely horrified when they inspected the status of their funding at yearend 2008. The gap between
assets and a realistic actuarial valuation of present liabilities is simply staggering."

Kentucky's failure to get a handle on its public employee pension and healthcare liabilities, compounded by this year's insane $50 million raid, should be enough to wake everyone up. But they probably won't.

Not until all the other government goodies everyone is used to start getting crowded out by the "staggering" payments that lie ahead of us.

Government Transparency

– What we mean in just three sentences

1) Can you find the information?

2) If you find it, can you read it and understand it?

Finally,

3) Does it tell you what you need to know?

Hon. Maurice McTigue
Former New Zealand Member of Parliament and Cabinet Member
Vice President, Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Director of the Government Accountability Project

If you have to ask, you can't afford it

Gov. Steve Beshear makes his pitch for tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to go to his NASCAR buddy without actually mentioning the price tag.

Go figure.

Transparency promise fails to 'stimulate'

If, after promising to make state government more transparent, Gov. Steve Beshear is now dragging his feet on putting Kentucky's checkbook on line in any kind of useful manner, why should we believe his promise to provide transparency in keeping taxpayers informed on how the commonwealth spends its expected $3.2 billion share of the federal bailout plan? One thing you should believe in the governor's statement: "This is one-time money." So, when Beshear talks about a shortfall when the next budget session comes around, we need to be sure his claims don't include programs and agencies created by this "one-time money." We'll see.

Writing portfolios: How about this?

I don’t think anyone disputes the value of writing.

The issue is whether our teachers will continue to teach writing, or even teach it better, if we pull Writing Portfolios out of CATS.

So far, I would argue that the combined evidence from extensive teacher complaints about awkward CATS Writing Portfolio scoring rules (69 percent in one recent report want them out) coupled with Kentucky’s marginal performance on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 8th grade writing assessment as shown here and unending criticism of portfolio scoring accuracy indicate it is worthwhile to try something else.

Kentucky only statistically significantly outscored just 5 of the 45 states that participated in NAEP writing in 2007. We only got a statistical tie for writing proficiency with California where a far smaller proportion of kids were excluded and one-in-five was still learning English as a Second Language).

But, here is a suggestion. The NAEP will again test writing in 2011. That gives us two years to teach writing without portfolios in CATS. We can put portfolios back in if the NAEP results decay. On the other hand, if our NAEP results notably improve, then everyone can be comfortable it is the right choice to keep portfolios out of the accountability program. After all, Kentucky is apparently the only state still using portfolios for accountability, according to discussions during the Assessment and Accountability Task Force.

So, readers, what do you think? Is this worth a try?

CATS – Later Than Ever?

Blame this one on the weather – at least in part – but a bill just out of the Kentucky House to allow schools to delete up to 10 days from this school term is now headed towards the Kentucky Senate.

It looks like a proposal to delay the CATS testing commensurately may be added to the legislation. That will delay the return of scores to schools to the point of ridiculousness.

In fact, Sen. Joey Pendleton, D-Hopkinsville, says he would favor either a CATS delay or even dropping the assessment all together for this year.

Of course, because portions of CATS are required for NCLB, the feds would have to buy off on that. But, dropping the non-NCLB parts of the assessment would free up a lot of days for more instruction – instruction that otherwise will be lost due to the winter storms.

There might even be some cost-savings.

So Senator Pendleton’s radical-sounding idea actually might make sense.

Best guess: Our legislators will basically say the heck with instruction and go for testing as usual, anyway. That will probably mean scores won’t come back before October, at the earliest, far too late for schools to get much of value from them.

It sure might make sense to cancel all the non-NCLB stuff in CATS so our kids could recover at least some of the lost academics. And, since we were declared a federal disaster area, maybe the feds would give us some slack on the NCLB stuff, as well. It never hurts to ask.

"The 2nd Amendment isn't about duck hunting"

Kentucky - where media ignorance pays!

Please help me understand this.

We keep taxes too high in Kentucky so we can pay a group of unaccountable bureaucrats to use some of that money to bribe other companies to come here from out of state. And The Lexington Herald Leader calls this job creation?

Looks to me like misallocation of resources.

If Frankfort can grasp that lower taxes attract business from higher tax states, why can't we at least try lowering taxes for everyone and walking away from the "incentives" shell game? Doesn't it make sense that spreading the benefits more widely would work better than letting the government select a few winners by overtaxing everyone else?

On the other hand, given the lack of demonstrated efficacy shown by this program, maybe they should pursue federal credits as a faith-based initiative.

Check out HB 229 yourself by clicking here.

Kentucky Fried Teeth

Kentucky blogger Cyberhillbilly picked up on an effort to stop subsidizing purchases of soft drinks with food stamp money:

"Maybe it's time Kentucky looked at banning the soda from being purchased via food stamps. The American Dental Association has already proposed a ban nationwide. Apparently such an effort would require a federal waiver, but we could at least seek such a course."

Here's more.

One might think Gov. Steve Beshear and friends could take a break from counting the billions of dollars in new federal money they have coming in to get this done quickly.

Bluegrass, Mercatus tag team Frankfort

High Dropout Rates –

Too Many Still Ignoring Them

“One of the first steps for anyone wanting to reduce the dropout rate in a community may be to convince others that a dropout problem exists.”

From: Reducing Dropout Rates - “Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis”

Education Week Subscription Required).

It’s nice to see that the Gates Foundation and others who supported this new report agree that a major problem exists with graduation rates in this country. The only question is why they took so long to see the obvious.

Of course, understanding the real dropout problem in Kentucky is made far harder because the official graduation and dropout rate reports paint far too rosy a picture. While our legislators seem happy to mostly just stand by, even after an official audit condemned the accuracy of our dropout rate reporting, the Kentucky Department of Education continues to crank out fictional graduation rates about 10 points higher than the likely reality.

The situation for minority dropout reporting is even worse. Aside from an overall, statewide average, there isn’t any decent reporting of disaggregated rates for minority graduation rates. The Bluegrass Institute had to use an approximation measure from Johns Hopkins University to do our “How Whites and Blacks Perform in Jefferson County Public Schools” report because not one school leader in this state is held separately accountable for biases in whom they do graduate.

Graduation rates are part of the CATS accountability system; but, no one in the legislature is talking about requiring this part of the assessment to become more accurate. After all, when all you see are inflated numbers, it’s easy to be fooled – if you want to be. Meanwhile, far too many kids don’t just get left behind – they get left out all together.

Mayor Newberry, call Obama's PR guys

Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry, fresh off his Fox News flogging for failure to put specifics to the promise that Spendulus 2009 will "create" jobs, is at again.

In an email he sent out this morning, he is still claiming the bailout of cities and states will create jobs. Team Obama has long-since figured out the way to avoid accountability for their claims is to state they will be "creating or saving jobs."

It's clear President Obama has access to higher quality spinmeisters than Mayor Newberry does:

Please watch and share our new video

Obama to bail out Big Health

If Gov. Steve Beshear could set aside politics for a minute and look at healthcare reality, he would do everything in his power to exempt Kentucky from this:


Kentucky's health insurance market has actually recovered fairly well from its failed government takeover in 1994. Other states like California and New York, meanwhile have gone in the opposite direction in the name of "fairness" or some such gobbledygook.

Make a note of what medical costs are now. Painful experience with decades of increasing government involvement in U.S. healthcare should convince all of us that ten years of ObamaCare will have disastrous results.

What Big Media doesn't want you to know

When there are taxes to be raised or a failed education system to prop up, The Lexington Herald Leader is the place to go.

But if you are looking for help forcing state and local governments to post their checkbooks online for everyone to see, they are asleep at the wheel.

Here is why:

If goons like the bureaucrats at the Lexington airport knew that if they rented strippers and bought guns with taxpayer money their expenditures would be posted to the internet and everyone would know, they would spend more time working and less messing around.

No messing around, no scandal. No scandal, no opportunity for a political figure friend to "investigate" the big story. And no big story.

Big stories sell newspapers.

If Kentucky's First Amendment-protected newspapers were as interested in preventing scandals as they are in reporting on them, they would advocate for government transparency.

I'm headed to Frankfort to hear testimony in the Senate State and Local Government Committee about how spending transparency improves government. Interesting to see if any reporters cover that.

Gov. Beshear, are you getting any of this?

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear is pretty hot on digging into his bowl full of stimulus. But before he does, he may want to notice that one of those wacky Republican Governors threatening to reject unemployment compensation expansion money because it creates an unaffordable unfunded mandate is Tennessee's Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen:

Gov. Beshear has been toying with the idea of doing something positive with unemployment insurance in Kentucky for several weeks. Now is his chance.

Now, let's agree on one of the best

The Louisville Courier Journal is right that SB 188 isn't such a hot idea.

It would be nice if the editorial board would join us in support of posting all government contracts and individual expenditures to searchable databases on the internet.

That would be the antidote to all this sneaky stuff.

Kentucky booze tax all set to fail

In case you had any doubt that the tax increase and pension raid earlier this month in Frankfort would hit you soon, you can't doubt it now. In addition to the $50 million pension raid everyone gets to pay back, fewer people are smoking and, now, fewer people are drinking beer.

This matters, of course, because Frankfort has already spent projected revenue gains from their new tax increases. By the time everyone knows that isn't going to work out, they will be back to hit us up again.

Media coverage of transparency really stinks

Ho hum. Another day, another news article failing to grasp the point of government spending tranparency. This time, it's USA Today:


Kentucky's transparency web site doesn't shine light on much of anything.

We will have spending transparency in Kentucky when a check is written in the name of the taxpayers and we can tell what that check purchased and why. We haven't even gotten to square one.

Frankfort may have satisfied their friends in the mainstream media, but they haven't provided us with transparency yet.

Medicaid bailout delays right-sizing in KY

If you understand how giving giving federal tax dollars to auto manufacturers who can't survive with more federal tax dollars hurts both the car companies, their employees, and taxpayers, then you may doubt the wisdom in throwing more borrowed federal money at states' busted Medicaid budgets.

How about $15.2 billion?

Of course, Kentucky's share is only $205 million, which is about half what really-big-government states New York and Massachusetts are getting on a per capita basis. But still, this only encourages us to tax and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on entitlements. Probably not the best plan when we already overspend on this every year.

When will we learn? Apparently, not soon.

Bailout ad absurdum

So let me get this straight:

Indiana's racinos and casinos have cannibalized each other to the point that racinos (casinos at horse tracks) are asking for a state government bailout. Horse industry people who lobbied for the racinos to "save" horse racing now say they need a bailout, too.

Kentucky horse industry people say they need racinos to "save" horse racing.


Hmmmmm...

CATS Crowd Really Getting Desperate

The “Keep CATS at All Costs” crowd is clearly getting desperate. Their latest shot, fired from the pen of Jack D. Foster, former secretary of education and humanities and a major architect of KERA, is a prime example.

While our economy shatters and we need government to reign in costs before we all go bankrupt, this education worthy proposes creating a vast new education assessment bureaucracy. This potentially huge agency would be staffed by “testing specialists,” who would emerge from who knows where, to run tests “at regular intervals” in every single classroom in this state.

See Foster’s incredibly out of touch test change proposition for yourself here.

Can you even begin to imagine how many extra people would be required to do this?

For starters, just think about the huge new per diem and travel costs this bureaucratic monster would suck up from our extremely strained state resources.

Then, think about how this would have to work. Will the tests be administered at the same time everywhere? If so, then a truly huge staff is indeed required.

If the testing is staggered, how can we insure that students and schools don’t pass test questions back and forth? Even if there is no cheating, how can we insure that the staggered admission tests are adjusted so that students who take them later don’t get an advantage simply from having spent more days in class? Would we need different tests for different days? That’s a hugely expensive proposition.

And, doesn’t this testing concept force us to adopt a statewide curriculum to insure that all classrooms cover exactly the same material in the same timeframe before the testers arrive?

This is just a short list of problems I see with this idea. CATS is too expensive now, but just wait if this incredibly bad idea is adopted by our spend-all-we-can-get, Draudmobile-Minded educators.

This isn't what we meant by "transparency"

Apparently Senate President David Williams and House Speaker Greg Stumbo, fresh off agreeing to raise taxes and raid the public employee health fund, are still looking for common ground.

Their next area of agreement appears to be giving the legislature extraordinary regulatory powers over the functions of the rest of state government, including secret meetings, reports that would not be subject to open records laws, and findings that would only be available to public view after an annual report is accepted by the legislature.

Senate Bill 188 is here. Speaker Stumbo told the Louisville Courier Journal he intends to file a similar bill on Monday.

I'm interested to hear why setting up a new, powerful government bureaucracy to police government activity and keep the public out is preferable to putting government activities such as spending and contracts on the internet for everyone to see.

Peace Corps in Reverse – in Kentucky!!!

What Happens When Your K to 12 Schools Don’t “Carry the Mail”

It looks like a national trend has come to Kentucky. The Herald-Leader reports that Lexington’s public school system has been hiring Filipinos as teachers to fill key shortage areas in math, science and technology and even special education. It seems the district is having trouble finding enough Americans to meet the need in these more academically demanding subjects.

Meanwhile, our CATS assessments have been telling us everything is getting better and better.

Sure!!!

Tax increase "gains" going up in smoke

This one is unbelievable.

Gov. Steve Beshear has been sending people door-to-door to sign up tens of thousands of new health insurance recipients at taxpayer expense and the federal government is going to pile on thousands more.

How, exactly, is this supposed to address Kentucky's spending problems?

The rest of the story is that the February 4th legislation was a 61 cent federal cigarette tax increase. That combined with Kentucky's 30 cent tax hike and fewer people smoking means less revenue going forward.

So we are increasing spending for a program we already can't afford. We are on our way to expanding government at the wrong time and burning through tax increase money and $50 million "borrowed" from the public employee health fund.

This is the part where a tax increase on the few comes after the rest of us.

Courier CATS Diatribe

Never has so much nonsense been assembled by so few to attempt to bamboozle so many

Today’s Courier-Journal opinion piece establishes a new low for factual ignorance.

To wit:

(1) The Courier charges that former Education Commissioner Jon Draud started the current process to revise (flatten in the Courier’s words) CATS.

Nonsense!

CATS was under attack, and rightfully so, long before Draud went over to the Department of Education. In fact, Draud’s opening remarks at the very first session of the Assessment and Accountability Task Force made it plain he didn’t want to hear about big changes to CATS.

Of course, the Courier could not know that. NOT ONE reporter was there (Courier included – what a way to run a newspaper!).

The meeting is all on video. See, hear and judge Draud’s comments for yourself here.

Draud makes it plain in the first couple of minutes that he doesn’t want to consider any major changes to CATS. Draud steamrollering CATS – absolutely not!

(2) The Courier alleges that CATS is unjustifiably maligned.
Well, let’s see. I guess the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary education is unjust to portray the dismal preparation of our recent high school graduates for college while the CATS cranks out ever increasing scores that indicate all is rosy, right?

(3) The Courier says it would be astonishingly stupid to remove writing portfolios from CATS.

Actually, it looks like bad educational practice to keep the portfolios in CATS. In fact, 69 percent of our teachers told Draud’s CATS Task Force that they wanted portfolios removed so they could start to teach writing properly.

Is the Courier calling the vast majority of our teachers astonishingly stupid? Nice job, Courier!

(4) The Courier says nationally norm-referenced tests (NRT) are set to grade a substantial number of students as failures.

That isn’t how NRTs report scores. NRTs rank kids on a percentile scale that doesn’t have a pass-fail score at all.

I wonder where the Courier gets such quaint ideas. They certainly don’t know much about testing.

(5) The Courier says throwing open the state’s education standards for review would dumb down the curriculum.

I don’t know what research the Courier has been looking at, but the “real stuff” says in areas like math that state curriculums around the US fail kids because they are a “mile wide and an inch deep.” You bet we need to focus our curriculum. Trying to teach far too much just means most kids wind up learning far too little. That’s why, after nearly two decades of KERA, our kids still test out at something like one of three to one of four proficient in the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Well, I suppose the people who create that federal test are trying to steamroller CATS, too.

Yeah, Right!

Friday "Good grief!" alert

Gov. Steve Beshear will be on ABC's 20/20 tonight to stand up for Kentucky's honor after that networks "Children of the Mountains" program program about the vicious cycle of poverty in Eastern Kentucky.

He will also be on CNN at 8:30 tomorrow morning, according to a press release from his office.

Unfortunately, we have every reason to expect Beshear to continue to promote the idea that throwing more tax money and increasing dependency is what the region needs to bail them out.

The four decades long War on Poverty, after all, has been such a great success so far!

CATS Replaced – With National Education Standards???

Even as discussions about revising Kentucky’s CATS school assessments continue here, a national movement seems to be gathering more steam to push for one, US-wide set of education standards and tests.

The movement to standardize the current 50-state hodgepodge of public education standards has been around for some time, but even the Fordham Institute, a spin-off of what was once considered the fairly conservative Fordham Foundation, is now jumping into a leading position.

With the US Department of Education flush with billions of new bailout program dollars and the power that comes with that, and with the highly liberal crowd now in Washington not terribly respectful of traditional constitutional restraints, an education tsunami may indeed be getting triggered as I write this.

One thing is certain. If you think the “CATS” fight over standards and testing has been a howling mess here in Kentucky, just wait until you see the fight move to DC. There, all sorts of education interests will be fighting – tooth and nail – over the recently much fattened, multi-billion dollar education pie.

The worst thing they could do

Details on the federal "stimulus" keep coming in and they don't look good. The latest will lead to rapid expansion of the state Medicaid at a time state taxpayers need someone to protect them from this new, gathering storm:

Kentucky taxpayers are directly responsible for paying 30% of the bill for the state's Medicaid recipients. Growing deficits might, in a sane world, inspire state officials to try to reduce dependency on the program.

This bailout will wind up costing us more than we want to think about.

Frankfort's slow learners

Gov. Steve Beshear and his big-government friends in the Kentucky Education Department wouldn't let a little thing like not being able to afford the programs we already have stand in the way of adding on another one with dubious prospects at best:

There can be little doubt Beshear's 27-member task force will agree with his position that more money for an early ed scheme is a must have. And no fair mentioning that we don't have any idea how much of our education dollars are being wasted already!

School Choice – Residential “Bailout” Style

No, I’m not talking about stimulus money here. I’m talking about parents forced to go to rather extreme costs to “bail out” of a terribly under-performing school system – even if it means moving.

Such a “bailout” has been going on for years in Covington, Kentucky, home of the state’s worst performing school district. So many families have left that it’s now reported Covington may have to close several schools.

The Bluegrass Institute’s disappointment with the Covington Independent School System is no secret. We’ve written quite a lot about Kentucky’s lowest performing district on a number of occasions in places like here and here and here and here.

Obviously, we are not the only ones who are disappointed. But, isn’t it sad that Covington parents have to move to find decent schools. Why don’t they have good school alternatives right in Covington? Those alternatives could include some good charter schools – an alternative that is working elsewhere and that might finally spur Covington’s regular public schools into doing something effective to stem the loss of 1,000 students over the past decade – right in the middle of one of the fastest growing regions in the state.

Of course – looking on the bright side – when we finally get a serious charter school law in Kentucky, Covington will have empty real-estate available where we could set some up. Given Covington’s long history of poor performance, it would be a wonderful candidate for a charter.

Incentivizing ourselves in circles

In the last few hours, California and Wisconsin have joined the parade of states raising taxes during a recession.

If making government bigger really got us out of recessions, we wouldn't be in one, would we?

Meanwhile, Sen. Kathy Stein weighs in on government incentives (from the Kentucky Kernel):

"Stein, who held a seat in the House for the 75th district for 12 years, said one of her biggest accomplishments during that time was her involvement with the Kentucky Children’s Health Insurance Program (KCHIP)."
...
""We need to realize that unless we fund education, particularly higher education, Kentucky families can’t afford college education," she said. "We are discouraging people from behavior that we want by the legislature not supporting needs of the university.""

"Stein said she has worked closely with Todd with university issues, and she thinks he has done "an excellent job under the circumstances.""

"One of Stein’s goals is to move Kentucky away from being a state of lung cancer, heart disease and diabetes. She said studies show the best way to curve cigarette and tobacco use is by a higher taxation rate."

So let me get this straight: Stein wants to throw more money at college "affordability," a stategy that has spurred massive higher education inflation in Kentucky, and wants to raise cigarette taxes (and spend more on government health insurance) to incentivize better health habits.

This is very similar to the reasoning that now has the federal government bailing out bad mortgages after years of forcing banks to make high risk loans.

Who is still standing in Frankfort?

Only eleven members of the Kentucky House of Representatives last week voted against tax increases, raiding the health insurance trust fund, and allowing counties to underfund the same fund. They are:

Rep. Ron Crimm
Rep. Jim DeCesare
Rep. Myron Dossett
Rep. Bill Farmer
Rep. Joe Fischer
Rep. David Floyd
Rep. Brent Housman
Rep. Stan Lee
Rep. David Osborne
Rep. Marie Rader
Rep. Addia Wuchner

The county underfunding bill hasn't hit the Senate yet, but only Sen. Katie Stine is still standing in that chamber.

CATS Changes May Be Nearer

Here’s the latest on the bill to change CATS testing from the Courier-Journal.

What’s new here is that Representative Harry Moberly now seems willing to completely remove the writing portfolios from the assessment. Instead, these would be used as instructional tools with their use monitored by Frankfort (a plan we have supported for some time).

That’s a position change for Moberly. During hearings at the Kentucky Department of Education’s Assessment and Accountability Task Force last year, Moberly at one point bemoaned removing portfolios from CATS. Apparently, Moberly has now seen and heard enough to finally see that a portfolio change is in Kentucky’s best interests.

You can see how using portfolios in CATS ties our writing teachers’ hands by watching this video.



Maybe Representative Moberly has seen it, too.

Newberry astroturfs himself

This is embarrassing. Can't imagine why Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry's political "folks" thought it would be a good idea for him to go on Fox News and call astroturf soccer fields "infrastructure," but that is what he did.

The media opportunity wasn't exactly an efficient use of public resources, Mr. Newberry. Hope your three minutes in the spotlight was fun.

Go here to see for yourself.

Kentucky's Poor Students' NAEP Performance

I haven’t spent much time looking at how the educational achievement of Kentucky’s poor kids compare to poor kids in other states.

For one thing, the data on poor student performance isn’t as extensive as I’d like. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) does list separate state scores for students eligible for the federal school lunch program – the usual proxy for student poverty in education studies – but only since 1996 or 1998, depending upon the academic subject.

Also, none of the publicly available NAEP data sets list rates of exclusion and accommodation for the poor students in each state. State to state demographic differences for poor students are not publicly available, either. Those are important issues in any NAEP analysis, as I have pointed out before.

Because NAEP didn’t report the information before 1996, until recently there wasn’t much of a NAEP trend line for poor students to study. In education a trend line is normally far more revealing than single point-in-time data. Despite these issues, Susan Weston at the Prichard Committee just posted a Blog on “Student performance and low family income,” so, I decided to take a look at how Kentucky’s poor students rank against poor students in other parts of the country. The graph below shows what I found.



This graph shows Kentucky’s rank among the states in various assessments in percentile format. Percentile reporting is necessary because all 50 states didn’t participate in all of the NAEP assessments. For example, in Grade 4 NAEP Reading in 1998, 39 states participated and Kentucky’s poor students ranked 12th, outscoring poor kids in 27 other states. So, Kentucky outscored 27/39, or 69 percent of the states that participated. Our poor kids’ performance increased slightly in 2007 when the state outscored poor kids in 37 of the 50 states that participated in that assessment, achieving a 74 percentile score.

Unfortunately, NAEP Grade 4 Reading provides one of only two positive trends for Kentucky in the NAEP results shown in the graph. In sharp contrast, our poor students lost notable ground compared to other states in NAEP Grade 8 Reading, Grade 8 Writing, and Grade 4 Math.

Also notice that for as far back as the NAEP reports the data, Kentucky’s poor students perform around, or even above, the state median (the 50th percentile). The existing trends tend to imply that our poor students probably did not score anywhere near the bottom of the states when KERA was enacted, though completely conclusive evidence about that simply isn’t available.

Certainly, when we look at NAEP changes over time for Kentucky’s poor kids, the picture painted is quite different from the one Ms. Weston creates.

Again, I caution that the rankings shown here probably have some error due to variations in exclusion and accommodation rates, and because the other states experienced some pretty dramatic demographic shifts in student populations over time. Unfortunately, because the NAEP does not separately provide information on those issues for students in the federal lunch program, there is no way to really gauge the possible impacts. However, if the overall exclusion, accommodation, and demographic data for all students in Kentucky are reflected in the poor student population, then the rankings shown in the graph above are too high.

The Weimar President

No discussion of hyperinflation in a developed country (which happens when a government prints up too much money and slings it around wildly) is complete without mention of the old Weimar Republic.

President Barack Obama's rhetoric is every bit as inflated. What's really wild is how the media has joined in the fun while keeping a straight face.

First, who really believes Barack Obama is going to "save" the economy? (Please argue this point with me!) Second, unless they are actually going to buy up houses and prohibit their occupants from remortgaging, the phrase they are looking for is "delay the loss of 9 million homes."

Bursting the "rhetoric bubble" would at least help more of us to properly value all the cheap talk.

More people understand spending transparency

As Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and his friends in the General Assembly continue to play games with the promise to show taxpayers what is really going on with their money, a state Senator in New Jersey is up to speed.

Senator Joe Pennacchio, a member of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, called again on the Corzine Administration to move quickly to implement the Transparency in Government Act. The legislation would require that all government projects and expenditures be released to a website in real time.

"Today’s revenue numbers demonstrate, beyond a doubt how critical it is that the State of New Jersey release to the public all projects and expenditures in real time," Pennacchio stated. "In this time of economic distress, the public needs to know that their hard-earned tax dollars are not being mindlessly squandered by faceless Trenton politicians and bureaucrats."

A very positive sign in Frankfort, though, is news that Maurice McTigue of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is scheduled to testify to the Senate State and Local Government Committee next Wednesday at noon. McTigue is a champion of the transparent government.

Beshear still wants to race through our money

When Speedway Motorsports CEO Bruton Smith spoke about his company's new acquisition of Kentucky Motor Speedway six weeks ago, he sounded very enthusiastic about consumer demand drawing a major racing event to his new facility.

"We are extremely excited about the new opportunities this market is going to bring the company," said Smith. "Since we announced this acquisition in May, we have been overwhelmed with the response of fans expressing their support and desire for a Sprint Cup event at Kentucky Speedway."

"We will continue to work with NASCAR to bring a Sprint Cup race to this fine facility as soon as possible. We are going to do everything we can to bring the great people of Kentucky what they want and deserve."

That was on December 31, 2008.

What a difference six weeks makes. Today, Smith met with Gov. Steve Beshear in Frankfort and now it seems the Sprint Cup race can't happen without tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and proposed legislation expected to be filed Monday.

From Gov. Beshear's press release:

"Bruton Smith, chairman and CEO of Speedway Motorsports, Inc., owner of Kentucky Speedway, and Jerry Carroll, consultant to Speedway Motorsports, Inc. said today that passage of this legislation would put Kentucky in position to host the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, that sanctioning body’s top racing series."

""The impact of a NASCAR Sprint Series Cup race for Kentucky is undeniable," Gov. Beshear said. “NASCAR is the number one spectator sport in the United States and is broadcast in more than 150 countries and 30 languages. I’m excited about the potential of Kentucky joining these ranks.""

Sounds like a lot of money for taxpayers to spend for politicians to get photo-ops and for one business to complete an expansion it would likely do by itself without our money.

If our corporate taxes are too high, Gov. Beshear, why not just cut them for everyone instead of picking and choosing?

Jon Draud did not give state $40,000

If you read the Louisville Courier Journal's piece about the selling of former Education Commissioner Jon Draud's car on Ebay, you might be under the mistaken impression that he gave the state $40,000 in exchange for us eating a $6500 loss on the sale.

If you believe that, though, you didn't read about Draud getting $40,000 under the table from the legislature last year.

Draud should at least pick up the $6500 loss like he said he would. This boondoggle is just a tiny example of what happens to taxpayers when such a huge part of state government has such little accountability.

Where the skies are so blue...

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear has monkeyed around with promises to not raise taxes, to root out wasteful spending, and to put government expenditures online for quite a while now.

He could take notes from Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, who at least has a firm grasp on what government transparency can do for government and its citizens:

"You shouldn’t have to be an investigative reporter to find out how the state spends tax dollars. So with this executive order, we’re going to put the state’s checkbook online," Governor Riley said. "This reform empowers taxpayers to become fiscal watchdogs. With this website detailing the expenditures of all state funds, Alabama will take a giant leap forward in government transparency."

Beshear has now turned his attention to reforming economic development tax incentives. Can't wait to see how that turns out.

Requiring a government cow when milk is free

A bill working its way through the Kentucky General Assembly would add government bureaucracy and a series of taxes, fees, and fines to the cost of electronics equipment sold in Kentucky supposedly to create a recycling program.

And yet here is a list of companies who will provide the same services at no cost to consumers, retailers, manufacturers, taxpayers or anyone else.

Hmm. Problem solved? Or are we still going to look for a government solution?

Better to reform the right problem

Kentucky officials appear to have bipartisan agreement to ignore the reality of the state's spending problem and focus instead on pulling more money out of a citizenry that clearly can't handle the burden.

The often-repeated statistic about Kentucky's tax burden being 20 percent less than the national average usually ignores the fact that our income is below the national average by about the same amount.

Looks like we can expect Rep. Jim Wayne's tax increase bills (here and here) to get fast attention in Frankfort now that the dam has burst.

Still no word, however, on Gov. Beshear's efficiency study, education accounting irregularities, or wasteful labor policies to clean up the other side of the ledger.

There is no good reason why none of this is being addressed.

Should we drain brains or drain the swamp?

Former Bluegrass Institute staffer Caleb Brown recently received a letter requesting his support for a Kentucky state government program. He didn't just say no. He said this:

"I no longer live in Kentucky. Most of the people I went to GSP with no longer live in Kentucky. They found opportunities elsewhere. Why? Because Kentucky is not competitive. Kentucky has a bloated government, a punitive tax system, looming pension crises that threaten to crowd out future state infrastructure spending and a regimented, bureaucratic education system that - at every turn - has chosen to serve the needs of its employees over the needs of students and parents."

The rest of his thoughts are worth reading and can be found here.

It would helpful if some of our politically powerful citizens could take time away from congratulating themselves for their bravery in raising taxes and raiding pension funds to notice what their handiwork is accomplishing.

CATS Open-Response Writing Questions – Your Number is Up!

I am amazed by confused news articles popping up around Kentucky supporting retention of open-response questions in the state’s CATS school accountability tests. How can so many intelligent people be falling for this CATS bait-and-switch deal? Even if these questions do test higher order thinking, that knowledge isn’t being effectively transmitted back to schools. To learn why that happens, read on.

Shhhhhh.... (You've been raided)

If you depend on the mainstream media for your news, you may be under the mistaken impression that all you have to do is not smoke or drink to avoid the long arm of the lawmakers today.

Not so fast.

HB 144 raised "sin" taxes, but HB 143 raided the public employees health fund of $50 million.

That's on top of the more than $30 billion underfunding we already can't afford in the public employee fringe benefits plans.

Funny the Associated Press (in the Frankfort State Journal) didn't think that rated more than passing mention as "shifting of other state money."

Hemp pancakes, anyone?

Sen. Joey Pendleton has filed a bill to make growing hemp legal in Kentucky.

An easy opportunity to see transparency work

The Bluegrass Institute has made no secret of its desire to see more government operations made available to the public via the internet. This has primarily involved advocating timely publication of government expenditures to a searchable database for everyone to see.

While we wait for that, another opportunity may be at hand.

House Bill 187 would allow county governments to spend less money buying newspaper advertising to announce proposed ordinances. Why not, however, save even more money by removing the newspaper publishing mandate completely and require instead posting to the internet?

The bill is expected to pass the House easily on Friday.

"Grandma, what big tax incentives you have!"

The House Economic Development Committee approved a bill Thursday to expand state government tax incentive programs for businesses.

House Bill 229, however, doesn't address one simple question: "Do state economic development schemes really benefit the public or would lower taxes across the board be better?"

Seems that with the massive amount of resources devoted to "economic development" by the government, if there were real justification for the whole exercise they would surely let us know in detailed fashion.

This whole charade reminds me of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story and Kentuckians are going over the river and through the woods to get eaten by our grandmother.

More broken promises from Frankfort

The Kentucky Club for Growth today urged legislators not to back up on their promise to start digging us out of our more than $30 billion public pension hole and to vote against House Bill 117.

The Club's Andy Hightower asks the only question left to ask:

"HB 143, just passed, borrows significant sums from the retirement system. Now HB 117 would delay payments into the system. How much will the next bill take from the system?"

Seems like only last June they were promising us they were going to get serious about the largest hole in our state's finances.

In fact, it was only last June.

WEKU Radio’s Stu Johnson on KERA Issues Before the Legislature

Click the play button on the left side of the audio slider to hear this interesting commentary.

It’s gratifying that even Bob Sexton over at the Prichard Committee now agrees with a long-standing BIPPS position that our CATS school assessments need extensive reworking.

Also, note that Susan Weston continues to contend that Kentucky’s kids score about average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. We showed a few days ago that this certainly isn’t true for Kentucky’s White students, who comprise about 85 percent of the students in Kentucky’s public schools.

Gatesian Grammar – Must Come from Kentucky’s CATS Assessments

While I was putting together a response to another blog, this grammar correction ‘gem’ popped up in Microsoft Word.




This example of computer grammar correction run amuck relates to writing instruction in Kentucky.

Until very recently, Kentucky’s teachers graded writing on a “holistic” basis, meaning that the grade was based only on an overall impression. Spelling, grammar and punctuation were deemphasized in this scoring scheme.

One argument used to support this bad idea was the claim that spelling and grammar checkers in word processors made it unnecessary for kids to know the mechanics of writing.

Nearly two decades of our kids suffered under this crazy notion before Kentucky’s teachers were told to grade writing differently. Supposedly, spelling, grammar and punctuation matter once more (at least in those classes where the teacher has reasonable mastery of these skills herself – keep in mind some of today’s teachers learned writing as “KERA kids”).

Unfortunately, wrong-headed ideas about writing were staunchly defended and prevailed in Kentucky for far too long because educators refused to listen to reason.

Now, some of the same education crowd desperately clings to our dysfunctional CATS assessment program. Despite clear evidence that CATS scores are misleadingly inflated, untrustworthy and constantly getting more so, status quo educators have been dragging their heels. They wasted last year with their largely dysfunctional Assessment and Accountability Task Force, making it clear that they wanted to delay meaningful changes until after 2014. Now they just made it clear again that they would prefer to drag out any changes for maybe another half-decade or more.
Meanwhile, our kids would continue to suffer in a program loaded with too much test preparation and too little real education.

There’s a lesson here. Since KERA began, key state educators time and again have emphatically told us things that just were not right. After all these years, their credibility has worn a bit thin. Delay fixing CATS for another five years? If we listen to that bad advice, we’ll just be sacrificing another half-generation of our kids.

Gut check time for state Senators

Thirteen current Kentucky state Senators promised never to support tax increases. If they keep their word, their votes will be sufficient to force the governor to face up to wasteful spending policies.

They are twelve Republicans and one Democrat.

The Americans for Tax Reform tax pledge signers are Sen. Walter Blevins, Sen. Charlie Borders, Sen. Tom Buford, Sen. Julie Denton, Sen. Carroll Gibson, Sen. Ernie Harris, Sen. Dan Kelly, Sen. Vernie McGaha, Sen. Katie Stine, Sen. Robert Stivers, Sen. Gary Tapp, Sen. Elizabeth Tori, and Sen. Jack Westwood.

Yesterday's vote in the House doesn't inspire much confidence. Pledge signers who broke their promise included Democrats Rep. Keith Hall, Rep. Royce Adams, Rep. Bob Damron, Rep. Melvin Henley, Rep. Jim Gooch and Republicans Rep. Jeff Hoover, Rep. Lonnie Napier, Rep. Danny Ford, Rep. Bob Deweese, Rep. Jim Stewart, and Rep. Charlie Siler. Their 11 votes would have been more than enough to kill the tax hikes.

Who will they come for next?

Global warming got a huge boost from all the tax increase hot air on the House floor in Frankfort today. Rep. Stan Lee, however, went straight to the heart of the whole charade.

This is just the beginning of the tax increase effort from the House.

The "who's your daddy?" bill

The Family Foundation of Kentucky announced today its opposition to HB 28 with an interesting take on the bill:

"The bill, House Bill 28, would allow the father of child born from an adulterous relationship with a married woman to claim parental rights to the child even after the woman had reconciled with her husband. The bill would effectively overturn the Rhoades v. Rickett's decision in which the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled last year that the marriage prevailed over the biological father's claim."

"Proponents of the bill argue that the mere fact that a man is the biological father of a child is sufficient to warrant parental rights, but Cothran argued that this has never been the case. "If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, then the biological father of a child born through in vitro fertilization to a mother married to another man could gain parental rights. In fact, if biology trumps everything else, what stops a rapist from claiming parental rights?""

Foreign-Born in US Hold Larger Percentages of Advanced Degrees

A new US Census news release says,

“A larger percentage of foreign-born than native-born residents had a master’s degree or higher in 2007, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Nationally, 11 percent of foreign-born — people from another country now living in the United States — and 10 percent of U.S.-born residents had an advanced degree.”

Could this trend impact some claims about increased degree holders in Kentucky and around the rest of the country? You bet it does.

The document referenced by the news release, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2007” shows in Table 2 that in Kentucky only 19.6 percent of native-born residents age 25 or more in 2007 held a Bachelor’s Degree or more while a whopping 34.5 percent of foreign-born residents did.

Only three states, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia had lower percentages of native-born residents with degrees in 2007. Here’s how Kentucky ranks based on our analysis of the data in the Census’ Table 2.

Percent Native Born Residents in Each State Age 25 and over
with Bachelor's Degree or More




Keep in mind that a 25-year old in 2007 probably graduated from high school in 2000, two years after our CATS testing started. Also, educated people are probably among the most mobile populations in the country, so some impact on the results could be due to people educated here moving elsewhere. However, even though the Census is primarily reporting on an older age group, with a decade of KERA era high school graduates now included, some impact from the KERA period should be starting to show in these Census results. Certainly, the numbers here cannot support any claims of success from KERA.

More evidence shortfall isn't the problem

Data from the Tax Foundation out today suggests sending more money to Frankfort won't solve the state's spending problem.

From Fiscal Year 2007's actual state operating revenue of $21.5 billion to Fiscal Year 2008's estimated state operating revenue of $25 billion, Kentucky's revenue growth was higher than every other state in the nation except Louisiana.

Can't help wondering where all that money went and why that isn't the burning question of the day rather than how to cram more tax increases down taxpayers' throats.

This is not how we get personal responsibility

If we start fining parents for no-showing teacher meetings, it's easy to see how we will need to expand the school bureaucracy.

A school official would have to be brought in to hear appeals and a low-income fund would have to be set up to pay fines for poor parents. Then we would surely need a gubernatorial task force on parental involvement.

We keep setting up government programs to remove responsibility from people and then wonder why they can't handle responsibility. I get the idea of wanting to start a discussion about parental involvement, but wouldn't that effort be much easier if we didn't go to such great lengths to subsidize irresponsibility?

Reversing course on some of our disastrous healthcare policies would give us a great start away from the ever-increasing need for government solutions to government-created problems. That's what we really need to be talking about.

So, You Think Kentucky’s Writing Portfolios Work

A couple of days ago I posted “NAEP – Beware Those Pesky Cautions” with some interesting data on how our kids’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress looks after you separate data for Whites and Blacks.

I have now had a chance to run some statistical significance tests on the White eighth grade writing performance in 1998 and 2007.

In 1998, Kentucky’s White students only got a statistically higher score for eighth grade writing than Whites in one other state – Arkansas.

In 2007, almost a decade later, a decade where certain college presidents in this state and many others told us how much writing had improved, Kentucky’s White students only got a statistically significantly higher score than one other state – West Virginia.

Now, how’s that again about all the great claims about Kentucky’s writing portfolio program? Since about 85 percent of our kids are White, it looks like the vast majority of our children are being left far behind their peers. So, it looks like what teachers are saying is right – having writing portfolios in the CATS assessments is simply a very bad idea.

Questioning the mad rush to raise taxes

Andy Hightower at the Kentucky Club for Growth suggests the hand-wringing about the state budget "shortfall" may be off base by almost $200 million.

"Let's say January is a precursor and state revenues remain down 4% for the next five months," Hightower wrote. "That would leave the state with a $277 million shortfall, only 60% of the prediction."

He also said some of those pushing for tax increases may be discounting the effect bad weather had on business activity in January.

"This is not to say there would not have been a decline, only that the freeze froze commerce to a significant degree, which was reflected in revenue numbers," Hightower said. "One only need look at the thaw this weekend when people were shopping like Christmas to have a sense of the truth here."

Another point to be brought out from the latest budget numbers is that cigarette tax revenues were down 22% in January from January 2008. Kentucky is already down over $7 million in cigarette tax revenue for the fiscal year. That's before the tax increase.

Food for thought, perhaps?

Imagine That!

The National Council on Teacher Quality recently released “No Common Denominator,” a report on the preparation of elementary school teachers to teach mathematics.

The report lists five standards that “would be the mark of a high quality program of teacher training.” Standard #3 is catching attention in some national Listservs that deal with mathematics issues. That standard reads:

“As conditions for completing their teacher preparation and earning a license, elementary teacher candidates should demonstrate a deeper understanding of mathematics content than is expected of children. Unfortunately, no current assessment is up to this task.”

Imagine that, no current teacher licensing assessment is up to the task of insuring your child’s elementary school teacher knows more math than we expect from children!

Kids – Pay No Attention to that Educator Behind the Mirror!

Earlier today, I posted a blog about a Position Paper on Assessment from the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). That paper deals with changing the state’s CATS accountability system.

That first Blog focused on the fact that while the KDE’s news article says the Kentucky Board of Education “released” this paper, in reality the board hasn’t even voted on it, yet.

Now, I’ve had a chance to digest and discuss some of the actual proposal items. It’s clear this paper is mostly a delaying action to keep CATS pretty much as is.

Of course, it’s no secret that the KDE does not want major changes to CATS. The commissioner of education made that quite clear back in August during the introductory meeting of his Assessment and Accountability Task Force.

So, I got a little skeptical as I began reading the new position paper and seeing proposals for what could be some radical changes. Does the KDE really mean it? Would the KDE really have a dramatically new program up and running in two years?

Then, I read this paragraph:


Hmm. Let’s see. We MIGHT get a new math test ready in two years, but forget about any other subjects until at least 2012. The whole thing might not be fixed until a lot later, however, as the department says we could possibly keep our current CATS trend line all the way to 2014 (all two years of that trend line because the department trashed the trend from 1999 to 2006 by inflating the scoring system in 2007).

So, ladies and gentlemen, pay no attention to that educator behind the mirror. He has no intention of doing anything soon – unless the legislature forces him to do so. Kids, that educator seems happy to throw another half-decade of you to the lions of high college remediation rates and high unemployment rates while he saunters along on a change program that probably, in the end, won’t bring much change, anyway.

Tax increase fur to fly in Frankfort Tuesday

Several state House and Senate members will join representatives of the Kentucky Club for Growth and Bluegrass Institute Tuesday morning at 9:30 am in the Capitol Rotunda for a press conference to discuss why giving the state more money right now isn't the best idea.

Senate President Pro Tem Katie Stine will be one of the speakers.

Panic Over Senate Bill 1

Like it or not, Senate Bill 1, which makes extensive revisions to Kentucky’s CATS public school assessment program, is stirring a lot of discussion. It just triggered a mistake over at the Kentucky Department of Education.

Senate Bill 1 is likely to pass in the Senate this week. In a possible attempt to forestall that, the Kentucky Department of Education got a little too “antsy,” issuing a news release today on a position paper calling for a different – and much slower – approach.

(Note: Original Version – May be revised in the Kentucky Department of Education Web Site)

The problem here is the chair of the Kentucky Board of Education, Joe Brothers, confirms the Kentucky Board of Education has yet to vote on this position paper. The earliest the board could do so is tomorrow.

So, the news release’s claim that the board already “released” this paper apparently isn’t correct.

By the way, this position paper offers only very unambitious, stretched out deadlines; meaningful changes to CATS are not promised for years. Meanwhile, Kentucky will continue to experience huge freshman college remediation rates and disastrous unemployment figures for young adults.

Quite possibly, when the board does consider this paper, they will vote differently. And, regardless of what the board does, it seems like, after 19 years of KERA, impatience with CATS has grown so strong that something is going to happen regardless of what the board decides. However, right now, the board apparently hasn’t decided anything despite this news release from the department of education to the contrary.

Blowing smoke and mirrors up our skirts

Kentucky's biggest growth industry got a boost today from last year's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Gov. Steve Beshear and Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry joined Kentucky Housing Corporation CEO Richard McQuady to celebrate receipt of a $1.5 million federal grant to "help" 2200 subprime borrowers with their troubled home loans.

Can't imagine $681.81 per borrower is going to make very many bad loans suddenly very good. But fixing problems is not what today's announcement was about.

We're replacing last year's real estate bubble with today's government hot air bubble.

"This grant will help an additional 2,200 Kentuckians, who are in danger of foreclosure, receive counseling and assistance as they work to keep their homes," Gov. Beshear said.

So now we are counseling our way to prosperity. Great.

Not to be outdone, Mayor Newberry said: "We have been working very hard for several years to help people realize the American dream of homeownership, and we want to keep new homeowners in their homes," Newberry said.

Newberry didn't specify what he meant by "working very hard."

CEO McQuady took the cake, though.

"They had the foresight to develop the Protection Center before the foreclosure crisis destroyed the dream of homeownership in Kentucky," McQuady said.

Finding Our You Tube Videos

The Institute has a number of You Tube videos on subjects of interest in Kentucky.

For those of you who want an easy way to find these videos, here is a directory with hot links to every one of them.

You will find all sorts of material here. There are simple explanations of the incredibly involved CATS scoring schemes and evidence that CATS has become less and less trustworthy over time. You'll also find several videos that explore why CATS writing portfolios are a problem.

One You Tube covers a portion of the news conference the Bluegrass Institute hosted last fall on the governor's illegal seizure of private Web domain names. A higher court in Kentucky just ruled that this seizure was indeed illegal and also took the rather remarkable step of blocking the lower court from taking any further action in the matter -- a remarkable slap at the lower court.

Happy viewing!

Scam too big for New Jersey coming our way

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine met significant resistance from fellow Democrats in his state's legislature over his plan to allow municipalities to underfund their pension plans and spend the money elsewhere.

Kentucky's House of Representatives could vote on a similar bill this week.

Corzine is reportedly working up an offer his legislature can't refuse. It's a shame Kentucky seems to be headed for a spending catastrophe our legislature can't understand.

Bad political spin never goes out of style

The latest bit of advocacy journalism from the Louisville Courier Journal really just goes too far:

The thing about the $1 million in "savings" is that, regardless of how many times they repeat it, it is illusory. The Senior Status program forces taxpayers to overpay for judges who work part-time. All we are doing by keeping this program alive is running up future pension bills. With public employee benefits unfunded liability already well over $30 billion, this is exactly the wrong thing to be doing.

We've already played this smoke-and-mirrors routine with cities and counties. It seems pension illiteracy is the new black.

As Discussions About Dumping CATS Heat Up

Washington State just dropped the ninth grade part of its long-running, costly and slow feedback WASL tests.

Next year, that state’s school executive recently announced, the entire program will be revamped to save money and get scores back quicker.

Sounds like Washington already did some of that research that a few in Kentucky are trying to say still needs to be done.

Last year's promised restraint completely gone

As legislators in Frankfort round up support for tax increases to delay making government more affordable, the state bailout of city and county governments marches on.

House Bill 117, which would allow local governments to underfund their pension obligations in the tens of millions of dollars, passed the House State Government Committee overwhelmingly.

Last summer when legislators came to Frankfort for a special session to save the state from decades of reckless underfunding of public employee fringe benefits, they promised to stop underfunding them.

That was before the November elections which are now, of course, in the past. The media is, for the most part, not very helpful on this.

Heard Around Frankfort on Kentucky Education

ON THE NEED TO REEXAMINE KERA:

“It is also time for a thorough review of the Kentucky Education Reform Act.”

Kentucky Governor Steven L. Beshear
State of the Commonwealth Address
February 4, 2009



ON WHETHER CATS SCORES PARENTS GET FOR THEIR STUDENTS ARE REALLY TRUSTWORTHY:

“CATS is not valid and reliable for individual students. All students do not take the same test.”

Kentucky State Senator Ken Winters
Senate Education Committee Meeting
February 5, 2009



ON THE QUALIFICATION OF SCORERS THAT GRADE CATS OPEN RESPONSE QUESTIONS (Note: the usual four-year college degree requires 120 hours of college credits):

“The (CATS) scorers that our contractor uses must have 60 hours of college credit in order to be a scorer.”

Kentucky State Senator Ken Winters
Senate Education Committee Meeting
February 5, 2009



ON WHETHER KENTUCKY SHOULD USE OPEN-RESPONSE (ESSAY) TEST QUESTIONS

“According to the Center for Teaching and Learning, well designed multiple-choice tests are generally more valid and reliable – I’m quoting from them – than essay tests.”

Kentucky State Senator Ken Winters
Senate Education Committee Meeting
February 5, 2009



ON MAKING MAJOR CHANGES TO THE STATE’S ASSESSMENT PROGRAM

“There’s momentum, and I think there’s a consensus that CATS needs to be sunset.”

Kentucky Senator Tim Shaughnessy
Senate Education Committee Meeting
February 5, 2009



ON WHAT TEACHERS ARE THINKING

"If I were going to paraphrase our members' feelings, it would be that CATS testing needs a complete overhaul."

Sharron Oxendine
President of the Kentucky Education Association
Quoted in the Louisville Courier Journal
February 6, 2009

Is Damon Thayer swimming against the tide?

As much of official Frankfort appears mesmerized by the fool's gold of a cigarette tax increase, an effort to hold the line on local tax increases may get somewhat less attention.

Kentucky Votes reports Sen. Damon Thayer's SB 72 would "require proposed ad valorem tax increases for a district within a county or counties to receive prior approval from fiscal courts of all affected counties."

Readers may track the progress of SB 72 on the new and improved Kentucky Votes site.

How Much Does the CATS Assessment Really Cost???!!!

-- And What Do We Get From It?

During today’s presentation of Senate Bill 1 to the Kentucky Senate Education Committee, some really interesting comments popped up.

At one point, Senator Dan Kelly outlined the full costs of CATS public school assessments, including the opportunity costs of instructional days lost to both administer the tests and conduct all the overly focused test preparation that we hear about so often. Kelly’s bottom line cost for CATS -- $700 Million.

We’d need to grow an awful lot more tobacco to recover anything like that with the ill-advised tax increases Frankfort is discussing!

It would be far better to finally reign in this out of control assessment, which, as Senator Ken Winters pointed out in the meeting, does not even provide us with scores that are valid and reliable for individual students.

The combination of high costs and limited education data just about insures the CATS has to be about the most inefficient school assessment program anywhere in the United States.

Transparency movement picking up steam

Kentucky's mainstream media has been strangely absent from the effort to put the state's public checkbook on the internet for everyone to see.

But that may be changing.

This passage appeared in a Lexington Herald Leader news story by John Cheves on Thursday:

""We're talking about furloughs and wage freezes and possible layoffs for state workers, and yet the governor is still putting his cronies behind desks," said Jim Waters, spokesman for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a free-market think tank in Bowling Green."

""It's way past time for us to rein in state spending," Waters said. "We need to examine every penny we're spending, and, if we did, neither one of these hires would have been approved as a critical public need.""

The effort to open up state spending to public view is certain to get a big boost next week. That should be a clue for the mainstream media and the Beshear Administration to get on the stick.

CPE Pres easily impressed for $352,000

I hate to think how many students could have been educated today for what it cost to send out the latest hysterical press release from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.

There are two media contact names under the beaming headline "Literacy levels of Kentucky adults increased since 1992, study says." But the big bucks came from CPE President Robert King who took time out from earning his $352,000 annual salary to read the "study," assess it, and say:

"This is a very favorable finding that confirms the progress of Kentucky’s efforts. However, much work remains to be done."

First thing, this "study" confirms nothing.

The National Center for Education Statistics surveyed 19,000 adults back in 1992 and determined that "Kentucky" had a 19% illiteracy rate and then called 19,000 more in 2003 and found that the rate had fallen to 12%. That's the big news.

Seriously.

I mean, what do think the margin of error is on this survey? Seven percent maybe? And if they divided up the 19,000 people evenly across the country -- which they didn't -- that would mean they talked to 380 Kentuckians 17 years ago and then did it again six years ago. How does anyone pull real meaning out of this?

And we're supposed to extrapolate from that now that Kentucky's KERA progress has been confirmed? The fact that they send this junk out with a straight face is only slightly less maddening than the fact the mainstream media will run with the story.

Turning county government into Starbucks

Speaking to the House Local Government Committee Wednesday, Rep. Dennis Keene unwittingly summed up why the state legislature is running in the red.

Making the case for a bill to allow local governments to set up satellite offices throughout counties for sheriffs, county clerks, and property valuation administrators, Keene stated that spreading the new offices around could turn them into "profit centers."

Asked to justify his absurd assertion, he said that it would help increase revenues because the offices would be closer to the people and would, therefore, make it easier for them to pay their local taxes on time.

The committee then proceeded to vote approval for the measure.

I'm not kidding even a little bit. Video of this will be available tomorrow.

Math Swamps Elsewhere Getting Drained

No sooner did I post my previous blog on Kentucky’s Math Swamp than this showed up from the Washington Post.

Parents in other states get it, and are moving out. And, unlike a trend too often seen in Kentucky, it looks like school administrators in Virginia actually listen! It's not taking a law to start getting things fixed.

BTW, I believe the math program in question in Virginia is used in a number of our schools, as well. If you know for sure, please enter a comment to this blog.

Protecting ourselves into Obama's poorhouse

President Barack Obama got his head handed to him Tuesday after he pulled out the old Herbert Hoover playbook and started talking about protecting American manufacturers against foreign competition.

He quickly learned that is just not how the world works any more:

Free trade requires everyone to figure out what they each do best and then do it. In today's global economy, attempting to fight the trend on international trade is always going to start a war we can't win.

So it is interesting to see a Kentucky legislator trying to prevent the state from buying American or Kentucky flags overseas. In the bailout era, the quicker we figure out that mandating purchases for non-economic reasons is a bad idea, the faster we will be able to learn the lessons the world is trying to teach us.

Kentucky’s Math Swamp – About to Get Flood Control

It’s been a hot topic here in Kentucky and around the entire country – the public school math standards tend to be “a mile wide and an inch deep,” covering far too much material in far too superficial a manner. Now, at least one bill aims to drain our shallow math swamp and remake our math program into something powerful and free-flowing.

It’s been too long in coming, although answers to fix Kentucky’s math woes have been available for some time.

Following years of very sharp criticism, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics changed their curriculum guidelines around the turn of this century and then about two years ago clarified what they really meant with a supplemental document called “Focal Points.”

The Focal Points document makes it clear that what a lot of us call “the basics” really are important and must be taught to mastery.

Then, early last year, the final report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) came out. Interestingly, one of its key members was Skip Fennel, the past president of the NCTM, but there were also many other key math experts on board.

The upshot of all this new guidance is that we now know the KERA math fanatics were wrong about a lot of things.

First, kids need to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide to the point where they can do it automatically. Calculators did not make those skills obsolete – instead these skills are a critical foundation for higher level math courses. Kids then need to really master fractions and some items from geometry.

Those earlier skills form the essential underpinning for the next step – learning algebra. The best, scientific research now makes it clear that algebra needs to be a major focal point, and other areas of math like statistics need to be deemphasized until algebra is mastered. Once kids understand the art and logic of algebra, they are then well-prepared to tackle some of the other important areas in math like trigonometry, advanced geometry, and statistics. Another KERA favored item called “spiraling,” where the same math topics were revisited year after year without kids ever gaining mastery of any topic is also discredited. When you try to cover too much material, spiraling is inevitable – but it doesn’t really teach kids enough math.

Anyway, the background research is done, and between the NCTM documents and the extensive and rather detailed information in the NMAP report, it shouldn’t take long to rework Kentucky’s math curriculum into something that will really work for kids. And, our continued high levels of math remediation in our colleges show this can’t come too soon.