Say WHAT???

– The Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich agree on something????

– You Bet! It’s real education reform that includes charter schools

This Wall Street Journal article probably will be a collector’s item. The picture of Sharpton and Gingrich cordially talking to each other is classic.

But, even more important is that these two men from the absolute opposite ends of the political spectrum agree that real education reform is crucial. And, the reform plan they are supporting most definitely is pushing charter schools.

Are you listening, Kentucky?

Pesky education budget analysis

Recently, one of the other blogs that writes about Kentucky education has been claiming that Kentucky only spends somewhere around 20 percent of its total money on public education.

That assertion surprised me, as I have heard many times that we actually spend 40 percent or more on public education.

So, I surfed to the governor’s new transparency Web site to see how the state’s fiscal experts describe the budget. The two graphs below are cut and paste copies from that site.

The first one shows how all of the $24.16 billion Kentucky spent in Fiscal Year 2009 was allocated. Education, which I think includes preschool through grade 12, did indeed get 20.2 percent of this pie. That works out to $4.88 billion. Postsecondary education got another 21.7 percent, or 5.24 billion. But, wait – There’s more.


This second graph shows how money from the General Fund, which the legislators can fully control, gets allocated.


When it comes to money the Kentucky legislature can control, public education got not 20 percent, but a much larger 44 percent of the pie. That’s about $4.136 billion from the $9.4 billion the legislature can control. Postsecondary education got another 13.8 percent, or about $1.3 billion, from the general fund.

I talked to one of the budget people in Frankfort about which graph would be the better indicator of Kentucky legislative intent. The answer was the second graph.

Apparently, a lot of the money in the first graph is “fenced” money from dedicated funds which our legislators really can’t touch.

A considerable amount of the fenced money comes from federal sources, like the federal highway trust fund and Medicaid, which cannot be reallocated by our state leadership.

Other state money that shows in the “all funds” amounts come from such things as license fees that are also dedicated, not general tax, dollars.

For example, license fees are generally fenced to serve the licensees. This includes a wide variety of groups from nurses and doctors to hunters. These are not tax dollars and should not be used as tax dollars. They generally serve to make the administering of the licensing services self-supporting.

License fees may also help do things like support wildlife conservation efforts, in the case of hunting and fishing licenses. Perhaps they even help cover game warden salaries.

While these fee amounts show in the all funds total, they are not available for reprogramming to education.

Of course, some of these license-related activities also contribute to education. For example, wildlife personnel conduct programs for our students, though I don’t think the costs involved for those other agencies' education programs are shown as an education expense in the pie charts above.

Anyway, I now understand the two ways Kentucky reports funding a bit better, and I hope you also do, as well.

Overspending: Watching our future spin away

Founding father John Adams warned: "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

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Ridiculous

The Washington Post wasn’t messing around when it called the situation in Kentucky – one of 10 states without charter schools – “ridiculous.”

The Post also did readers across the nation a service when it explained the different atmosphere at charter schools, which are publicly funded, privately managed schools: “Freed from the constraints of union contracts and one-size-fits-all school policy, they've been able to innovate successful new approaches to learning.”

Little wonder, then, the most determined opponents to charter schools in Kentucky, is, has been and will continue to be, teachers unions and their enablers in the Legislature.

Questions grow about errors in student counts in NCLB reports

I did a little of my own research after posting a blog earlier today about two school districts that were questioning data in their 2009 No Child Left Behind Reports (NCLB). Instead of looking at district level data, I looked at the counts statewide for students tested under NCLB for reading in 2008 and 2009. The table shows what I found.


Most of the changes from 2008 to 2009 don’t look out of line, but there are two exceptions – the students with learning disabilities, and the students with limited English proficiency. Both groups showed very large one-year increases.

Most definitely, the increase in the count of students with learning disabilities looks out of line. This 11,000 plus jump in one year looks highly unreasonable.

Even worse, an increase that large can’t be due to one or two school districts having bad data. This must be spread out over more districts, maybe all of them.

The limited English proficiency number increase in one year of 1,443 students isn’t a big increase by itself even though on a percentage basis it is indeed a very large jump. However, the increase in the two groups that are likely to create this increase, the Hispanic and Asian students, in total was only 1,213 students. Where, exactly, did the other 230 limited English proficient kids come from? Whites? Not likely.

So, it looks like the Kentucky Department of Education may indeed have some problems. In fact, there may be some massive problems that could impact many schools that either did, or did not fail NCLB due to learning disabled kids who may not even exist.

This, indeed, is getting interesting.

How Schools Fail Democracy

This E.D. Hirsch commentary in the new “The Chronicle of Higher Education” should be required reading for every educator.

Hirsch explains how a major focus on “child centered” instruction often acts to prevent those children from being able to participate in our republican form of government. Hirsch knows that one of the key goals of education must be to teach every child the core of knowledge that is assumed by adult writers. Without that core of knowledge, a person is doomed to live forever in the “linguistic shadows,” unable to effectively communicate and participate in society.

NCLB Scoring Errors?

The new Kentucky No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores for 2009 have been out less than a week, but at least two school districts are already questioning their reports.

The most recent situation was covered by the News-Graphic from Georgetown. Under the title, “Schools score 94.7 percent, fail No Child Left Behind” (Subscription), the newspaper includes comments that the Scott County Public School District found mistakes in the number of its learning disabled students in the new report.

Per Scott County, the NCLB report shows 188 more learning disabled students than are actually in the system. I calculate that figure would be more than 30 percent too high, based on the number of learning disabled students in the system one year earlier.

This error could point to a number of problems, but the leading suspect at this point is the Infinite Campus student tracking computer program. This is a program with teething pains, as we have noted before.

Scott County isn’t the only school district with concerns. The first school system to question the new NCLB results is the Barren County School District. According to the Glasgow Daily Times, the district’s director of Instruction and Techonology, Benny Lile, spotted some “discrepancies” which the paper didn’t discuss further.

I called Mr. Lile, who has a long history of service to state education as the past chair of the statewide School Curriculum, Assessment and Accountability Committee. He indicated the problem in Barren County also concerns questionable numbers of students who were reported as learning disabled.

It will be interesting to see if more districts have similar problems.

As an aside, I also talked to Mr. Lile about how Barren County is handling the new testing data. He is going to be doing a good job with that task. His district will take a detailed look at the data broken down by individual test and by student subgroup performance. I think that is exactly what the legislature intended when they disbanded the CATS accountability system with its overly simplistic single-score-for-everything approach, which just wound up hiding lots of problems.

Lile’s district isn’t going to do anything with the unofficial, CATS-like number called the “Transition Index” that a consortium of private groups concocted this year. Lile recognizes that single number can hide all sorts of underlying problems and mostly just serves to confuse the public about what is really going on in their public schools.

NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card” Trifecta

I’ve already discussed (here and here) two closely related ways some poorly performing schools in Kentucky got their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability slates wiped clean without ever meeting required academic targets. Those “slate wipes” were related to changes in the students attending the schools.

It turns out that there is a third way schools have gotten their NCLB slates wiped clean. I don’t think this one happens very often, but it does happen.

The example school for this NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card” is the Knox Central High School in Knox County. Knox Central’s avoidance of NCLB consequences is due to the school moving in and out of the category of “Title I School,” which refers to whether or not the school got enough federal support money each year to be held subject to the federal NCLB law.

The first table below comes from Knox Central’s 2006 Adequate Yearly Progress report. First, note that this school consistently failed to make the annual proficiency target for reading since the beginning of NCLB (Scores were not tabulated for the first, baseline year of 2001-02).


If Knox Central had been a Title I school, it would have entered NCLB Tier 1 status after the 2003-04 school term and would have been so classified for the 2004-05 school year in the right section of the table. Then, by the 2006-07 school year, Knox Central would have been in Tier 3 Status.

But, Knox Central wasn’t a Title I school until the 2005-06 school term, by which time it had amassed a record of failure for math as well as reading. Because the school was now in Title 1 status, it became an NCLB Tier 1 school for the first time after the 2005-06 term results were released and was carried in that classification in the 2006-07 term.

Now, look at the latest NCLB report for Knox Central for 2009.


First, note that this 2009 report added information in the right-hand section about Title I status of the school. That wasn’t in the earlier year’s table.

Next, note that the year after Knox Central entered NCLB Tier 1 status for the first time, that it again was not carried as a Title I school. That wiped out its NCLB Tier slate completely for the 2007-08 term.

Next, note that the school moved back into Title I status for the 2008-09 school term. Because of its long-standing failure in math, it was at once renamed an NCLB Tier school, but only as a Tier 1 school. Then, for this current school term, due to continued failure in math, Knox Central moved up to Tier 2 status.

But, if Knox Central had not cycled in and out of Title I status, its string of consistent failures to make proficiency rate targets in math would make it a Tier 5 school for the 2009-2010 term.

This helps highlight the problem with the NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards” I’ve been discussing. These policy actions can erase a school’s accountability history under NCLB in a number of ways even though the schools have not demonstrated acceptable academic progress.

The “Get Out of Jail Free” cards also work to deny students important benefits such as the right to transfer to better schools and the right to receive supplemental education services like extra tutoring.

As far as I can tell, the “Get Out of NCLB Jail Free Card” schools get to start the accountability process all over again. It seems that these schools could enjoy as much as five more years before they can again be identified by NCLB as a lowest-performing, Tier 5 school. That just isn’t acceptable.

Overall, it looks like 21 schools used one of the NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card” Trifectas to have their entire NCLB accountability reset for the 2009-2010 school term. Six of those schools that got this procedural “slate wipe” were in NCLB Tier 5 status last year, the very worst performance category. If the Kentucky Department of Education had kept its long repeated promise to look at Alternative Governance in those schools, the staff in these schools would have faced some consequences. Instead, it looks like the school staff are getting a free ride, perhaps for as long as five or six more years. We need to fix that.

I will have some ideas on how we can better monitor the “Get Out of Jail Free” schools, and I’d love to hear your ideas, too. Our comments feature in this blog is very easy to use, and you can do it anonymously.

What do you think about schools getting out of all NCLB accountability based on non-academic technicalities? Should their NCLB status be completely reset to non-Tier status? Should they be allowed to work up from Tier 1 to Tier 2, Tier 3 and so forth all over again if they fail NCLB again next year? Should a school be allowed to stop supplemental services to students just because the district makes some zoning changes, even though the staff in that school isn’t changed? What do you think?

NCLB 2009 – Performance for student subgroups Lags

One of the great strengths of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school accountability program over our old CATS assessments is the focus on not leaving any subgroup of students behind. While CATS never had any penalties for a school that failed with say, its African-Americans or its kids in poverty, NCLB does. Furthermore, we get separate, easy to understand data on those subgroups in the NCLB reports.

Thus, the NCLB performance reports for 2009 make it easy to see the lagging performance of Kentucky schools with major student subgroups.

This table includes data taken from both the Kentucky Department of Education’s 2008 and 2009 NCLB Briefing Packets.

The table shows how many schools failed to make their NCLB goals with African-Americans, poor students in the federal free and reduced cost lunch program, and students with learning disabilities for both years.


I used data in the table to compute the rapid rises in failing schools, as shown in this graph. Across the board, there was no improvement for either of these student subgroups in either reading or math.


Clearly, the under-performance of schools with these populations is not acceptable, and neither is the weak excuse from the Kentucky Department of Education that the rises are due to the NCLB targets moving somewhat higher in 2009. Let’s talk about that excuse.

First of all, you have to consider that KERA is nearly 20 years old. We didn’t start this reform yesterday. We didn’t even start back in 2002 when NCLB got started. We’ve been trying to make education work better for our kids for nearly two decades.

Next, let’s really look at those target proficiency rates, which did increase a bit this year. Well, the real targets look pretty unimpressive once you consider all the Kentucky NCLB loopholes that shoot holes through the nominal numbers we are told schools had to meet. Some of those NCLB loopholes include:

Unstable, non-standard scoring over time

Confidence Intervals

Unreasonable requirements for size of student subgroups before reporting scores

Safe Harbor

and now

“Get Out of Jail Free Cards” which can totally cancel a weak school’s NCLB report card.

Thanks to all the loopholes, we see things like Ballard High School in Louisville “passing” the NCLB math test for its poor kids even though their actual proficiency rate in 2009 was only 37.5 percent – that’s all! We see Bardstown High getting credit for success with its African-American students in math even though the percentage of proficiency was just 33.33 percent. Imagine that, 20 years after KERA started, and Bardstown is officially doing just fine despite the fact that only one in three of its African-Americans can do an acceptable job in math.

And, thanks to the new “Get Out of Jail Free Cards,” we see Hazelwood Elementary School in Jefferson County get its NCLB Tier 5 failing status summarily wiped away without any apparent change in the school’s leadership, and despite the fact that the school promptly failed again with its new students. Those kids just lost their right to transfers out of this school along with important supplemental tutoring services, but it looks like not much really changed in the school.

(Note: find these schools’ individual “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT – 2009”, with the Web access tool here).

Hey, Kentucky! After almost 20 years of education reform, is that the kind of performance you think should be passing muster? We don’t need more of the same old, same old tiresome excuses. We don’t need more warmed over versions of tried and failed reform attempts.

We need to come to grips with the idea that some of our schools really need a stem to stern reworking including a major staff overhaul. One way we could make that happen is with charter schools, and the new NCLB results make it clear we are well past the point where we should have already made that decision.

More NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards”

I wrote earlier today about how the court-directed busing program in Louisville acted to destroy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability in several of that district’s schools. Now, I’m going to discuss how a rather closely related event, changes in school zones, can have the same disastrous impact on NCLB accountability.

Kentucky Administrative Regulation 703 KAR 5:020 says, “If as a result of a change in service area boundaries or local board of education policies affecting student population served by a school, less than eighty (80) percent of a school's student population at its accountability grades is stable, the school shall be considered a reconfigured school.”

The Jefferson County example fits under the “local board of education policies” provision. The local board chose to do the busing plan as a way to comply with the court decision.

Now, let’s look at a school where zoning changes apparently led to an NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card.” You will see the situation is almost identical to the one for Maupin Elementary School in Louisville, but there is actually a different reason.

First, here is the Carlisle NCLB status table from last year. Note that the school consistently failed in reading over time (just like Maupin) and was in NCLB Tier 5 status when the 2008-09 school term started.


Now, here is the new report for Carlisle. Just like at Maupin, the school has been totally removed from NCLB Tier status, and its previous history has been erased. It is starting all over again.


However, John G. Carlisle didn’t get its “Get Out of Jail Free Card” because of court-ordered busing. This school’s student body changed because another elementary school in Covington, the very poor performing Thomas Edison Elementary School, was closed, not due to education issues, but due to declining enrollment in the district. This “Get Out of Jail Card” could have happened (and has happened) in any district where zoning changes impacted more than 20 percent of a school’s students from the previous year. It can happen anywhere in Kentucky. A federal busing lawsuit isn’t required to trigger this.

A few more notes are in order. First, just like at Maupin, notice that after the zoning change, John G. Carlisle Elementary continued to fail in both reading and math.

Also, I checked, and the principal at the school was there last year, as well. So, at least this key staff position was not changed. I don’t know how other staff slots at the school were impacted by the shutdown at Edison, but the district probably awarded slots this year on a seniority basis rather than a merit basis. For sure, neither Carlisle or Edison was doing well, so allowing a merged school staff to totally restart their NCLB “clock” isn’t in the best interests of students.

There is another problem here. Due to the non-academically earned end to Tier status in all the schools I have been discussing, students are losing important benefits like school transfer rights and, perhaps more importantly in the case of both Maupin and Carlisle, the right to get school board financed supplemental education services like extra tutoring. That’s a real shame.

There is one more “Get Out of Jail” card yet to play. Stay tuned.

NCLB ‘BUS-ted’!

It came as a real shock.

After the new 2009 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores released on September 23, 2009, one of the first things I checked was how the 34 schools that were in Tier 5 status last year performed in this new report. These 34 schools are of high interest following our August release of “Examining Kentucky’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ Tier 5 Schools.”

They were Kentucky’s lowest performing schools in NCLB after the 2007-08 school term ended.

We especially wanted to know about two of the 34 schools. The first one was the Okolona Elementary school in Jefferson County, because if this school had done well in 2009, it would have earned its way out of NCLB Tier status. The second school was Atkinson Elementary School. Its principal had been highlighted in a recent KET TV broadcast about the importance of principals in schools. It sounded like Atkinson was a school to watch. Would the principal enrichment program there work some magic for the students?

Then, the shock hit.

When we looked at the 2009 NCLB reporting documents, it turned out that we couldn’t determine if real academic performance in these schools had impacted their NCLB Tier status.

Instead, both schools had escaped all NCLB accountability due to a loophole – a real “Get Out of Jail Free Card.”

Thanks solely to significant changes in the students attending these schools because of the on-going problems of busing in Jefferson County, both schools had their NCLB Tier slates wiped completely clean. It’s as if both schools have a pristine record even though both schools still have the same principals, and probably most of the same staff, that they did last year.

And, these schools are not alone. Jefferson County’s Hazelwood Elementary School and Maupin Elementary School also got their NCLB slates wiped clean.

The 2008 and 2009 NCLB reports for Maupin Elementary (find the Maupin NCLB reports using the Web tool here) provide a typical example of what happened.

The first table comes from last year’s NCLB report for Maupin. Notice that the school consistently failed to make the required proficiency rates in reading and steadily rose in the NCLB Tier system to become a Tier 5 school after the 2007-08 results released. This is shown by the listing for the 2008-09 school year of NCLB Tier 5 in the lower right part of the table.


The next table shows what happened to Maupin in 2009. See the N/A entries under both columns in the lower right part of the table? That means Maupin’s slate was wiped clean. Because of changes in the student makeup at the school, this school’s NCLB “clock” has been completely restarted. That is also why you don’t see the Tier listings from the previous years that appeared in the 2008 report. Thanks to busing, Maupin has ‘BUS-ted’ NCLB accountability.


Now, here is what really makes this accountability program questionable. First, as of the September 11, 2009 update to the Kentucky Department of Education’s school directory, Maupin still has the same principal that served last year. Most likely, the rest of the staff at the school hasn’t changed much, either.

Now consider – even though Maupin had a different group of students in the 2008-09 year, it still failed to teach reading adequately, as the center section of the table above shows. That points more strongly to the possibility that it is the staff, not the students, who are the problem at Maupin. Even though students got bused in from better performing sections of Louisville, the school still failed to teach reading adequately in the 2008-09 school term (and math too, for that matter).

Still, the staff just got a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” for NCLB. Their Tier slate is wiped clean.

There is still more to this unsatisfactory story, by the way. I’ll be talking over the next few days about two other ways NCLB is getting ‘BUS-ted’ in Kentucky. One involves “slate wipes” due to zoning changes, and the other involves a “slate wipe” due to changes in the proportion of federal Title 1 money each school gets. So, stay tuned.

Anyway, these NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards” just are not right. It’s certainly not in the best interests of the kids in this school. When a school has a long history of failure under NCLB, and when the school staff isn’t changed, then we need to look at other options besides totally restarting the NCLB “clock.”

If we don’t get this right, then other educators will take advantage of this loophole, and we’ll wind up with a thoroughly ‘BUS-ted’ NCLB.

NCLB 2009 – Results by school level look strange

I’m getting into the numbers from the new 2009 NCLB report for Kentucky, and the overall results look strange. To put it mildly, either our elementary schools are doing a bang up job while our middle and high schools are in real trouble, or our elementary school level assessments are far too easy and hide the fact that poorly educated graduates of the state’s elementary schools create unsolvable burdens for our middle and high schools.

Here is a rundown on the percentage of schools by school level that met their NCLB goals.


Taken at face value, this “big picture” of the data shows Elementary schools are just running away with the show.

However, there are several “flies in the ointment.” First, due to some loopholes on minimum student group sizes to report NCLB scores, elementary schools have an unfair advantage in the comparison above.

In addition, the elementary schools do better only if – and it’s a big if – the Kentucky Core Content Tests (KCCT) upon which the NCLB is based are balanced and accurate across all school levels.

Therein lies the rub. Is the big elementary school advantage in the graph above due to a really dramatic performance difference, or is this a result of a comparatively easier KCCT tests for elementary schools?

Unfortunately, it is going to be a while before we get recent comparison data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to help answer this question. While NAEP tested state-level reading, math and science in late winter of 2009, the results are currently scheduled to dribble out rather slowly over the next nine months or so.

In any event, regardless of possible differentials in test difficulty by school level, the middle and high school information in the graph above is simply too serious to ignore. Sadly, the poor high school numbers agree all too well with the completely unacceptable rate of college freshmen requiring remediation in Kentucky.

Clearly, the new NCLB data shows that, overall, we are a long, long way from where Kentucky education needs to be. It is time to consider some really different approaches to get where we need to go.

Stay tuned, because we have a lot more to say about the new NCLB results, including the possibility that some of the state’s very lowest performing schools just got an NCLB “Get Out of Jail Card” that wiped out their accountability. I’ll have more on that later.

Trying to make steak out of Kentucky testing sausage

Refusing to let CATS die, the 'KERA Amen Chorus' has developed its own ‘home-brewed,’ CATS-like school ‘assessment’ scoring scheme. The Herald-Leader, which often sings soprano for KERA, is using the results from this dubious program in a new on-line search tool.

Somehow, this feeble attempt to prolong CATS seems rather pathetic.

The Kentucky legislature unanimously killed the CATS public school assessment and accountability system for cause during the 2009 regular legislative session. It was an act of mercy long overdue.

Legislators realized that the CATS system was doing more harm than good, misleading us into a feel-good sense of complacency about our public schools that didn’t match the stark reality of high levels of college freshmen needing remedial course work and of constant complaints from business and industry that the state’s schools still were not producing the educated workforce needed.

The legislature also realized that CATS scores, as we have pointed out before, were getting more and more inflated, growing more out of line over time with results from other tests like the ACT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Scores were rising, but that didn’t seem to reflect an accurate image of the real picture.

The bottom line is the CATS assessment formula gave us misleading information, so the legislature voted to shut the program down cold turkey instead of permitting it to fester on while we worked on a new assessment program. Any misguided efforts to bother schools and the public with an aped image of this failed assessment are unlikely to do much more than distract us from the important job of getting our schools oriented on a better track while we work to get the new assessment right.

The KERA Amen Chorus needs to get over CATS and shift their time and talents toward helping us get a really good assessment program for Kentucky. Our kids and our schools deserve no less.

Jefferson County teachers sue to leave union

Apparently, a group of Jefferson County teachers have had enough of their union’s heavy-handed recruiting and member-holding policies. They are suing for the right to resign from the union at any time.

The suit names the Jefferson County Teachers Association (Union local), the Kentucky Education Association (State-level union organization), the National Education Association and the Jefferson County Board of Education as co-defendants.

2009 NCLB scores for Kentucky – First thoughts

The new No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores are out today for Kentucky schools, and initial news coverage has started. Some articles try to spin the story into some sort of good news, or at worst mixed news, but I honestly don’t see much to crow about in the new data.

Keep in mind that KERA is about to celebrate its 20th birthday. After all the time, effort and tax dollars we have expended on our schools, the numbers released today aren’t impressive.

There is another problem, as well. Very few reporters attended the NCLB press conference on Tuesday at the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE), so I don’t know if the regular press will dig very deeply into the scores. That’s a shame, because some disturbing patterns are emerging as I look over the 2009 data. As I learn more, I’ll be sharing those concerns over the next few days (or weeks).

Some specifics

Overall, there was a very disturbing drop in the percentage of schools that made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) from last year. In 2009, only 60.2 percent of reporting schools made the grade, seriously down from 2008 when 72.9 percent made the goals. The 12.7 point drop from 2008 to 2009 is much larger than the 4.6 point drop from 77.5 percent of schools making goals that was posted in 2007. This train is on a collision course, and it is speeding up.

The KDE excuses that rather large drop by saying that the required NCLB proficiency rate percentages increased dramatically this year, but there is a lot more to that story.

For one thing, the target NCLB proficiency rate percentages did indeed rise in 2009 by something like 7 to 10 points, depending upon subject and school level. However, even after those jumps, Kentucky’s target NCLB proficiency rates are still rather unimpressive, generally running between 47 to 67 percent depending upon the subject (math or reading) and school level.

Somehow, shooting for something along the lines of a one out of two proficiency rate in the critical subjects of math and reading at this point in KERA’s evolution seems like a pretty un-ambitious target. Once again, we’ve been at this for nearly 20 years.

Furthermore, as far as this year’s big jumps in the target proficiency rates go, Kentucky did that to itself. The state’s education crowd “backloaded” the required proficiency rates so that in the early years of NCLB little, if any, improvement was required. Our educators gamed the system, hoping NCLB would go away before it was time to pay the piper. Our educators lost that gamble, but they did it to themselves.

Worse, because we delayed a needed day of reckoning for some schools, we also delayed taking early action in those schools. Our kids pay the price for such delays.

For another thing, as we have abundantly discussed before in places like our recent report on Kentucky’s NCLB Tier 5 schools, and our earlier report on how CATS wasn’t suitable for NCLB use, there are a lot of NCLB loopholes in Kentucky. No school has to actually reach the published NCLB proficiency rate targets to escape accountability. Thanks to a statistical slight of hand using something called “Confidence Intervals,” while the official NCLB high school target proficiency rate for reading in 2009 was 49.54 percent, schools with considerably lower proficiency rates will get credit for reaching that target.

The exact number of confidence interval “bonus points” varies considerably from school to school, with smaller schools benefitting more from this statistically excessive slight of hand.

You can be assured that no high school in Kentucky actually had to post a 49.54 percent proficiency rate in reading with any of its accountable student groups in 2009 to escape sanctions.

For one example, it looks like the Fulton County High School only had a 31.82 percent reading proficiency rate for white students this year, way below the required target. But, this small school got a confidence interval booster of 28.78 points for its white students, pushing its credited proficiency rate for this ethnic group well above the required target.

What makes the Fulton County High example even more unsettling is that last year the actual reading proficiency rate for whites was 66.67 percent. This small school had a dramatic drop in proficiency this year to less than half of last year’s rate, but it still didn’t get tripped up in reading thanks to Kentucky’s out of control use of confidence intervals.

Anyway, as we close in on KERA’s 20-year anniversary next April, a 49.54 percent reading proficiency rate, especially since it is based on an inflated test like our KCCT reading test, doesn’t sound like much of a return on our huge educational investment.

I’ll have more on that as I get more time to dig into the reports, so stay tuned. Based on its general lack of interest in yesterday’s news conference, I expect the classical media’s interest in these important school results to wane quickly.

One last note: The link to access the individual school NCLB reports was inadvertently left off of the main Web page at the KDE Web site. You can look up your home school’s report here.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging

If you don’t believe high state taxes can tackle the economy and bring it down, you haven’t been exposed to the real cause of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While there were several factors that contributed to those dark economic days, Arthur Laffer reminds in his excellent commentary in today’s Wall Street Journal that high trade tariffs and government taxes formed the core of the financial crisis.

Laffer, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board and one of the nation’s top economists, shows how the share of the nation’s GDP (the most important economic indicator of our nation’s economic strength) consumed by state and local taxes rose from 7.2 percent in 1929 to 12.3 percent for the years 1930, 1931 and 1932 respectively.

I wonder how many members of the Kentucky General Assembly realize that their tax increases during the 2009 legislative session provides a direct threat to the economic strength of our commonwealth and country. Surely, such a negative economic impact must carry at least as much importance as the next political campaign, doesn’t it?

“A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity,” Laffer writes. “If there were one warning I’d give to all who will listen, it is that federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s.

New ‘random-sample-like’ report shows charter schools outperform in Big Apple

It’s really hard to do a fair analysis of charter school performance compared to regular schools. What group of students do you use for the control group?

Now, new research from charter expert Professor Caroline Hoxby works around that problem by comparing the performance of students in New York City’s (NYC) lottery-selected charter schools to the performance of those students who entered the lottery but didn’t win a charter school slot. In effect, it’s a randomized study, the gold standard for this sort of research.

According to the Wall Street Journal summary the comparison of Big Apple charter schools and regular public schools really wasn’t even a contest. The lottery-selected inner NYC charter school kids, who come mostly from poor and disadvantaged families, actually score almost as well as kids from the extremely exclusive Scarsdale school district, a super high wealth school system in NYC’s Northern suburbs that makes Kentucky’s wealthy Anchorage district near Louisville look low-rent.

Those lottery-selected charter kids obviously did far better than the “control” group of kids who entered the lottery but wound up in regular NYC public schools.

It’s no surprise that the local teachers’ union head in the Big Apple tried to downplay charters, but I don’t think she really thought through her comments.

The union head said the charters are not representative because the state charter process makes sure the schools are better than the rest.

That’s the whole point, madam union person. It is possible to create better public schools for our kids. But, union rules and a cumbersome state education bureaucracy bog down regular public schools so kids don’t get that educational benefit. That is particularly true in Kentucky where we don’t even have a charter school law.

The NYC teachers’ union head also cited another study released recently that shows overall charters across America don’t perform better than public schools. Clearly, this union worthy would be upset to learn we know about that report, and among other things it shows is that in certain states charters definitely do outperform public schools. The key is that you can have good, or bad, charter laws – a lesson Kentucky can benefit from as we craft our charter legislation.

More from the news we can use area: Hoxby’s study indicates the most successful charters use the following practices: longer school days, teacher merit pay and a strong disciplinary policy. We need to insure a Kentucky charter school law facilitates these top performance elements.

Maybe the most telling comment of all in the Journal’s article comes from a Harlem hospital manager. She entered her daughter in 10 charter lotteries, but didn’t win any of them. Instead, she enrolled her daughter in a Catholic school for $3,100 per year, saying, “I had no choice. I'd rather pay every last dime than put her in a public school."

That is, unless it was a public charter school.

Is the Courier-Journal demanding something a district superintendent can’t deliver?

– KERA may be in the way

The fallout from Coach Jason Stinson's criminal trial acquittal in the tragic heat exhaustion death of football player Max Gilpin may serve to highlight the incredible, and widely misunderstood, lack of authority and control now impacting local school boards and district school superintendents in Kentucky.

A Courier-Journal editorial demands that Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Sheldon Berman not allow Stinson to return to coaching duties, but it isn’t clear that Berman has that authority. KERA ripped much of the real authority in Kentucky schools away from district superintendents.

In Kentucky, KERA mandates that the school principal and the individual school’s site base council reign supreme.

In fact, if a superintendent fires a principal, the school’s site base council can turn around and hire that same person back in the same job. The superintendent basically can be told to go take a hike by an obstinate site base council. I’m told it’s actually happened.

I’m not sure that things are much different for coaching positions. I suspect that if Stinson’s principal wants the coach back, there is nothing Berman can do about it.

In fact, since the coach was acquitted, both Berman and the school’s principal would likely have a tough time trying to fire the coach, who probably has union protection.

Thus, one of the enduring outcomes of this tragic situation may be yet another example of how KERA disrupted lines of authority and accountability in Kentucky’s schools in a way that even the state’s largest newspaper can’t even understand, let alone overcome.

Louisville’s school busing mess may get messier

Apparently, a construction project on Interstate 65 in Louisville will impact the district’s already bothersome busing mess even more.

Schools expected to be impacted include Okolona Elementary, Moore Traditional High School, Moore Traditional Middle School, Smyrna Elementary and Southern High school. However, with the city’s major north-south freeway in a mess, city street traffic that spills over into other school zones seems likely, as well.

If your child’s school experiences even more bus problems, let us know.

Kentucky’s school test results will look different on Wednesday

As I mentioned earlier, the Kentucky Department of Education will release the 2009 No Child Left Behind test results in two days.

Jim Warren at the Lexington Herald-Leader has a nice article that covers some of the changes in this year’s report. For anyone interested in our schools and their accountability program, Warren’s article is worth reading.

Warren probably gets one item incorrect, however. He writes, “No Child Left Behind data will look the same as in previous years.”

In fact, the department of education indicated in a School Curriculum Assessment and Accountability Committee meeting some time back that due to complaints from a professor at the University of Kentucky, the test accountability data for each school this year will not include a breakout of the number of students in each student subgroup that were tested. The professor claims it is possible to reconstruct scores for student subgroups too small to normally get score reports when the counts of students are presented. He supposedly created a study on this; but, so far, promises from the department to send me a copy of that study have not been fulfilled.

I suspect the professor’s work overlooks a key point. Creating meaningful scores for small student subgroups is impossible with Kentucky’s current testing system. Kentucky’s assessment scores are not valid for individual students because of something called test matrixing. That fancy term basically means that each student only answers a subset of questions on the test. As a result, no individual Kentucky student is completely tested on the subject matter. Only when large numbers of student responses are averaged together does something approaching a valid performance picture for the entire student group in a school start to appear.

So, there isn’t any reason to try to compute scores for small student subgroups with the current testing program in Kentucky. It is mathematically possible to generate scores, but the results are meaningless.

However, eliminating information on the number of students tested is an important omission. It will hamper independent research on the real performance of Kentucky schools and eliminates the ability of independent researchers to confirm the validity of information in the Kentucky Department of Education’s reports.

Aside from the Bluegrass Institute, I am informed that even the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence holds an unfavorable view on this reduction in government transparency.

Anyway, the department of education has heard our complaints, so they may have figured out that there really isn’t a good reason to drop reporting the student numbers in the “No Child” reports. We’ll see what they decided on Wednesday.

Warren also totally misses another key point in his report. These scores are coming out way too late to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements. Last year, we got “No Child” scores on August fifth. We’ll want to learn more about that, as well.

2010 Students needing remedial work won’t start at the University of Cincinnati’s main campus

It’s an action that probably has repercussions for Kentucky students and could foreshadow a trend at other competitive colleges.

The University of Cincinnati just announced that students who need remedial courses will be diverted to one of the school’s satellite campuses when they enroll next fall.

The print version of the Kentucky Enquirer’s news article, which ran Sunday under the title “Accepted at UC? Maybe Not,” provides some interesting statistics.

The current UC on-campus remedial program, known as CAT, enrolls about 600 students a year. Among the group that entered under the CAT program in 2004, only 18 percent had graduated as of the spring of 2009. That is a five-year survival rate of less than one in five students. Perhaps more will graduate from this group in the future, but the costs for the required six years of college will clearly be enormous.

Here in Kentucky, college remedial requirements are a major and continuing problem, as this graph of data from Kentucky’s Council on Postsecondary Education shows.


With UC admitting a record enrollment on its main campus this year, it only makes sense to reward the most qualified students with coveted main campus slots while allowing less competitive students a chance to improve their performance and eventually win a slot at the main campus.

It’s tough love, but absolutely essential as the costs of education continue to rise dramatically, especially at large main campus locations like UC’s. This sends the right message to high school students – work hard, fix your educational discrepancies early and don’t goof off in the senior year – unless you want to wind up in a less competitive college.

How’s that?

It seems the Kentucky Executive Branch Ethics Commission voted Friday to allow former Kentucky governor Paul Patton to continue to serve on the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education as its chairman while simultaneously serving as Pikeville College’s president.

Use our comments feature to let us know what you think about this.

Island mentality won't help the economy

Labor unions succeeded in pressuring the Obama administration to slap high tariffs on imported Chinese tires. The decision may be good politics for the administration, but could have a negative boomerang effect.

Click here to read the entire column.

Finally! No Child Left Behind scores to release

The Kentucky Department of Education just announced that the 2009 No Child Left Behind scores for Kentucky will finally be released on September 23, 2009.

That will be six and a half weeks later than last year's August 5th release.

Some of the delay is explained by bad weather last year which resulted in some schools getting a two week extension on the mandatory testing dates. Some of the delay, that is.

Of course, by the time parents find out next week that No Child allows their child a right to transfer to a better school, we will be so far into the new school year that few parents are likely to take that disruptive option.

Once again, parents and students lose because the state didn't get the scores back on time because our testing company couldn't cope with delayed returns that impacted only a portion of our schools.

Jim Waters to host 'The Pulse' today

Jim Waters will be hosting "The Pulse" following Rush Limbaugh on Clear Channel Radio's WLAP-AM 630 in Lexington this afternoon -- 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. (eastern). Listen in at wlap.com.

Charge – Special education programs getting abused

Special education programs are important for students that really need them; but, as Manhattan Institute's senior researcher Jay Greene charges in “The Problems with Special Ed,” “Students who are struggling academically — but have no true disability — are being wrongly placed in special education.”

Here in Kentucky, there have been discussions that our rate of identification of special education students was also being driven by our CATS assessment. Special education students could qualify for a host of “test-busting” accommodations that even included reading the reading assessment to students!

Hopefully, when our new assessment program starts, it will take stronger action to prevent this sort of test-based special education abuse.

Liberty served at Murray Tea Party

Jim Waters gave a rousing speech at the Murray Freedom Rally on Saturday, Sept. 12, to several hundred patriots gathered for the occasion.

Click here to read the press coverage in the Murray Ledger & Times.

Kenton County Schools give taxpayers a break

Add the Kenton County School System to the small but growing list of Kentucky school districts that are working with taxpayers in these very troubled financial times.

Thanks to good fiscal management, this district voted not to increase taxes last month, joining the Walton-Verona Independent schools which also held the tax line and the Beechwood Independent Schools which actually voted a small tax reduction for this year.

If you know of other districts that are helping out their communities by resisting the temptation to raise taxes for the hard-pressed citizens of this state, we’d like to mention them, as well.

President Obama’s education speech – More on Conservatives’ concerns

The recent brouhaha over President Obama’s speech to school kids left the popular press wondering why there was so much fuss from conservatives.

I now know more about why conservatives were upset about this speech, courtesy of the Eagle Forum Web site.

Apparently, a contentious You Tube video (find the link in the Web article from Eagle Forum), shown in at least one school about two weeks before Mr. Obama’s speech, had raised conservative “antennas” to a high level of vibration.

Certainly, if the president’s speech had been anything like that video, there would have been justified howls of protest. In fact, the final version of the president’s speech and supporting education plans were toned down even more than earlier on-line versions.

All teacher graduate programs certifications to “Sunset” in Kentucky

Last night’s KET special on “Kentucky Principals, Leading by Example” (sorry, not yet on line) contained a stunning revelation.

Education Professional Standards Board head Dr. Phil Rodgers announced that the certification of every education Masters Degree program in Kentucky will “sunset” (i.e. terminate) in 2010 and the certification of every Kentucky education school’s principal preparation program will cease in 2011.

In all cases, education schools will have to reapply for certification under new guidelines to meet new standards for both the Masters and the principal preparation programs.

While Rodgers didn’t say so, this dramatic change appears to be driven at least in part by Senate Bill 1 from last winter’s regular legislative session.

Regardless, the implications of this announcement are stunning.

The Bluegrass Institute and other independent education observers in the state have been raising concerns about the preparation of teachers for some time. Lately, the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence has been beating war drums on the topic. When Prichard and Bluegrass Institute agree, someone needs to act!

Now, action indeed seems to be taking place. Dr. Rodgers remarkable announcement amounts to an admission that there are indeed major short-comings in several key areas of teacher training.

What remains to be seen is whether undergraduate teacher preparation programs will also undergo a similar reconstitution. It’s fine to fix programs for more experienced teachers and school administrators, but there is abundant evidence that problems in teacher development begin earlier in the pipeline.

Legislators hear about parent-friendly approaches in Boone County Schools

Parent-friendly approaches for improving education were the subject of one of the highlight briefings in today’s meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on Education at Northern Kentucky University.

Boone County outreach pro Dr. Anna Marie Tracy discussed a number of different ways Boone County Public Schools reaches out to welcome parents to help them get more effectively involved with their children’s education.

I’ll be talking about the details of some of these plans in future posts, but one quick example is a program for parents to make the most of high school. Useful subjects discussed at this brown bag lunch affair include things parents need to know about college in general and the ACT college entrance test.

In an effort to meet the needs of parents, Boone County hosts events like these with breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings, including weekend meetings, so parents with unusual work schedules can still attend.

Boone County has figured it out – leveraging parents in positive ways is a real low-cost education option with great payback. For one thing, as a briefer pointed out, parents are available without any salary, benefits or health care costs.

Stay tuned on this, as I suspect other districts around Kentucky could benefit from some of the ideas Dr. Tracy covered today. We know that parents in other areas of Kentucky don’t always feel as welcome as what we hear is happening in Boone County.

KACo: right the ship or mothball it?

Conventional wisdom says stopping a tax before it becomes law requires much less effort than getting rid of one enacted. The same holds true for government agencies.

Click here to read entire column.

Charter schools operate at much lower costs

I’ve been talking the past few days about some remarkable information in a new federal study on school district funding across the nation. What makes this study especially unique is that it separately reports fiscal data for the 1,673 school districts around the country where EVERY school is a charter school. Of course, none of those charter districts are found in Kentucky because we don’t have charter schools here.

I overviewed some of the implications in this report over the past few days, but now let’s dig a bit deeper.

The table below presents a state ranking I assembled for the median per pupil revenue by state for regular, non-charter districts in the US. That ranking does include every school district in Kentucky because, again, we don’t officially have charter schools (the Model Lab Schools at EKU and the Gatton School of Science at WKU operate much like charters, but they are not officially charter schools). Note that Kentucky ranks fairly low for per pupil funding, but (at the risk of sounding like a TV ad), wait – there’s more.

(Click to Enlarge)

Read down near the bottom of the table to see that while Kentucky’s 2006-07 median school district funding is $9,491 per pupil from all sources, local – state – federal, the median charter-school-only district funding elsewhere was considerably lower – only $8,677 per pupil.

In fact, the median charter-school-only district’s revenue is lower than the regular district median revenue in all but five states, and it’s over $2,000 lower than the US wide figure – nearly 20 percent lower.

The table above also shows that the median revenue for regular school districts in 12 states is at least 50 percent higher than the median amount the charter-only districts receive.

Clearly, charters in the federal study are operating at much lower cost than regular districts. That is undoubtedly due at least in part to the charter schools’ release from most of the burdensome, expensive and reform-stifling regulations that regular schools have to obey.

Unfortunately, the federal report doesn’t provide separate testing results for the charter-only districts. However, several reports indicate that on average overall charters perform about as well academically as public schools. If that general finding also pertains to the charter-only districts, then charter schools would be far more efficient for taxpayers.

One last note – the anti-charter crowd in Kentucky claims that charter schools won’t work well in our many rural school districts. That may not be true. Apparently, people in other states have thought about this issue and realize that one way to overcome this supposed problem is to convert all the schools in a district into charter schools. That allows the whole district to benefit from the educational flexibility that a charter provides.

Certainly, in the sad cases in Kentucky where entire school districts have failed to make No Child Left Behind goals for years and years, converting the entire district to a charter district might be a very good option for us to pursue.

We hear from states with charter schools that they open the door to real school flexibility. Charters can go out and do what works best for children free from bureaucratic reform-stifling restrictions that seem more focused on protecting adults in the system rather than educating the system’s true customers – the public school students of Kentucky.

New federal report shows KERA’s funding equity is best in nation

I blogged yesterday about a new federal report from the National Center for Education Statistics that contains some surprising new information.

Among other surprises, this report reveals that in some states there are a surprising number of school districts where every school is a charter school. That means every single school in those districts has been freed from most of the burdensome and restrictive school regulations that many experts now believe are standing in the way of real education reform.

There are more interesting revelations in this amazing new document. One of those concerns the funding spread from the lowest to highest funded regular school districts in each state. That statistic is captured in the federal report by a figure of merit called the “Federal Range Ratio.” A small Federal Range Ratio means there is very little difference between bottom-end and top-end funded school districts in a state.

As you can see in this table, which I assembled from Table 1 in the federal report, Kentucky has the smallest Federal Range Ratio for regular school district funding of any state in the nation. In other words, KERA has done a phenomenal job of leveling funding in our schools. The difference is only about 30 percent. No other state does this job better. In over 40 states, the ratio is at least twice as large.

(Click to Enlarge)


The fact that Kentucky’s school funding is now so uniform from district to district provides more evidence that funding alone doesn’t solve inequitable academic performance from district to district. Despite nearly equal funding across Kentucky, we still see a wide variation in test scores on both CATS and the ACT from district to district.

By the way, I’m not done with this report, so stay tuned for more.


Data details for the statistics crowd

Federal statisticians know that in most states some school districts “break the curve” when it comes to funding.

A good example in Kentucky is the Anchorage Independent School District. This very affluent school district charges extremely high local school taxes, far above what most Kentuckians can afford. In addition, the district only operates a Primary to grade 8 school system. Those factors make Anchorage’s state-leading per pupil revenue out of line with the real norms for Kentucky. Anytime a district like Anchorage is included in funding analysis, it “pulls the curve.”

Recognizing this problem, the federal analysis doesn’t look at the very top and very bottom funded districts in each state. Instead, to overcome the problem with “curve pullers,” which statisticians technically label as “outliers,” the new federal report looks at the district where the funding ranks 5 percent above the bottom funded district and at the district that ranks 5 percent below the top funded district. These are called the “5th percentile” and “95th percentile” districts in the report. Statistically speaking, this is a good and uniform approach to use when outliers like Anchorage are present.

After determining the 5th and 95th percentile district funding in each state, the federal report then compares those numbers using the somewhat cryptically titled “Federal Range Ratio.” When you actually look at this statistic, it is just a percentage-like difference between the low-end and top-end funded districts, expressed as a decimal instead of a percentage form.

Again, this is a good approach for such a figure of merit.

New federal study – Charter schools are cheaper

– A LOT CHEAPER!

I just learned to my surprise that across the country there are now 1,673 school districts where EVERY school is a charter school. That compares to 13,560 other school districts nationwide where only some, or none, of the schools are charters (Officially, Kentucky has no charter schools although we think that the Model Laboratory Schools at EKY and the Gatton School at WKU operate like charters).

Now, a brand new federal report takes a look at how the funding in these charter-school-only districts compares to the funding for the regular districts. Some of the findings are remarkable.

We hear a lot of complaining from Kentucky’s education crowd about supposedly low school funding. However, the new report shows the median district per pupil revenue in Kentucky in 2006-07 was $9,491 while nationwide the charter school districts only got $8,677 and nationwide the regular school district median was $10,754.

Suddenly, this new fiscal data casts the performance of charter schools in a very different perspective.

A couple of things are certain. First, there are school districts in other states today where every school is a charter school. That could be an answer to one excuse in Kentucky for not adopting charter schools due to the notable number of small, rural districts here. OK – go charter district wide to get out from under the onerous regulations that stifle the creativity and advantages of charters.

Second, charter-only districts operate at significantly lower cost than regular school districts do.

That could lead to another interesting possibility. We have heard that overall charter schools across the nation perform about the same on average as regular public schools (We note that there are exceptions in some states where charters do outperform regular schools).

However, even if charters across the nation only match regular public school performance, the new fiscal data could imply that the charter school districts are managing generally equivalent performance using about 20 percent less money than the regular schools receive (assuming the performance of schools in the all charter districts is similar to the performance of charter schools overall). That would be a huge savings. It will be interesting to see if separate charter district scoring data becomes available (If you have seen anything on that, please let us know).

Anyway, the new report certainly adds some serious evidence to often stated comments that charter schools are cheaper. If we are talking about district-wide charter models, they definitely are.

Stay tuned for more from this new federal report.

BIPPS serves up liberty at Murray tea party

Jim Waters, director of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, will be the keynote speaker at the Calloway County Freedom Tea Party on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 10: 30 a.m. at the old Brandon Auto World on the Kentucky 121 Bypass in Murray.

Click here to read entire news release.

Answer THE question, remove all barriers

First Lady Jane Beshear will host "Graduate Kentucky: A Community Approach" this weekend. This is a wonderful stage to highlight the problems and challenges associated with students that drop out of school.

It is great to engage outside speakers and to solicit the input from some of the best thinkers around the commonwealth on how to keep students in school.

However, shouldn’t we expect at least the same kind of urgency and collaboration from those within the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) who are getting paid via our hard-earned tax dollars to solve "the graduation problem?"

But what else can we expect when education officials educators cannot even agree on how to count the number of dropouts?

A few other questions also come to mind:

- Why are the top brains in the KDE following, instead of leading, this week’s event?

- Isn’t it true that the First Lady and all other concerned Kentuckians outside the system do not have the authority to implement any suggested plans, changes, policies, or reforms that may come from this well-intentioned event?

- When will the Kentucky professional educators being paid to deliver education reform and improvement be held accountable for results?

Or, just answer this single question: What internal barriers within the KDE need removing to implement meaningful reforms that result in more Kentucky students earning their high school diplomas?

Morphing from worker freedom to government handouts

More than 100 years after the first Labor Day celebration on Sept. 5, 1882, the labor movement that once advocated worker rights is working hard to trade those rights for government handouts.

Kentucky union members accounted for just 8.6 percent of wage and salary workers in 2008, compared with the 9.1 percent posted in 2007. Yet union influence on our legislators and administration is tremendous. Too many legislators and administrators bow to the union agenda in hopes of remaining in power. So much for country and commonwealth first.

What unions can't achieve in growth through performance and service to their members they try to get from politicians as payback for helping get them elected. The Employee Free Choice Act, known as “card check,” is tops on big labor’s agenda. This legislation would greatly empower unions, hamstring business, force unrealistic bargaining timelines with mandatory binding arbitration lurking in the background, and limit worker freedom. Kentucky representatives Ben Chandler and John Yarmuth voted for this legislation.

If the big labor bosses had confidence in their approaches, they would say to their legislator friends:

- “Get rid of prevailing wage legislation and Project Labor Agreements. We can effectively compete on price/performance with anyone.”
- “We support right-to-work legislation because our services for our members are worth much more than their dues.”
- “We don't need card-check legislation because we can grow and work hand-in-hand with business to create new jobs without government handouts.”
- “Forget payroll deduction of our dues. Instead, we will collect our members’ dues just like any other organization.”
- “We don't need the government to give preference to union participation in projects because it puts a bad rap on us as hindering competition and increasing costs.”

Now statements like those would be in the true spirit of individual freedom, liberty and free enterprise! They would offer a true reason to celebrate Labor Day.

Smoking bans, seat belt laws: Nanny-ism at its worst

Supporters of government mandates claim that coerced smoking bans make people healthier and seat-belt laws make driving safer. Perhaps. But such laws also weaken liberty and increase dependence on government.

Click here to listen to the commentary.

US Dept. of Education’s ‘take’ on Kentucky’s high school graduation rates

As First Lady Jane Beshear gets ready to kick off her forum on Kentucky’s endemic problems with high school graduation rates, I thought everyone might benefit from seeing Kentucky’s numbers using a well-researched high school graduation rate formula created several years ago by the US Department of Education.

This formula is known as the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate, or AFGR. It was extensively researched along with a number of other formulas by national dropout and graduation rate statisticians after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused new attention on the nationwide problem of high school dropouts.

That federally sponsored research showed the AFGR returned the most accurate information when it was tested with two states where high quality student tracking systems provided really accurate comparison data (Note: Kentucky lags in this area and is at least four years away from getting the first high quality graduation rate information from its still teething “Infinite Campus” student data system).

This graph summarizes the AFGR for Kentucky as published in several different issues of the annually released “Digest of Education Statistics.”


Notice that Kentucky hit a peak in high school graduations in the 1993-94 school year, shortly after KERA was enacted. Most of those graduates spent the majority of their school years in classrooms that saw little, if any, impact from the reform, which focused in the early years on the lower grades.

Also note that as of the latest available data, Kentucky has yet to return to that peak performance in 1993-94. While there has been a notable improvement in graduation rates since the 2001-02 school year, we still have a long way to go. As of 2005-06, the US Department of Education’s most accurate high school graduation rate formula shows Kentucky still was losing nearly one in four students.

Looking at the graph, it isn’t hard to understand why Kentucky educators held off adopting the quality AFGR formula for Kentucky. Kentucky’s official graduation rate statistics are based on another formula that was also examined by the US Department of Education. That formula was found to return the most inflated figures of any formula the research team examined, sometimes running as much as 10 percentage points too high.

The Kentucky Department of Education’s “Briefing Packet” for 2008 nonacademic data shows the state’s 2006 high school graduation rate was 83.26 percent. Compare that to the 77.2 percent figure the US Department of Education calculated with the AFGR formula. The six-point difference amounts to around 3,000 more dropouts than our educators want to admit left Kentucky high schools without a diploma in 2006.

Kentucky’s current graduation rate formula was also audited by the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts and found to have significant errors.

Wouldn’t it be nice for our educators to move to the AFGR formula now? Maybe then we would get a better idea of exactly how bad our high school dropout situation really is. I hope Kentucky’s First Lady will join us in calling for that change when our next round of graduation rates is released next summer.

You can read more about graduation rates in general and AFGR’s in the FreedomKentucky Wiki.

You can access “Digest of Education Statistics” issues and individual tables here.

'The next epic civil rights battle'

Columnist Ruben Navarrette gets it right when he concludes that “for African-Americans, the next epic civil rights battle will be fought not in the streets but in the classroom.”

Navarrette’s particularly well-reasoned and pointed comments here are worth the read.

He takes those to task whose mantra remains: “More money automatically means a better education.” Instead, Navarrette points out:

“Some people like to think the public education crisis can be eased by simply throwing more dollars at public schools. That mentality makes the issue easier to deal with. It's much more challenging to look beyond the spreadsheet and see the problem for what it is: a shortage of imagination. Many teachers have a tough time imagining African-American students being among the high achievers. They don't have a sense of possibility for what these students can accomplish.”

One wonders how much, as former President Bush once stated, “the soft bigotry of low expectations” affects the performance of those in Kentucky’s Tier 5 (lowest-performing) schools.

Jim Waters to speak Saturday at Murray freedom rally

Jim Waters of BIPPS willl be the keynote speaker at the Murray-Calloway County Freedom Tea Party on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 10:30 a.m. at the old Brandon Auto World on Ky. 121 Bypass in Murray (next to University Church of Christ).

Grad Rates on other peoples’ minds, too

As Kentucky gets ready to host its “Graduate Kentucky Forum” this weekend, Education Week reports (subscription, but a free trial is currently available) that 13 states, eight years after passage of No Child Left Behind, still do not report separate graduation rates for students still learning English.

A PDF table linked from the news article (click on the graph titled “GRADUATION RATES 2006-07”) shows that Kentucky is one of those 13 states that still has this hole in their graduation rate statistics.

The same Ed Week table shows the overall graduation rate Kentucky reported to the US Department of Education for the 2006-07 school year. That rate is not credible. Ed Week’s table lists that erroneous rate as 83.7 percent. This rate, however, was fabricated using the same inflated formulas that were officially audited in 2006 and found to be – inflated.

So, the forum meeting this weekend has some interesting data problems to discuss. That should start with a discussion on getting serious about accurately reporting the problem to the schools and the public.

President’s prepared remarks to students on line

The White House has publicly released the prepared remarks President Obama plans to make tomorrow to students ranging from preschoolers to high school seniors.

Given the controversy surrounding this speech, it will be interesting to see the reactions, especially from the target audience, the huge age span of children (Pre-K to Grade 12) the president plans to address.

Graduation Rates for Kentucky Colleges

As Kentucky’s First Lady gets ready to host a conference on the graduation rate problems in Kentucky’s public high schools, the Education Trust has just updated their search tool on college graduation rates. This tool has a number of interesting features including the ability to look at the 4-year graduation rate for the majority of Kentucky’s public and private colleges.

That 4-year rate is important to parents and students because it shows which schools do a better job of graduating students most economically. College expenses mount up quickly, and paying for an extra year or two to get a Bachelors’ Degree can really load up the costs.

Here is how the public and private universities in the state stack up in the Education Trust’s database.




Notice that the very best 4-year graduation rate in Kentucky’s most effective public college, the Murray State University, is less than 33 percent. In other words, less than one in three students graduate from Murray state “on time.” For other state schools, the performance is even worse.

The very worst “deal” in state schools is the U of L. It has by far the highest student-related expenditures of any of the public universities, but its 4-year graduation rate is very low.

Things look better for a number of the state’s private colleges, but only a handful graduate more than one out of two of their students “on time.”

It should be pointed out that graduation rates in all of these schools quite naturally increase when students who take five or six years to graduate are added. You can do those 5-year and 6-year what-if calculations using the Ed Trust Web tool. However, the costs involved for each extra year of school mount up quickly, and smart parents and their students would do well to consider four-year graduation rate performance in college planning.

Another point is that the colleges alone do not share all the blame for the low graduation rates. Poorly prepared students from our pubic schools arrive in large numbers at our colleges’ doors with inadequate preparation. That requires non-college credit remedial course work which often pushes students into at least one extra year of college the moment they matriculate. Thus, some of the blame for the very low 4-year grad rates in the Education Trust database must be laid clearly at the foot of Kentucky’s public schools and the failure of KERA, after nearly 20 years, to produce the sort of improvement we were promised in 1990.

As a note, I’m still researching what the Student Related Expenditures/FTE actually shows, but it does not appear to directly relate to tuition costs. You can research that yourself here in Ed Trust’s technical notes, found here.

FreedomKentucky.org: Empowering taxpayers to hold politicians accountable

FreedomKentucky.org, the Bluegrass Institute's new wiki Web site, now has the checkbooks of four Kentucky cities online:

http://www.thetimestribune.com/local/local_story_247085100.html

Changing 'people's lifestyles': Whose job is it?

In Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Tom Eblen's latest column, he quotes local councilman Jay McChord as saying: "What we need to do is change people's lifestyles."

The column is about how 100 of Kentucky's 120 counties are closing a street or highway for a few hours on Oct. 11 so that residents can take walk, enjoy a bike ride, run, jog "and to think about how regular exercise could make them healthier and happier." The project is known as "Second Sunday."

It's a good enough idea. But the quote from the councilman has me a bit concerned.

Whenever politicians or bureaucrats start thinking it's their duty to "change people's lifestyles," it seems appropriate to remind all Kentuckians: It's up to individuals, not the government nanny state and its minions, to "change people's lifestyles."

Governor’s wife getting serious about high school dropouts

Next weekend, Kentucky First Lady Jane Beshear hosts a conference on Kentucky’s continuing problem with high school dropouts.

She now recognizes a problem that I have been highlighting since the mid-1990s – despite all the hype about KERA, Kentucky continues to have far too many high school dropouts.

How many?

Well, don’t trust the numbers in the Kentucky Enquirer article. They are the “official” numbers from the Kentucky Department of Education, but the process that generates those numbers was officially audited by the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts in 2006 and found to seriously understate the true number of dropouts. The true numbers are at least several thousand students higher than the department is willing to admit.

The interesting thing in all of this is that there are better formulas to use, right now, to give Kentucky a better idea about high school completion rates. Maybe, just maybe, one outcome of the First Lady’s conference will be a call to move to those more accurate reporting methods right away.

Maybe.

School choice would bring quality — and accountability

Those who really care about Kentucky’s children are willing to give parents a choice.

Click here to read the entire article.

Commish to Schools: Viewing president’s speech on education should be voluntary

Next Tuesday, September 8, 2009, at noon Eastern time President Obama will make a major speech directly to school children around the country on both CSPAN and other dedicated education channels.

While the proclaimed goal – keeping kids in school and focused on education – seems laudable, the Christian Science Monitor’s blog reports that conservative and Libertarian groups are upset about some of the supporting education material sent out from the US Department of Education.

Those groups charge the material turns the speech into a political event designed to recruit youngsters as administration lobbyists. And, I have read elsewhere that some feel the speech represents an exceptional intrusion of the federal government into the area of local determination of school curriculum.

Given all the controversy, Kentucky’s education commissioner Terry Holliday is taking a neutral and common-sense approach on the debate. Holliday says that whether or not schools present the speech to students is most definitely a local decision.

In addition, the Kentucky School Boards Association reports that Dr. Holliday’s e-mail to Kentucky’s 174 school superintendents urges schools to honor parents who do not want their children to view the speech and to plan alternative activities for those children who opt out. It’s a parent friendly approach that many in Kentucky will appreciate – one that local schools will hopefully be careful to honor.

In fact, we’d love to hear from you about how your school handles this unusual situation. You can reply anonymously to this blog item if you wish, or send us an e-mail.

(update deletes out of date reference)