“KERA at 20” reports will be living documents

As regular readers already know, the Bluegrass Institute released a major set of reports about Kentucky’s 20-year history with KERA on Monday, November 22, 2010. One, “KERA (1990-2010): What have we learned?” is a full-length report, and the second, “KERA@20,” is a quicker reading “Commentary” on some of the key points in the main report plus more information.

You can access both from our freedomkentucky.org Wiki KERA Portal page.

You can also find more in the Portal.

One of the challenges in creating these reports was deciding what we didn’t have space to cover. We just couldn’t fit everything in to a reasonably sized report.

Also, the reports are not intended to be just dull history, but rather they offer policy-makers and citizens background to inform future decisions as we move forward with Kentucky education.

Thus, we intend that the reports will “live” through additions to the KERA Portal page. You will want to check there for updates to the “See Also” section of the portal.

You can check there now for some early additions on such topics as how Kentucky’s assessment history has cautions for the two efforts under way now to create new Common Core State Assessments (articles titled “SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium” and “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)”). We see potential danger that both those efforts could be repeating mistakes we made in Kentucky, and we’d like our educators to avoid them.

We’ll be adding another link soon to an already existing article about how Kentucky’s teachers didn’t get a fair share of the huge increase in spending that took place after KERA was enacted in 1990, so stay in touch.

And, once you have read our reports, if you think we need to add something else (e.g. parent involvement has already been mentioned), let us know. And, don’t forget, with the freedomkentucky.org Wiki, you can even add articles yourself. If you think your article, or any other existing article, needs to be listed on the KERA Portal page, let us know.