WCLU radio interview about new digital learning report

Here is the link to the radio report, which has several audio clips from an interview with Richard Innes about the Barren Academy for Virtual and Expanded Learning program.

Digital Learning Report video coverage

WCPO-TV Channel 9 in Cincinnati provides this from our Digital Learning Now!: Obstacles to Implementation in Kentucky press conference.

Coverage from today’s “Digital Learning Now!: Obstacles to Implementation in Kentucky” press conference

The Kentucky Enquirer’s nky.com web site just posted education reporter William Croyle’s “Bluegrass Institute pushes digital learning” article about our press conference today.

Croyle does a great job covering what we said about the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning and some of the great digital learning opportunities that are coming on line in regular Kentucky schools.

Those opportunities are definitely found in our host for today, the Conner High School in Boone County and its newly refurbished and reequipped library/media center.

Educators, press and activists gather to hear about digital learning

Richard Innes

Earlier today a press conference was held in the media center of Boone County's Conner High School to mark the release of Digital Learning Now!: Obstacles to implementation in Kentucky. 


Among several speakers was author and Bluegrass Institute education analyst Richard Innes and Dr. Dewey Hensley,associate commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education’s Office of District 180. Other attendees included Bluegrass Institute CEO Phil Moffett, Lt. Governor candidate Dea Riley, and Boone County Schools superintendent Randy Poe.

Dr. Dewey Hensley

The report outlines a set of Kentucky-specific recommendations regarding the enhancement of digital learning in our schools.
There was a lot of excitement about the future of digital learning in Kentucky and its potential as well as much discussion about the obstacles to effectively implementing it.  Members of the press, education groups, educators, and citizen activists gathered to support the education of Kentucky's children!

You can download the entire report here.


Join in the discussion on Twitter using #KyDigitalLearning and follow us @BIPPS!

Bluegrass Institute releases report on digital learning

The Bluegrass Institute released a report today focusing on roadblocks to increasing digital learning in Kentucky at a press conference at Conner High School in Boone County, Kentucky.

The new report is inspired by Digital Learning Now!, a report from former governors Jeb Bush’s (Florida) and Bob Wise’s (West Virginia) Foundation for Excellence in Education.

The foundation’s report deals with digital learning issues from a nationwide perspective while the new institute report focuses on specifics in Kentucky. The national report was released in December 2010.

In addition to a presentation of the report, the press conference agenda featured comments from Kentucky Associate Commissioner of Education Dewey Hensley concerning his efforts in the Kentucky Department of Education’s Office of District 180 to turn around Kentucky’s lowest performing school systems.

Several digital learning efforts were also discussed including the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning and new digital learning efforts in the Conner High School.

The Bluegrass Institute’s “Digital Learning Now!, Obstacles to Implementation in Kentucky” is available on line now to everyone. It should prove important reading for educators, legislators, members of business and industry and the general public who are interested in education in Kentucky.

Stay tuned for more information on the press conference and the new report.

(Updated following actual news conference)

New Bluegrass Institute report on digital learning coming Monday

A new report from the Bluegrass Institute on the exciting potential of digital learning in Kentucky will be released to the public on Monday at a 10 a.m. news conference at the Conner High School in Boone County.

In addition to highlighting some important developments such as the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning, Kentucky’s fully online digital learning high school, the new report consolidates concerns from Kentucky educators about roadblocks to expanded use of this powerful instructional technology.

The new report draws inspiration from the Digital Learning Now! report issued by the Foundation for Excellence in Education in December 2010. This organization, which is heavily invested in improving education in the United States, is headed by former governors Jeb Bush from Florida and Bob Wise from West Virginia. The foundation’s report has a nationwide focus, while the new Bluegrass Institute report deals with specific issues in Kentucky.

The new Bluegrass Institute report will be important reading for education policymakers as they chart the path of education in Kentucky in the 21st century.

We’ll list the link to the report in this blog on Monday right after the press conference ends.

Jefferson County busing madness takes hit in appeals court

The Republic from Columbus Indiana reports that the Jefferson County School Busing program doesn’t look too good to two of the three judges on a Kentucky appeals court. Opinions of a third jurist were not revealed during the hearing which did not render a final ruling in the case.

Read more »

Tennessee provides the right to work

People vote with their feet. We have written before about how 3 times as many people move to Tennessee than Kentucky because of lower tax rates and school choice laws.

Another reason may be that people want to live somewhere they don't have to be forced into joining a labor union. Tennessee is one of 22 states that has Right-to-Work laws which make it illegal to deny employment  based on association with a labor union.

You can view the language of Tennessee's law here. Contact your state legislator, they may be interested in seeing an example.

Jefferson County busing madness heads back to court

WXIX news reports the Jefferson County school bus plan is headed for another court review to see if it complies with state law.

The Jefferson County school bus system requires some students to take bus rides clear across Louisville – trips that take more than an hour one way – even though schools are located much closer to a child’s residence and parents don’t want their children on the bus for so long.

The busing plan is an outgrowth of 40 years of busing to achieve integration. But, after four decades, if this idea was going to work, don’t you think by now the city would have been naturally integrated as minorities got better educations that enabled them to get better jobs and move to the more affluent and desirable parts of the city?

It will be interesting to see what the court decides.

Poll confirms need for non-union teacher organizations

Hopefully, a press release from the Association of American Educators is going to spur teacher union bosses to make some changes.

The press release points to results from a recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll that shows:

“…71% of respondents said that they have trust and confidence in America's teachers. However, when asked about the teacher unions, 47% say they believe the unions have hurt education, compared to only 26% believing the unions have helped education.”

Clearly, a lot of Americans are unhappy about current union influence on education. With such a small percentage of the public believing teachers’ unions are helping, as the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Report Highlights says:

“Teacher union leaders should thoughtfully consider what actions they could take to improve their public image.”

Amen.

Dr. Wayne Lewis on charter schools

Dr. Wayne D. Lewis, Jr. from UK is starting a series in his blog about charter schools.

It’s well worth a look.

Jefferson County school busing: Not as bad as last year is supposed to be good?

The ACT score release had me tied up last week, but searching through the Courier-Journal’s web site today, this very short article popped up.

It says, “Last JCPS student off bus at 6:15 p.m. Thursday.”

The article goes on to say the last student got home on the first day of school about an hour later (it was 7:13 p.m., per another Courier article).

School gets out in Jefferson County at 3:45 PM. So, on day one of school, some poor kid was stuck somewhere between school and home at the end of the school day for 3-1/2 hours. It only got reduced to 2-1/2 hours in this transportation maze on Thursday for another kid (maybe the same one?). As one astute Courier reader pointed out, you can drive to Cincinnati in that amount of time.

If the district keeps this up, it may not take until spring for stories to start appearing about the violence on the buses.

After all, the kids already have had a year of ‘bus boredom education’ to get them ready.

ACT scores: Views from others part 2

Maysville’s The Ledger Independent has chimed in on the new ACT results, as well.

We need to be cautious about comparing Kentucky’s latest results to the national average (because only 49 percent of graduates took the ACT nation-wide while all of Kentucky’s Class of 2011 did).

Still, the point that a newspaper is now saying NO! to a knee-jerk call for more spending to fix problems in education is very interesting.

We do like the paper’s call for technology to be part of the answer, and we’ll have more to say on that in a few more days.

ACT scores: Views from others Part 1

There is no question that the new ACT college entrance test results have not exactly impressed the editors at the Independent in Ashland.

The article starts out by saying:

“The scores received by members, of Kentucky’s graduating class of 2011 on the ACT college entrance exam are in and, in a word, they are dismal.”

Read the full discussion here.

Ouch!

Ed Commissioner wants help to advise kids about college and careers

It’s a real problem. Education Commissioner Terry Holliday says that across Kentucky, the student-to-guidance-counselor ratio is less than one to 500. That isn’t nearly enough to give each student the sort of individual guidance and attention necessary to develop a solid plan for college and careers.

Especially now that we are testing all of our students with the ACT college entrance test, more students are finding out that they have the potential to go beyond high school. But, that potential still needs focus if students are to find out what they really want to do in life – and what it takes to get there.

Who would be better to help than adults who have already ‘been there, seen that, done that’ (and maybe even have the T-shirt)? So, Holliday is launching a new effort to get many groups, including PTAs, chambers of commerce, Workforce Investment Boards, higher education and business to help.

During March 12 to 16, 2010, Holliday wants an army of volunteers to help advise 8th and 10th grade students about their future career plans.

There will be training first, so the volunteers won’t go at this cold.

While there are a lot of details still to work out, the basic idea sounds like a good one to us. Our kids need the best help we can give them, and it’s clear that in-house school guidance resources are currently stretched too thin. Certainly, members of the public, especially those with degrees, and, I would think, those in technician positions and those working in the skilled trades, might make a big difference for a student.

Be wary of "pro-business" politicians

Rick Perry is an unapologetic "pro-business" candidate for President. Columnist Tim Carney unpacks what Perry might mean when he says that:

Perry promises to "get Americans back to work," but his policies -- from backroom drug company giveaways to green energy subsidies -- eerily mirror the unseemly big business-big government collusion that has characterized President Obama's presidency. Judging by his record in Texas, Perrynomics might just be low-tax Obamanomics.

Corporate welfare king Boeing provided a formative experience for Perry. Weeks after Perry took over the governorship in 2001, the jet maker announced it was moving its corporate headquarters out of Seattle and was considering Chicago, Denver and Dallas. Undoubtedly, Texas provided the best business environment: lower taxes, less regulation, better weather, less traffic. But Chicago won because Mayor Richard Daley and Gov. George Ryan offered Boeing $63 million in "incentives," including a $1 million buyout to a tenant who was occupying Boeing's preferred office space.

One problem: Texas' slower legislative process prevented the state from making a counteroffer. Perry was determined to fix this inefficiency so he would never be out-corporate-welfared again.

In his next State of the State address, Perry pushed the Legislature to create the Texas Enterprise Fund, giving the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker the power to hand out multimillion-dollar grants to businesses seeking to relocate to or expand within the state. Two years later, Perry and the Legislature created another subsidy bank, called the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, using taxpayer money to invest in high-tech companies. Perry made government a venture capital fund.

Muckrakers at the Los Angeles Times and the Austin American Statesman have shown a strong correlation between Perry's biggest campaign contributors and the money handled by these funds and Perry's other public-private partnership. Almost half of Perry's "mega-donors," according to the Times, have received profitable favors from the Texas government. Poultry magnate Joe Sanderson, for instance, gave Perry's campaign $165,000 and received $500,000 from the Texas Enterprise Fund to open a facility in Waco, the Times reports.

I'd continue quoting, but you should really just read the whole thing. Of course, no politician should be "pro-business" when it means that consumers pay the price. Even the father of economics, Adam Smith, wasn't pro-business. He was, like any credible economist, pro-market. Markets are what deliver benefits to consumers by allowing prices to float freely and giving entrepreneurs the signals they need to put their resources where they can do the most good.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kentucky governor Steve Beshear's re-election campaign reminds me a great deal of Perry's self-promotion. Beshear's campaign seems largely designed to tout the kind of special interest tax "incentives" he's given to businesses throughout the state. Beshear wouldn't apologize for that because it makes some political sense, but he should know that businesses without political connections don't much care for that kind of favoritism.

Beshear, like Perry, perhaps believes that he has the Midas touch when it comes to picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Beshear, after all, can point to the winners he picks. But it's not as if Beshear is investing his own money in these businesses. He's making bets on and rewarding the activities of some businesses as the direct expense of every other taxpayer in the commonwealth.

A wiser tax policy would be to eliminate all special interest tax breaks, lower overall rates (dare I say eliminate some taxes completely?) and therefore send a beacon to would-be entrepreneurs that Kentucky is the place to be. But I doubt that kind of reasoning fits too neatly in a 30-second campaign commercial.

(Thanks to Ryan Young for the tip.)

How do the new ACT Composite Scores compare across states with high participation?

Yesterday, I posted information from the ACT about the percentages of white and black graduates in 2011 that were fully prepared for college. To keep that comparison fair, I only looked at states that tested 100 percent – or nearly 100 percent – of all 2011 high school graduates with the ACT college entrance test.

Today, let’s look at the 2011 ACT Composite Scores by race for those same states.

The first graph shows the very disturbing news about how our whites compare to whites in other high ACT participation states. Data in this and the next graph come from the individual ACT Profile Reports for each state.


Note that even Mississippi’s whites beat our kids.

Keep in mind that Kentucky’s graduates were 79 percent white in this ACT test group. Only North Dakota had a higher white percentage (83 percent). Six of the states shown here had white percentages more than 10 points lower than Kentucky’s. Four states had white percentages more than 20 points lower. Thus, the dominant racial group in Kentucky was outscored by their counterparts in every other state in the graph.

It’s these demographic differences that explain how Tennessee scored 0.1 point lower than Kentucky in the overall ACT Composite Score for all students but exceeds our performance by 0.4 point for whites.

That brings up an important point. Because whites score a lot higher on the ACT than every other group except Asians (who represent very small proportions of students in most states), Kentucky does get a strong, and unearned, advantage in any comparison of overall ACT scores. The problem is the same as the one I have often discussed concerning the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Hence, it’s important to disaggregate scores to see what is really happening in our education system.

The news is better, in a way, for our black students.


Kentucky ranks in the middle of the pack here. However, blacks in all these states trail whites significantly. Even blacks in top-performing Louisiana trail whites in the lowest performing state, Kentucky, by 2.6 points. That’s a very big difference on the 36-point ACT.

The second graph does show that Louisiana, a major charter school state that rebuilt its Hurricane Katrina shattered gulf coast area schools with many new charters in the mix, clearly is doing a better job with these children of color.

And, Louisiana has a lot of blacks in its system, 32 percent of all 2011 graduates versus just 9 percent for Kentucky. Louisiana’s Class of 2011 is only 57 percent white.

If you have more questions about why I only look at states with high participation rates on the ACT and why I break this out by race, click the “Read more” link below. Or, use our comment feature to ask a question or make an additional observation.

Read more »

More on Louisiana Vs. Kentucky on the ACT

After I started posting comments on the new ACT score release yesterday, I was engaged by an anonymous reader with an obvious bias against charter schools. That individual also seems to be having a lot of trouble getting his or her facts straight. That happens in this blog from time to time, and we do work to try to insure that our readers get an accurate picture when those who post comments are confused.

However, sometimes, good comes from those reader challenges, even when the reader is wrong.

A case in point: our anonymous – and not well-informed – correspondent alleged that Louisiana tested 100 percent of its students with the ACT in 2007. That isn’t true, but when I checked the right information for 2007, I discovered something that adds to my evidence that post-Katrina Louisiana has made some remarkable progress on the ACT.

Here is the real data on graduates tested and ACT scores for Kentucky and Louisiana from 2007. It is on line in the ACT, Incorporated’s web site, accessible under the “ACT Average Composite Scores by State” section (I removed other state data for clarity).


Notice that both states had nearly identical numbers of graduates tested in 2007 (77 percent in Kentucky and 79 percent in Louisiana) and that Louisiana scored 0.6 point lower on the ACT Composite Score than Kentucky.

Because the 2007 participation rates are so very close, I think comparison of these scores is reasonable.

Now, flash forward to 2011. Here is how ACT reported that data.


Notice that both states now test all their graduates. However, the ACT Composite Score situation has flip-flopped. Louisiana – ravaged by Katrina six years ago – now scores 0.6 point higher than Kentucky.

So, between 2007 and 2011 charter school rich Louisiana went from 0.6 point below Kentucky’s ACT Composite Score to 0.6 point above. That relative change of 1.2 points is noteworthy on a 36 point test like the ACT.

Even after I pointed this out, our anonymous nay-sayer was unconvinced. He or she tried to claim something to the effect that only the rich had moved back to Louisiana after the big storm hit.

I doubted that assertion, so I checked the percentages of students eligible for free and reduced cost lunches in the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade reading assessments of 2003 (Closest pre-Katrina administration) and 2009 (most recently available). I used the NAEP Data Explorer to find those figures.

Guess what: In 2003, free and reduced cost lunch eligible students in Louisiana amounted to 50% of all the students there.

In 2009, lunch eligibility in Louisiana rose significantly to 62 percent, an increase of 12 points.

In contrast, Kentucky’s poverty rate was 42 percent in 2003 and rose to only 47 percent in 2009.

So, Louisiana had 8 points more poverty in 2003 and that rose to 15 points more by 2009.

If anything, based on the most recently available student poverty rates in NAEP, Louisiana should be at a notably higher disadvantage relative to Kentucky today than it was back in 2003 before Katrina hit. That makes Louisiana’s progress on the ACT even more remarkable.

The ACT doesn’t report on poverty rates, so for now the 2009 data is the most recent I can offer. But, most school statistics don’t change all that rapidly, so it is still very likely that poverty in Louisiana remains notably higher than Kentucky’s even today.

This adds more evidence that something in Louisiana is boosting their performance, and charter schools, which now enroll 70 percent of the students in New Orleans, for example, certainly seem likely to be a part of the process.

Quote of the day - society and government

Thomas Paine goes to great lengths in Common Sense to distinguish the difference between "society" and "government".

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a county without a government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."

- Thomas Paine

How does college preparation in Kentucky compare to the rest of the nation?

We always get questions about how Kentucky’s education system compares to the rest of the nation. Often, that isn’t such a simple question to answer well.

However, here are some comparisons of the percentages of white and black high school graduates that scored above the college readiness benchmarks in all four ACT tested areas in 2011. To get a reasonably fair comparison, I only show states that had very high participation rates on the ACT (98 percent in North Dakota, 100 percent in the rest).

The first graph shows how our whites compare to whites in other high ACT participation states. Data in this and the next graph come from the individual ACT Profile Reports for each state.


Notice that even in top performing states like Illinois and Colorado only about one in three graduates was fully prepared to enter a liberal arts college program. In Kentucky, less than one in five graduates was adequately prepared for a liberal arts program in a typical US college.

Now, here is the depressing information on black preparation.


As you can see, even in the top performing states in this graph, fewer than one in 10 black high school graduates from the Class of 2011 was adequately prepared for a typical liberal arts college program.

In Kentucky, fewer than one out of 20 blacks were fully college-ready.

You might wonder why I only look at states with high participation rates on the ACT and why I break this out by race.

Click the “Read more” link below to find out.

Read more »

How many Kentucky high school grads in 2011 were prepared for college and careers?

Not many

This graph, which I developed from data in the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release 11-067 about the 2011 ACT scores, tells the tale (click on it to enlarge).


Note that I only include years where Kentucky conducted 100 percent testing of all graduates.

Also, keep in mind that the benchmarks are developed by ACT after a survey of a number of colleges that use this assessment for admissions. Thus, the benchmarks represent an average level of rigor across a number of different colleges. Students with lower scores might survive in colleges with lower levels of rigor, but their educations will probably be of lesser quality, as well. On the other hand, students will need even higher performance to survive in more demanding schools.

Currently, a little more than half of our students are going on to postsecondary education. It looks like most of them are ready for a freshman college English composition course.

However, in math, only one in four Kentucky public high school graduates is ready for college algebra, generally the minimal math requirement for most degrees except elementary school teachers (and, that is a mistake I have often commented about before).

Only two out of five Kentucky public high school graduates read well enough to survive a freshman social studies course in a typical university.

Less than half of our college bound students are likely to survive in freshman biology or another science course.

Finally, only 14 percent of our graduates are fully prepared for a liberal arts education across all four areas.

As you examine the graph, you will see that progress so far is coming at a painfully slow rate, generally improving by only a percentage point or two over the past three years. We need to jump start this process if we are going to do justice to our kids, who are about to enter a very changed adult world where yesterday’s education simply will no longer do.

Kentucky’s non-public students boost overall state scores in new ACT reports

The Bluegrass Institute is always being asked if we have any idea how private school students in Kentucky perform academically.

The answer is, yes, we do have some information. And, that information just got a new update.

And, it shows that private and home school students in Kentucky are doing a really good job.

The ACT college entrance test scores for the graduating class of 2011 were released earlier today, and I’ll be doing a lot of analysis of this very important information.

A few hours ago, I also got a copy of the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release 11-067, which includes ACT scores for graduating public schools students only. Earlier, I obtained the overall average scores for all Kentucky graduates, public, private and home schools combined, from the ACT Profile Summary Report for Kentucky for 2011.

That allows me to do a little algebra to compute how many non-public school students graduated in Kentucky in 2011 and how they did as a group on the ACT.

Here are three tables that tell the tale from 1993 to the present.

The first one presents overall results for all students combined. These are scores directly released by the ACT, Incorporated in its reports.


Notice that the overall scores for Kentucky dropped notably in 2009, which is the first year the state tested all students with the ACT. That added about 25 percent of our graduates who had not previously chosen to take the ACT when it was optional, and taken at student cost.

This next table covers public high school students’ performance in Kentucky. These scores come from the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release.


Notice here that our ACT Composite score was 19.1 in 2009, the first year we started 100 percent testing, and dropped to 19.0 the next year. Then, in 2011, we came back up to 19.2. So, our improvement since the first year of 100 percent testing has been 0.1 point. That isn’t a lot to crow about, but it is an improvement.

Finally, this last table covers the performance of the non-public school students. I had to calculate these figures.


There are some very important things to consider here.

First, I have no way to know whether or not the 4,232 students tested in 2011 represent all of the non-public school graduates in Kentucky. However, I suspect that a rather high percentage of the non-public school students in the state do take the ACT.

Second, the number of non-public school students tested dropped slightly from 2010 but still represents nearly a tenth of all the students in the state. That is enough for private and home school graduates to make a notable difference in the all-student scores in the first, blue-shaded table above.

I suspect the private school drop is related to the economic situation.

Next, Kentucky’s non-public students notably outscore our public school students, and the gap has been growing recently.

For example, in 2009 public school graduates had an ACT Composite of 19.1 and non-public school graduates scored 22.1, a difference of 3.0 points.

In 2010, the gap grew to 4.0 points.

For this year’s graduates, the public to private/home school gap enlarged further to 4.4 points.

Thus, in 2009, private school graduates pulled up the public school ACT Composite of 19.1 to an overall average score of 19.4, a difference of 0.3 point.

In 2010, the non-public school graduates’ 23.0 ACT Composite pulled up the public school composite of 19.0 to an overall average of 19.4, a difference of 0.4 point.

Finally, in 2011, Kentucky’s private and home school graduates pulled up the public school average again by 0.4 point.

So, in evaluating only overall scores for Kentucky, it is important to keep in mind that they reflect an important contribution from Kentucky’s non-public school graduates.

When we look at the trend in scores only for Kentucky public school graduates since we adopted 100 percent ACT testing, we have only improved performance by the minimum amount detectable, 0.1 point.

Still, the trend is starting to go in the right direction. This offers hope for the future even though Kentucky clearly has a very long way to go and really needs to look at what is happening in a key charter school state, Louisiana, which I blogged about earlier today.

Southern charter school state handily beats Kentucky in new ACT test results

The new ACT results are out, and I already posted a blog earlier today with the news that Kentucky did edge up slightly in ranking among those states where ACT testing is essentially universal.

But, a really big story concerns how Kentucky stacked up against hurricane-racked schools in Louisiana. Louisiana rebuilt its post-Katrina school system largely by harnessing the power and flexibility of charter schools to move out much more quickly than traditional, regulation- and union-constrained public schools could ever accomplish.

Here is our comparison graph again of states where ACT testing is virtually or totally universal.


Note that Louisiana, one of the nation’s strongest charter school states, and also a Southern state, outscored Kentucky by 0.6 point for the 2011 high school graduates’ ACT Composite Score. Here is a further breakdown of ACT Composite Scores by race for the two states:


In particular, notice that blacks in Louisiana outscored Kentucky’s blacks by a full point on the ACT Composite Score. That is a notable difference.

However, the white situation is much more dramatic. Kentucky’s whites languished behind whites from Louisiana by a whopping 1.6 points! That is a very dramatic difference in state-to-state comparisons.

Keep in mind, both states tested all of their graduates, so these comparisons are quite appropriate.

When you consider the challenges Louisiana has faced, this is clearly rather remarkable performance – for them. Good job, Louisiana!

The situation shows that Kentucky could make stronger educational gains, faster, if it would finally establish a good charter school program.

Data sources: ACT Profile Reports for Kentucky and Louisiana, on line here.

Kentucky edges up in 2011 ACT test reports

Data released today shows Kentucky’s performance improved slightly in ACT college entrance test results for the high school graduating class of 2011. It’s an encouraging sign that Kentucky’s schools are finally changing focus to preparing students for college and careers instead of preparing for meaningless CATS assessments.

At a press conference today in Nicholasville, Kentucky and in their web sites, the ACT, Incorporated and the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) posted data listing the combined average performance of all students in the state, both public and private.

The reports show among those states that test all, or virtually all, students with the ACT college entrance test, that Kentucky improved its position by one place in the rankings, swapping places with Tennessee (See graph below; click on it to enlarge).


Still, in a fair comparison of states where testing percentages are virtually identical, it is clear that Kentucky has a long way to go to match top-performers like Illinois and Colorado, which pioneered the policy of testing all their students with the ACT a decade ago. In 2011, those states posted ACT Composite Scores for all their public and private school students of 20.9 and 20.7, respectively. Kentucky scored more than a point lower at 19.6, a very notable difference.

For example, in Kentucky, only 28 percent of the graduates met the ACT College Benchmark score that signaled adequate preparation for a college math course in algebra. In Illinois, 42 percent were prepared to take that same college algebra course.

It is important to note that ACT performance in Kentucky cannot be validly compared to performance in most other states because those states do not conduct universal testing with this assessment (UK Center on Business and Economic Research, are you listening?).

For example, ACT participation rates for high school graduates in 2011 ranged from a low of only nine percent in Maine to full, 100 percent participation in eight states in the graph above and nearly universal participation (98 percent in North Dakota for the first time in 2011, so also included in the graph for that reason).

In most states, students voluntarily take the test, so the ACT results do not represent a valid random sample and therefore cannot be reasonably compared to states where testing is universal.

There is a lot more to discuss from the results of this very important testing program, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, you can find some of the 2011 reports from the ACT, Incorporated here.

Keep in mind, the reports released by ACT, Incorporated cover overall averages in each state for all students, public and private. We’ll talk about public school only performance in Kentucky in a later blog.

Imposing national curriculum standards

Next month, the Obama Administration will begin granting waivers to states that are not on track to meet proficiency requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will be granting these waivers selectively, based mostly on states' willingness to abide by new executive branch mandates not included in NCLB, likely including adopting national curriculum standards.

Duncan has the authority under NCLB to grant waivers, but not to compel states to jump through administration hoops in order to earn them, as Neal McCluskey has documented clearly.

As Neal notes in today's Cato Daily Podcast, essentially imposing national standards – as well as other potential waiver demands – represents a large-scale assertion of federal executive power over local education:

We've broken any semblance of a Constitutional balance of power between the executive and the legislative branch. Now the President is just going to dictate to every school what they're going to teach. And that is a giant threat to freedom and to the American education system.

A broader recognition that the Constitution grants neither Congress nor the President any role in education would go a long way toward fixing these problems. NCLB may be, to quote Arne Duncan, "a slow-motion train wreck," but using that law to transfer power away from parents, states and Congress is easily a solution worse than the problem.

Big Apple charter schools turn in better performance, again

And, they learned about it in a timely manner, too

WNYC in New York City reports that the charter schools in the Big Apple outperformed regular public schools, once again – mostly in math this time – in the past school term even as the State of New York increased the rigor of its assessment program.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of schools in Louisville where hardly any kids learn much math. Wouldn’t it be great if we could offer parents in Louisville the same school choice options that are now routinely available to similar parents in New York City?

Also, wouldn’t it be great if Kentucky already had its school testing results for 2011?

How come a huge education complex like New York’s already has its assessment results back when a much smaller operation like Kentucky’s is still waiting, maybe for another month or more, to get our school test scores back?

Schools are starting up across Kentucky in the next week or so, but our teachers still don’t know if what they taught last year was effective. Kentucky’s teachers had to shoot blind, or with reliance only on locally funded supplemental testing, to create this year’s education plan while teachers in New York were able to benefit from additional information on performance that their state assessments provide.

Teachers’ union protest in Washington is a flop

It’s really rather humorous.

Back on July 30, 2011, the country’s two main teachers unions and a group called Save Our Schools (SOS) held a rally in Washington, DC to push back against badly needed pressure being put on schools across the nation to improve their performance.

The SOS group expected a 5,000 to 10,000 person turnout, a trivial drop in the bucket when you talk DC rallies. That is especially true when you consider the latest data in the 2010 Digest of Education Statistics shows in 2008 there were 3.2 million school teachers in the United States.

According to Education Week, only around 3,000 actually attended the SOS rally. That’s just 0.09 percent of the nation’s teachers who were excited enough by this event to show up.

In fact, the 2010 Digest of Education Statistics shows that in 2008 there were more than 5,000 teachers just in Washington, DC alone.

Of course, the SOS march in DC was spotted for what it was even before it happened.

Groups like the Association of American Educators (AAE) and the Washington-based Center for Education Reform denounced the rally and claimed that the teachers involved didn’t want the American education system to progress.

Certainly, the lackluster turnout for this highly touted union event hints that it’s the union itself and its status quo policies that many of our nation’s more forward-looking teachers want to be saved from.

Free-market solutions to web censorship?

What happens when governments attempt to censor information? Innovation and the market take over. Telex is a system being developed that could potentially make it impossible for governments to censor individual websites.

This has incredible implications for the spread of information, government transparency and accountability!

Headline of the day

Supposedly shocking:

Standard & Poor’s, others lobby government while rating its credit

Apparently not shocking:

Lawmakers tax companies, individuals while asking for campaign contributions

That is all.

Jefferson County’s extreme school busing: It’s BACK!

WAVE-3.com reports that when school starts up again in Jefferson County schools on August 15th, some students will still face excessively long bus rides – over an hour one way – even though all kids there live much closer to a suitable school.

By the close of last year’s school term, those long hours on the bus were turning into the inevitable mayhem, with fights and disruptions a virtual daily occurrence.

Why is the learning curve for the people running this school district so shallow?

Meanwhile, the Courier-Journal is justifiably upset about the school board hiding a busing plan that might have cut down on the excesses. The paper has published two separate related editorials since this story broke on August 3, the first editorial ran on August 6 and the second on August 10.

Tea Party having impact: Official actually talks cutting a tax by 40 percent!!!

Wow! The tussle over the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission (NKAPC) is providing new evidence of Tea Party impact.

The Tea Party and Northern Kentucky building contractors turned in nearly 25,000 signatures yesterday to force a referendum vote on the continued existence of the NKAPC on the November ballot.

Today, Kenton County Judge Executive Steve Arlinghaus actually suggests in a Kentucky Enquirer article that the NKAPC should cut its tax rate by 40 percent to woo voters to keep the commission in existence.

Kenton County Judge-Executive Steve Arlinghaus said he would like NKAPC Council to lower the $32 per $100,000 tax by 40 percent. That might get public opinion on NKAPC’s side. Says Arlinghaus:

“It is the most practical solution to the entire problem. To cut the planning commission off at the knees would be a grave mistake. If the area planning commission, though, is not willing to budge on the tax issue, they’re equally wrong.”

When was the last time you heard a politically elected official call for a 40 percent cut in anything?

Good Job, Tea Party!!

Kentucky’s education commissioner protecting tax dollars

Holding up payments to Jefferson County for questionable school restaffing

The Courier-Journal reports that Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday is holding up millions in school assistance funds for Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Jefferson County until the school district provides answers about the highly controversial way staffing changes were made in these schools.

The Courier interviewed Dewey Hensley, a former principal in Jefferson County who now is the Associate Commissioner for District 180 programs at the Kentucky Department of Education. Says Hensley:

“We are asking them to provide us with a detailed description of how they chose and staffed these schools,” Dewey Hensley, an associate commissioner with the Kentucky Department of Education, said in an interview Tuesday. “We want to understand their system for placing highly qualified teachers in these schools that have a high-needs student population.”

At issue: a huge percentage of the teachers selected to help turn seven Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Jefferson County are brand new, with absolutely no prior teaching experience.

Holliday and Hensley obviously have well-founded concerns that this action isn’t in the best interests of students and may violate state and federal requirements, as well.

Also at issue: How these teachers were selected, and how the district determined they had the ‘right stuff’ to turn these low-performing schools around.

Professor Stephan Gohmann on Milton Friedman

This presentation was made by University of Louisville Professor of Economics Stephan Gohmann about the ideas of Milton Friedman at the Bluegrass Institute's annual "Friedman Day" event.

Stephan F. Gohmann - Milton Friedman Event from Bluegrass Institute on Vimeo.

The morality of capitalism

Capitalism deserves a moral defense, but even those who appreciate the moral superiority of capitalism sometimes find themselves ill equipped to offer a clear response to critics.

A new book from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Students for Liberty and the John Templeton Foundation aims to provide just that intellectual ammunition. The Morality of Capitalism, edited by Tom G. Palmer, gathers a diverse group of scholars, writers and business leaders from across the globe to extoll the virtues of capitalism.

I recorded a quick podcast with Tom about the book and its authors.



Student groups can get bulk copies shipped to them from Students for Liberty.

A laugh for the day

This is via Intellectual Takeout:

New Rule: When a politician says he's going to create jobs, he has to resign and actually start a business.

Former Kentucky testing expert raising concerns about new state standards

Andrew Porter, dean of the graduate school of education at the University of Pennsylvania and a former member of Kentucky’s National Technical Advisory Panel on Assessment and Accountability (NTAPAA), is raises some very strong concerns about the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that Kentucky adopted a year ago.

In a letter published in Education Week (subscription?) Porter writes,

“I wish I could say that our progress toward common-core standards has fulfilled my hopes. Instead, it seems to me that the common-core movement is turning into a lost opportunity.”

He goes on to say the CCSS do not represent a “meaningful” improvement over existing state standards.

Porter has more to say. Regarding the two separate efforts to create new tests based on the CCSS, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium Porter says:

“What I know so far about the work of the two multistate consortia developing the assessments isn’t promising. It sounds as if the new assessments may ignore state-of-the-art research and technological advances, settling for tests that are much like the ones we already have.”

Kentucky’s teachers are gearing up right now to teach to the new standards so our students will be prepared for new tests. Let’s hope Porter, who was often rather insightful in his NTAPAA days, is off target this time.

N. Ky Tea Party pulls it off: Gathers nearly 25,000 signatures to put issue on ballot

Collaboration between freedom-loving citizens and business leaders in Kenton County, Kentucky, has borne abundant fruit.

A petition drive sponsored by this coalition has collected signatures of nearly 25,000 residents of the county who want a right to vote about the continued operation of the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission or NKAPC.

NKAPC was created decades ago to coordinate area development in the three major Northern Kentucky counties of Kenton, Boone and Campbell. The law that enabled creation of the NKAPC stipulated that more than one county must be a member and at least one city with 50,000 residents must be included.

Of key interest, the law allowed the NKAPC to be a separate taxing entity with only rather loose control from officials actually elected by the citizens.

Still, this would make sense, if the commission really operated as a multi-county planning and zoning operation.

However, Boone County never joined.

Later, Campbell County left NKAPC, leaving this organization basically operating in just Kenton County. Furthermore, the latest Census shows the population in Covington, Kentucky, the county’s largest city, has dropped well below the 50,000 figure stipulated by law. Thus, continued operation of the NKAPC no longer appears to comply with the original intent of the law.

The current situation renders Kenton the only county in Kentucky where zoning, planning and building inspection is actually rather far removed from the control of elected county officials who are ultimately responsible.

And, while exact figures are in hot dispute, it almost certainly makes the operation of these functions much more expensive in Kenton County than in any of adjoining counties.

In any event, it looks like Kenton County voters will now get to decide for themselves. The Tea Party/Builders Association team needed to collect something less than 18,000 signatures to put the issue on the November ballot. Even allowing for the almost inevitable disqualification of some of the petition signatures, there is so much overkill in the number of signatures submitted to the Kenton County Clerk’s office that a ballot item seems all but inevitable.

JCPS school board admits disappointment in superintendent evaluation

The Bluegrass Institute recently submitted a records request to obtain the most recent (2009-2010) performance evaluation for former Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Sheldon Berman. You can read/ download this evaluation here. This was a follow up to a previous request that was a part of the investigative report, "Rewarding Failure".

In that report we criticized the school board for providing a glowing review for Berman's performance while failing to even MENTION the incredible number of underperforming schools in the district. This time around it was at least mentioned...

Considering very few school boards across the state even mention student performance in superintendent evaluations, the fact that disappointment was expressed by the JCPS school board is a significant step forward. Granted, it is just a couple of sentences from a multi-page document but it does represent a willingness to bring this discussion into the open and an awareness that the superintendent is the CEO of the school district.

Superintendent performance questions in other states

An excellent South Carolina based transparency site has been asking some great questions about whether school superintendents are "earning their keep". The premise of the post is that the highest paid superintendents' districts are performing mediocre at best.

The Bluegrass Institute has been monitoring this very issue in Kentucky for a while now. You can read about our efforts here. It is great to see accountability and transparency on superintendent evaluations spreading in other states!

Kentucky’s own high school graduation rate calculation

On August 2, 2011, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) released two sets of high school graduation rate data for the Class of 2010. One data set was calculated in accordance with current federal No Child Left Behind requirements, and I have already posted several blogs on that data here and here.

A second set of graduation rate data was also calculated using a Kentucky-only formula that attempts to give schools credit for students who take an extended time to earn a regular diploma and for students with learning disabilities who earn a Certificate of Completion but don’t meet the requirements for a regular diploma.

While it is worthwhile to recognize schools that stick with students who take more than the standard four years to complete high school, the Kentucky-unique formula is incorrectly described in the Briefing Packet for the new data release.

Furthermore, there are some important assumptions being made that the briefing packet also fails to mention. It remains to be seen if those assumptions prove valid once we get good quality graduation rate data in 2014.

Read more »

U.S. credit rating downgraded by S&P

... which makes this video about 30 minutes out of date. It's instructive, nonetheless.



This downgrade effectively means the price of most state and local public sector borrowing just went up.

High school graduation rates: How does your local school district rank?

The Kentucky Department of Education finally released the high school graduation rate report for the Class of 2010.

However, the data is all lumped together into one, massive Excel spreadsheet. That makes it impossible to easily see how districts perform against each other.

So, we disaggregated the data into a series of tables that show how each district ranks for No Child Left Behind compliant graduation rates.

There are separate tables for all students as well as each major minority group found in Kentucky.

Everything can be found in freedomkentucky.org wiki item:

2011 Kentucky High School Graduation Rates

By the way, the graduation rates reported here use the Federal Government’s Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate calculation. This formula was extensively researched in 2006 and found to be the best available for states like Kentucky that don’t have high quality student tracking data to compute the very best information.

Kentucky won’t see its first set of high quality graduation rate data until 2014, which will tie us for last place in getting such baseline performance data for our schools.

In the future, we plan to run a similar series of tables for individual high schools, so keep tuned.

Taking liberty to the airwaves: Jim Waters to host 'The Pulse' today

Jim Waters will be guest-hosting for Leland Conway today on "The Pulse" from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Clear Channel Radio's WLAP-AM 630 in Lexington. Click here to listen.

Kentucky State Education Board and Department of Education inject a good weighting scheme for new assessments

Reversing a very contentious decision from the June meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education with Kentucky Department of Education staffers, a very weak plan for weighting various elements of the new Kentucky public school assessment program has been revised.

Now, the Kentucky School Boards Association reports the following weights will be used:

• 70 percent – “Next-Generation Learners” areas, which include test scores in reading, math, science, social studies and writing, achievement gap reductions, growth in the reading and math areas, students who meet college and career readiness targets and, for high schools, the graduation rate

• 20 percent – “Next-Generation Instructional Programs and Support,” which includes the program review results for subjects such as arts and humanities, practical living, world languages and additional writing areas

• 10 percent – “Next-Generation Professionals,” which includes effectiveness ratings for teachers and principals

Special interests, largely groups representing the arts and humanities and world languages teachers, swayed the board at its June meeting, resulting in a very unsatisfactory weighting scheme of 50/30/20. That would have provided far too much weight to the very subjective areas that will receive program reviews and staff reviews.

In sharp contrast, core academic subjects would have received far too little emphasis, a problem the board and the education department heard about after its June decision from many sources, including yours truly.

The fact that the board listened – and made these changes – is a hopeful sign for Kentucky’s new assessment program.

Quote of the day: Coal vs. government

“The coal industry has done a lot more for Eastern Kentucky than the state has." --Dennis Adams of Prestonsburg, in a Lexington Herald-Leader letter to the editor. Read the entire letter here.

Video: Phil Moffett steps up to lead the Bluegrass Institute

Kentucky’s new graduation rates raise questions

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) finally released high school graduation rate data today, and it will take some time to go over all of it. However, a first look at the new data, which for the first time has the KDE using a much more accurate calculation developed by the US Department of Education, raises some questions.

For one thing, last year Kentuckians were told our high school graduation rate in 2008-09 was 83.91 percent. Using the new formula, the KDE now more accurately reports the real rate was only 75.11 percent, 8.80 points lower.

It looks like the new calculations from the KDE agree fairly well with those from the US Department of Education for 2007-08. The feds say Kentucky had a graduation rate of 74.4 percent while the KDE calculated 74.99 percent, little more than a half a point higher.

So, here is the full set of graduation rates for the nation and Kentucky calculated by the feds since KERA began plus the new data for 2009 and 2010 from the KDE.


First note the new KDE data shows an increase in graduation rates over the past two years, which reverses a trend of decline from the previous two years. That change in trends may or may not be accurate. We’ll have to wait a year or two for the feds to do their own calculations to be sure.

Finally, even if the very latest data from KDE is correct, note that we still are not seeing rates better than some posted in the early days of KERA. So far, all we have done is to regain lost ground over the past two decades.

More later, so keep tuned.

Phil Moffett, BIPPS new president and CEO, on 'The Joe Elliott Show'

Phil Moffett, the Bluegrass Institute’s new president and CEO, will be on "The Joe Elliott Show" on 970 WGTK-AM at 1 p.m. (EDT) today.

Moffett will be talking about the institute’s exciting future as it builds alliances to advance freedom, defend liberty and build a more prosperous Kentucky.

"The Joe Elliott Show" is broadcast weekdays from Noon to 3 p.m. EDT.

Listen live here.

Recent articles on Bluegrass Institute's new president and CEO

Take a look at some recent articles related to today's announcement that Phil Moffett has joined the Bluegrass Institute as president and CEO!

Phil Moffett will head conservative institute - Kentucky.com/Lexington Herald-Leader


Moffett heads conservative think tank - WEKU

Former gubernatorial candidate to lead BIPPS - Bluegrass Policy Blog

Video: 'An Unsustainable Path' author discusses Medicaid

Recently the Bluegrass Institute published "An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid Spending". The video below is from the release of the report. Author John Garen provides an overview of his findings.

Former gubernatorial candidate to lead BIPPS

(LOUISVILLE, Ky.) – Phil Moffett, Louisville businessman and former GOP gubernatorial candidate, is the new president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

Moffett announced that the institute would reshape its mission from a traditional “think tank” to a “do tank” by forming an alliance with Kentucky businesses and liberty organizations statewide, including Tea Parties, the Kentucky 9/12 Project and Take Back Kentucky. This new coalition will focus on specific missions promoting free markets, smaller government, reduced government spending and limited regulation.

“The time is right to team the intellectual capital of the Bluegrass Institute with the organizational strengths and passions of the liberty groups along with business owners to bring specific legislative and regulatory changes that will make Kentucky more prosperous than it has ever been,” Moffett said. “As president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute, I look forward to building and managing this unique and powerful alliance. Our effort will lead to increased opportunity and prosperity in the Bluegrass State.”

Moffett follows Bowling Green entrepreneur Chris Derry, who founded the institute, and Lexington businessman Rick Loghry to become the institute’s third president and CEO.