We are moving!

The Bluegrass Policy Blog is packing up and moving over to the new, official Bluegrass Institute website.

We will still be providing news, analysis, and research about free-markets, education reform, the protection of personal freedoms, and a constitutionally restrained government.

You will find our new location here: http://www.bipps.org/bipps-blog/

End funding to college sports?

College affordability is one of those issues that inspires many a politician to wring his hands, furrow his brow and - after careful consideration - boldly call for more state funding. But if these politicians really cared about college affordability, wouldn't they ask colleges to make some difficult cuts? Columnist A. Barton Hinkle makes a pretty good case for why students and taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pay for college athletics:

A story last year in USA Today reported that "at least six schools—all in Virginia—charged each of their students more than $1,000 as an athletics fee for the 2008-09 school year. That ranged from 10 percent to more than 23 percent of the total tuition and mandatory-fee charges for in-state students." Yet some students never attend so much as a single basketball or football game—never mind a lacrosse match or rowing competition.

There are some exceptions. Depending on the year, one to two dozen athletic departments around the country turn a profit. Those are the ones such as Virginia Tech with huge football programs (or, occasionally, great basketball). At those schools, the football and men's basketball teams end up subsidizing all the rest—from women's basketball to men's tennis.

Kristi Dosh, a lawyer who specializes in sports financing and who runs the blog businessofcollegesports.com, has analyzed how much sports other than football and men's basketball siphon off. Most of the time, she has found, the cost of other sports more than outweighs the net gain from football and basketball, and the losses can be huge even before adding in big variables such as coaches' salaries, aid to student athletes and recruiting.

Take the University of Florida. During the 2009-2010 school year it raked in $44 million from football and $2 million from men's basketball—but lost $2.8 million on women's basketball, $5.3 million on other men's sports, and $10 million on other women's sports. And that's before you include the cost of coaches' salaries ($17.4 million), aid to student athletes ($7.5 million), and recruiting ($1.4 million).

Unlike Florida most universities don't have a top-20 football team—if they have a football team at all. And even many that do end up looking like Rutgers, which (reports Bloomberg) last year gave the women's basketball coach a monthly golf allowance while removing professors' desk phones from the history department to cut costs.

True, Virginia law ostensibly limits the use of public funds for athletics. But athletic-department budgets are notoriously opaque: Money pours into one big pot from a variety of sources (e.g., ticket sales, alumni donations, student fees), gets mingled together and then gets spent on everything from salaries to Gatorade. As a VMI spokesman told USA Today, information about athletic fees is "buried in our budget."

But not only is the financing fudge-able, money is fungible. In other words: If VCU were not spending $600 of each student fee on athletics, some of that money might be available for, say, assistant professors. Ditto for alumni donations, endowment proceeds, and the like. This in turn would reduce a school's need for state funds.

Kentucky is a place where basketball experience can serve as an embarrassingly effective launching pad to elective office. It's hard to imagine a Kentucky politician saying that even highly indebted college students or cash-strapped taxpayers shouldn't be compelled to pay for college sports programs, no matter how much they might claim to care about preserving college affordability or the pocketbooks of their constituents.

Crony Capitalism

From the General Motors bailout to subsidies for Solyndra, crony capitalism is as serious a threat to liberty, free markets and civil society as ever. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Tom G. Palmer recently discussed The Morality of Capitalism (free pdf), the financial crisis and cronyism at the John Locke Foundation.



The book is quick and rewarding read.

Does Kentucky have any clear-cut examples of this kind of crony capitalism?

Substantial progress or not: You can’t have education both ways

A Tuesday news release from the Kentucky School Boards Association has me scratching my head. Why do some education boosters in this state think we don’t remember the past?

The legislature realized that Kentucky’s CATS school assessment program was not providing trustworthy information and disbanded it back in 2009. I remember that.

Never the less, a consortium of groups including the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, the Council for Better Education (CBE) and the Kentucky Association of School Councils couldn’t let go. They kept on computing a ‘CATS Index’ anyway.

Today that consortium released data disaggregated by race and special student groups such as English language learners.

The bottom line from this new release: even relying on the watered down testing left over from CATS, most student groups in Kentucky are not on track to reach the performance goals that were set back in the start of this century.

In one case, students with limited English proficiency, the scores are flat or even declining at all school levels.

So, on Tuesday, the story was about enduring achievement gaps and that major work remains to bring Kentucky education to the level we all want to see.

That doesn’t mesh with recent claims we’ve been hearing about the state making “great strides” over the past 20 years, does it?

I'm sorry ed boosters, but you just can’t have this both ways.

Read more »

AdvanceKentucky AP program posts more ‘wins’

Per the Madisonville Messenger (subscription or fee), you can add Hopkins County to the growing number of school systems in Kentucky that have greatly benefitted from the AdvanceKentucky program to provide better trained teachers and other incentives in Advanced Placement course offerings around the state.

The paper reports that the number of students in Hopkins County recording college credit qualifying AP scores of 3 or higher, which usually earns college credit, was 113 in 2011. That’s a considerable jump from the 37 students with qualifying scores in 2009.

At present, AdvanceKentucky serves 64 high schools throughout the state. We are hoping this outstandingly successful program, which accounted for an incredibly high proportion of all the AP course improvement in Kentucky last year, will soon add at least one high minority high school from Louisville.

So far, Kentucky’s largest school district has shunned this program, possibly because the teachers union there doesn’t like merit pay for teachers, and AdvanceKentucky rewards AP teachers with $100 for each student that gets a qualifying AP score. Let’s hope the adults in Louisville will soon let at least some of the students there have a chance to participate in a highly successful AP course initiative.

New BIPPS.org launches

Dear Friends,

Since it was created in 2003, the Bluegrass Institute has enabled many important victories for freedom, personal liberty and the expansion of free markets in Kentucky. We are proud of the work we have done to move freedom forward in the state—from shining the light on poor performance in Kentucky’s public schools to forcing transparency and accountability in government.
This is why we are excited to continue driving impact and policy change in Kentucky!

Today we take that impact a step forward.

You may have noticed some changes to the look of the institute. The Bluegrass Institute is Kentucky’s only free-market think tank. We are dedicated to our mission of empowering Kentuckians to take back their freedoms and forcing policy changes that expand liberty across the commonwealth. To that end, we have sought feedback and advice from supporters and marketing experts on how to more effectively com municate our message.

This is why we are proud to officially announce the launch of our new website and introduce our new logo!

The new www.BIPPS.org aims to invigorate our voice and further our goal of systemic public policy changes by working with business owners and grassroots organizations to advance freedom, defend liberty and build a more prosperous Kentucky.

Please take a few minutes to look around the page. I’m sure you’ll find a wealth of interesting material. Also, feel free to relay your ideas and recommendations. And don’t forget to tell your friends!

Freedom Forward >>

Governors Bush and Wise on digital learning

Former governors Jeb Bush (Florida) and Bob Wise (West Virginia) talk to Piers Morgan about digital learning in this CNN interview.

Morgan also gets a scoop on the announcement of “Digital Learning Day,” coming on February 1, 2012.



You don’t have to wait until February, thought, to get an idea about digital learning in Kentucky and what stands in the way of our kids getting more of this exciting new educational experience.


Just check out our new report: Digital Learning Now!: Obstacles to Implementation in Kentucky.

Jeb Bush talks to Piers Morgan about education

Piers doesn’t lay on the dreaded 'America’s Got Talent “X” Button' in this interview!

Clearly, Florida’s former governor has got “talent” when talking education.

Taking liberty to the airwaves: 'Bluegrass Mondays' today on 84WHAS

Jim Waters, Bluegrass Institute vice president of communications, will be empowering Kentuckians to take back their freedoms today on The Mandy Connell Show on 84WHAS at 10 a.m. EDT)

The "Bluegrass Mondays" segment is part of Connell's show every other Monday.

The Mandy Connell Show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to Noon (EDT).

Call in to participate in the conversation at (502)571-8484 or (800)444-8484.

Read Jim's recent column on why Oregon is not a good example for Kentucky to emulate when deciding whether to make pseudoephedrine a controlled substance in order to keep it out of the hands methamphetamine makers.

Digital Learning conference: Union protestors’ chants ring hollow

Education Week reports (Subscription?) that a digital learning conference in San Francisco last week led to protests by individuals who “echoed” sentiments from national union leaders.

Regarding the latest report from the effort led by former governors Jeb Bush (Florida) and Bob Wise (West Virginia), the EdWeek article contained the following observations:

“Notably absent from the report's endorsers were either the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's two largest teachers' unions, with then-NEA executive director John I. Wilson calling the suggestions "corporate" and lacking legitimate teacher input.”


Well, time for a little truth here. When I was researching my Kentucky-specific Digital Learning Now! report, I asked the Kentucky Education Association for input on multiple occasions. In the end, our state’s largest teachers’ union declined to provide any input.

In fact, my report does have teacher input in several forms, along with input from many other great sources including Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday, the Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board’s Phil Rogers, other state education organizations, district technology coordinators, local school district superintendents and the very fine folks at Kentucky’s totally on line digital high school, the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning.

But, the union totally opted out.

Keep that in mind as you reread the EdWeek comments above about the teachers unions fussing about a lack of their inputs.

Atlanta cheating scandal fallout starts

Education Week reports (subscription?) that the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, which rules on teacher licenses in that state, has voted to remove licensure for the first group of eight teachers and three administrators involved in the huge Atlanta, Georgia school testing scandal.

Meanwhile, the fates of those involved in the ACT testing scandal in Perry County, Kentucky, remain under review by the Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board (EPSB).

I don’t think that means accountability isn’t coming in the Kentucky case. I just think the EPSB is being very careful to assemble a tight case as it deals with the relatively new area of forensic testing investigation.

Digital Learning Now! national scorecards are out

Kentucky has a way to go

The progress of all 50 states on promoting digital learning has just been assessed by the national Digital Learning Now! organization headed by former governors Jeb Bush (Florida) and Bob Wise (West Virginia).

Each state was evaluated for performance on a total of 72 metrics from 10 major “Element” areas that concern good digital learning programs. My quick analysis of the Digital Learning Now! scorecard report web tool shows states met anywhere from a low of only 14 of the 72 metrics in California to a high of 49 in Utah.

Kentucky met 25 metrics, which tied us with Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, Rhode Island and Tennessee for 31st place for digital learning implementation.

Here is how we compared to a near-top ranked state, Florida (click on table to enlarge).


One thing that really hurt us was the absence of charter schools, which Digital Learning Now highly prizes. If we had charter schools in Kentucky, I think we’d have ranked MUCH higher.

Still, imaginative efforts like the Barren Academy of Virtual and Expanded Learning, Kentucky’s totally on line digital learning high school, which I have discussed before, helped us to do better than we would have otherwise.

I know the Kentucky Department of Education is working hard on digital learning, and they are planning to release a report soon which will be used to launch even more innovations.

In the mean time, you can get an idea about the roadblocks to expanding digital learning in Kentucky by reading my recent report, “Digital Learning Now!: Obstacles to Implementation in Kentucky.”

This report will probably provide some important input into the final state plans.

You can get Digital Learning Now! report cards for Kentucky and other states by clicking here and then clicking on the state you want to examine.

Which education gaps are being improved – Part 2 – High School Graduates’ Performance

I started this gap series of blogs yesterday with an analysis of the recently released Kentucky Core Content Test results. I am looking at what I’ll call “classical” achievement gaps, those between whites and blacks, males and females, and so forth.

Today, I present gap trend information for Kentucky’s white and African-American high school graduates from the ACT college entrance tests.

The quick bottom line: whether we look at scores for all high school graduates, public and private school combined, or just scores for our public schools, Kentucky’s African-American students got left behind.

To see the details, click the “Read more” link

Read more »

Taking liberty to the airwaves: 'Future Shock' on WGTK's 'The Joe Elliott Show'

Phil Moffett, Bluegrass Institute president and CEO, will discuss the institute's new series on Kentucky's public pension systems on "The Joe Elliott Show" on Louisville's 970 WGTK-AM today at 1 p.m. EST.

Listen live here and call in at 502-571-0970

"The Joe Elliott Show" airs weekdays from Noon to 3 p.m.

Read the first in the series entitled "Future Shock," which considers:

• How Kentucky’s pension mess started and grew.

• Who the players are and who voted for the bills.

• Examples of gross abuse of the public pension system.

• Solutions based on free-market principles

Which education gaps are being improved?

With its recent release of the 2011 Kentucky Core Content Test results (KCCT), the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) inaugurated a new concept in reporting education gaps.

Instead of reporting such statistics as the difference in proficiency rates between blacks and whites, or males and females, the department now reports each student group’s performance separately in terms of how far that group is from 100 percent proficiency. Between 2010 and 2011, the KDE’s Gap to Goal report (obtain by clicking on the “Statewide” “All District” Excel spreadsheet icon here) shows that averaged statewide, almost every group closed the “Gap to Goal” of 100. In other words, the average proficiency rate for each student group for reading and math combined in 2011 was higher than the group’s combined average for 2010.

There is some merit to this gap to goal approach, because it doesn’t mean very much if, for example, blacks close the gap with whites only because white proficiency rates decline.

However, there is also merit to looking at achievement gaps in the classical way: whites versus blacks, males versus females, and learning disabled students versus the overall average performance for all students. And, there is merit to looking at performance separately for each academic subject.

So, I took the recent Gap to Goal report from the KDE and did those additional calculations. This table shows what I found (click on it to enlarge).


Here is how to read this table.

In 2010 the percentage of the “All Student” group that scored either “Proficient” or “Distinguished” on the KCCT Reading Assessment was 71.85 percent. In the same year, the percentage of students “With Disability” who scored in this proficient range was only 47.06 percent. The difference, shown in the column headed “2010 Reading Gaps” was 24.79 points.

Similar results are shown in succeeding columns for 2010 math and 2011 reading and math.

Finally the last two columns show the trend for the gap. In the case of reading, in 2010 the all student versus disabled student gap was 24.79, and previously noted, and in 2011 it was 26.49 points. That is an increasing trend, which isn’t what we want. So, the column on the right for “Gap Trend in Reading” shows the word “Increasing” in red.

A similar logic applies to other gap calculations for females versus males (shown in the yellow highlighted rows) and whites versus African-Americans (in the salmon colored rows).

You’ll note that there is a lot of red in those last two columns. In fact, among all the comparisons shown, only the white versus African-American math gap shows improvement.

Thus, this classical gap analysis shows that kids are still being left behind in Kentucky’s public schools, namely African-Americans, students with learning disabilities, and males.

Furthermore, you can’t tell that from the official Gap to Goal calculations. You have to look deeper.

Frederick Douglass and the Movement for Liberation

This video is worth your time.

Famed orator, abolitionist, and writer Frederick Douglass was one of history's greatest champions of individual liberty and equal rights for all.

Robert McDonald is an Assistant Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. This lecture was recorded on July 27, 2011 at Cato University in Annapolis, Maryland.

Jefferson County busing mess headed to state’s high court

More tax dollars will go down legal drains and out school bus tailpipes as the Jefferson County Board of Education appeals their busing for integration program to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

WAVE-3 has the details.

Bluegrass Institute report: Private groups gorging at state pension trough

Workers at politically connected private agencies eligible for taxpayer-funded retirement, health care benefits

For Immediate Release:
Tuesday, Oct.11, 2011

Contact: Jim Waters at 270-782-2140

(FRANKFORT, Ky.) – A new Bluegrass Institute policy brief shows that hundreds of workers at a multitude of agencies – including some private organizations – are feeding at Kentucky’s taxpayer-funded public pension trough.

According to “Future Shock – Kentucky’s public-pension hole: Deep and getting deeper,” even staff members at the Kentucky Education Association, the state teachers’ union, are allowed to join the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System – as long as they had prior involvement in any of the commonwealth’s six public employee pension plans.

“Kentucky’s public pension plans are more than $31 billion underfunded and the hole is getting deeper by the day,” said Phil Moffett, the institute’s president and CEO. “We must understand how we got in this hole and what we need to do to get out. Getting private industry and privately employed individuals who work on contract with the state off the public dole is a good start. The ‘Future Shock’ series will shine a bright light on the problem and present solid free-market solutions.”

Also included in Kentucky’s pension plan are a faith-based housing group, master commissioners and their staffs and the Commonwealth Credit Union.

The credit union currently has 365 members in the Kentucky Retirement Systems, including 253 active employees, 83 current or former workers vested but no longer contributing to the plan and 29 current retirees.

A recent report by the Lexington Herald-Leader noted that Commonwealth Credit Union has $890 million in assets and $58 million in annual revenue.

“Why is this healthy and profitable private company getting corporate welfare at taxpayer expense?” Moffett asked.

Responding to claims that Commonwealth was allowed to join the state pension system because “its customers are government employees,” he said: “This seems ridiculous. Wal-Mart in Frankfort probably has a very large group of customers who are state workers. Should they also receive state pensions?”

Today’s release previews a full research report on the state’s ailing public pension system, which currently faces a $31.4 billion unfunded liability.

The institute will release the report, which is authored by Lowell Reese, owner of Kentucky Roll Call, a public affairs publishing company in Frankfort, and former state Chamber of Commerce executive, in sections that address:

• How Kentucky’s pension mess started and grew.

• Who the players are and who voted for the bills.

• Examples of gross abuse of the public pension system.

• Solutions based on free-market principles.

For interview information, please contact Jim Waters at 270-782-2140 or jwaters@freedomkentucky.com.

Update: Where's 'Occupy City Hall' when you need them?

Update: The Louisville MSD has hired a new spokesman. I'm not sure any amount of PR will be able to cover up -- uh, pardon me, "explain" -- whatever State Auditor Crit Luallen uncovers.

Where's 'Occupy City Hall' when you need them?

There’s plenty for taxpayers to be concerned about in today’s Courier-Journal report about the deferred compensation package that apparently awaits Bud Schardein, executive director of Louisville’s Metropolitan Sewer District? Which bothers you the most – that:

• Schardein, whose salary is $181,147, will get $200,000 in deferred compensation if he hangs around for another 15 months. Apparently, this was a benefit designed to keep Schardein from leaving the MSD?

• All of this is happening while customers’ rates have been going up by 5 percent to 7 percent annually – increases the bureaucrats claim are needed to pay for renovations?

• Other Louisville government agencies – including the Louisville Water Co., Transit Authority of River City, Louisville Regional Airport Authority and even metro government itself – “don’t provide anything similar to encourage their leadership to stay?”

• Schardein likely will, with his long tenure and high salary, receive a six-figure government pension?

• MSD Chief Engineer Mark Johnson, who’s also getting hefty taxpayer-financed raises and bonuses – has, according to the Courier-Journal story, “retained business ties with the owners of his former consulting firm while the firm contracts to secure no-bid MSD contracts.”
• Jefferson County Public Schools is generously contributing $35,000 of Louisville taxpayers’ salary into an annual annuity for new superintendent Donna Hargens – even before she has proved whether she can turn around one the failing school district?

• Former JCPS Superintendent Sheldon Berman, whose annual salary approached a quarter-million dollars, received $80,000 in such special annuity payments even as he presided over a district with five of the lowest-scoring high schools on the most recent ACT test?

• Mayor spokesman Chris Poynter seems to think there “may have been very legitimate reasons the MSD board” would allow an agency head to enrich himself as the expense of tax- and rate-payers?

• Metro Council President Jim King doesn’t want to get involved?

The Occupy Wall Street crowd cries “foul” when private-sector CEOs get such golden parachutes. But where, exactly, is that foul-smelling crowd now?

Fight brewing: who ultimately controls education?

Kentucky General Assembly or the Kentucky Board of Education?

A power struggle over who ultimately controls public education in Kentucky may be brewing in Frankfort.

On the one hand, you have the Kentucky General Assembly. The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled back in 1989 this body was ultimately responsible for public education in this state.

On the other hand, you have the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) and its advisors from the Kentucky Department of Education. This group claims KERA gives the board wide latitude to develop and administer education policy in the Bluegrass State.

And, that’s the basic rub. What are the limits of the board’s authority?

It’s an uncharted area, but building emotions on both sides of the argument indicate that someone with a good ‘policy GPS’ better grab a hold of the tiller of state pretty quickly.

Read more »

Jefferson County school busing litigator takes Courier-Journal and school board to task

Lawyer Teddy Gordon has never been shy about his opinions of the continuing school busing mess in Jefferson County.

In his recent letter to the Courier-Journal, he nicely lays out all of the problems with this dragged out legal fight to insure that Jefferson County’s students get the same right that kids in almost every other part of the country enjoy – the right to attend the school nearest their home.

CPE’s Bob King has it right, but Owensboro’s Messenger-Inquirer doesn’t

Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) leader Bob King has it right about college and career preparation in Kentucky.

As the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer writes it in “Speaker: College readiness a major concern” (Subscription):

“CPE chief: Too many Kentucky high school grads need remedial classes in college; higher ed should "shoulder part of the responsibility to help K-12"

The Inquirer also says King admitted:

“We are producing superb teachers, but we are producing some that are not as superb enough.”

Somehow, I doubt King’s exact comments were that grammatically challenged, but the idea comes through, anyway.

King said still more, but the Messenger-Inquirer confused his comments about Kentucky’s leading rate of improvement in some indicators with the idea that Kentucky actually now leads the nation for such things as: the percent of adults age 25-64 earning degrees, six-year graduation rates at four-year universities and the number of undergraduate credentials awarded relative to the population with no college degree.

While our recent rate of improvement in those indicators is reportedly the best in the nation, we still have a long way to go to catch leading states in these areas.

Furthermore, it isn’t hard to show big rates of improvement when you are starting from well behind the rest of the pack.

Educators just can’t give up on misleading test analysis

Keep up a mirage of great progress, even if it’s largely a mirage. That seems to be the bottom line motive behind a number of folks involved with Kentucky’s education system. These well-meaning, but misguided people keep trying to breathe a 10th life in to our now defunct CATS accountability system.

The latest example can be found in an article from the Kentucky New Era, “Transition index useful to schools” (Subscription), which defends an unofficial and privately developed CATS like reporting scheme for public school performance in Kentucky.

For example, the article shows that the Hopkinsville High School's “Transition Index,” as this unofficial grading system has been dubbed, rose from 70.5 in the 2009-10 school year to 77.6 in the recently completed 2010-11 term.

What do results from more credible testing show for Hopkinsville High?

This table lists the percentages of Hopkinsville High’s 11th grade students who met the ACT Benchmark scores that indicated good preparation for college and careers.


These numbers look a lot different, and a lot lower, than the cobbled together index, don’t they?

ACT testing shows there has been a little bit of improvement in English, Math and Reading, but the overall percentage of students with good preparation in these subjects is a whole lot lower than the misleading “Transition Index” would have us believe.

And, in science, the abysmally low level of preparation actually deteriorated between the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school terms.

That is definitely not a 77.6 performance!!!

Quote of the day: More stimulus money needed .... really?!

"The fault with Mr. Obama’s (stimulus) plan is not that it contains too much government spending, but that there is not enough." -- Courier-Journal editorial

School board drops union negotiations

In a surprising move, the McCracken County School District has cut off negotiations with its local teachers’ union chapter and will unilaterally set issues such as wages, salaries and benefits, the Kentucky School Boards Association reports.

That leaves only eight school districts in the state with union contracts.

You can read about these eight agreements in “Analysis of Collective Bargaining Agreements in Kentucky Districts,” a report from the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission that was approved last December but still is only available in approval draft form in the freedomkentucky.org wiki site.

It’s hard to understand how the Kentucky Education Association has such influence in Frankfort and financial support from teachers when its primary job of negotiating working agreements is obviously not being very effectively conducted.

“Our NAEP scores are in question”

It came up during today’s Kentucky Board of Education meeting in a discussion about extra help, called testing accommodations, given to students with learning disabilities.

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday pointed out something I have been saying since 1999 – Kentucky’s testing policies for learning disabled students impact the validity of the state’s reading scores, both on state reading assessments and on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Holliday specifically told the board:

“Our NAEP scores are in question.”

He’s right.

Click the “Read more” link to learn the shocking story about how Kentucky’s educators have been reading kids the so-called reading tests in this state.

Read more »

Scott County Schools foolin’ with figures

Scott County just jumped on board the school performance denial bandwagon (see “Most schools raise scores on tests used with CATS” (subscription)), citing scores from a CATS throwback, Prichard Committee concocted school grading scheme. This scheme makes everyone feel good even though kids are not learning enough.

When will Kentucky’s school folks finally get it?

The CATS assessment is dead. It has been dead since 2009. It died because it was giving us an inflated idea about our school performance.

And, as the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) recently stated, continuing to cite Prichard’s CATS-like scores is not helpful to bringing a better program on line. KDE spokesperson Lisa Gross says, “The index is misleading and it is not in the best interest of the implementation of Senate Bill 1.” She added that the index isn’t reliable, and then said of the state’s educators, “I hope they don’t use those."

Scott County obviously wasn’t listening to Gross.

And, Prichard’s “stuff” is misleading.

For example, the new Prichard Index for the Scott County High School was 79. That sounds pretty good.

Reality: Recently released 11th grade ACT testing results for 2011 for Scott County High show only 45.2 percent of the school’s students read well enough for college work and even lower percentages of the students are prepared for math (29.7%) and science (21.9%).

Doesn’t sound much like a ‘79’ performance, does it?

Starbucks wants to help businesses, not government

Starbucks has been in the political news quite a bit in recent months. CEO Howard Shultz announced he would no longer donate funds to political campaigns until Washington got its act together and urged his fellow CEO's to follow suit. Most recently he announced an initiative to collaborate with a non-profit organization on a project called "Jobs for USA". The project seeks to provide loans to small businesses.

I am not certain of the specifics of this project but there is one admirable aspect - less reliance on the federal government for funding and expanding small business and job growth. The government does not create jobs. The only thing it can do to help create jobs is create a healthy environment for businesses to thrive.

School performance reports: talk about confusing

It’s ironic.

On October 3, 2011, the Education Week newspaper ran an article titled, “Ky. Turnaround School Reaps Double-Digit Gains.”

This article discusses a turn-around school that made double-digit gains in reading and math proficiency rates and made No Child Left Behind Adequate Yearly Progress for the first time in the history of that 2001 legislation.

On the other hand, one day earlier the Courier-Journal ran a very different sort of headline about Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), titled “JCPS in danger of becoming revolving door of persistently low-achieving schools.”

Surly, you must be thinking, the two articles are talking about different schools.

Well, guess again.

The EdWeek article is totally focused on The Academy @ Shawnee, a high school in Louisville. The Courier’s article talks about multiple schools, but also includes Shawnee as a concern school.

How is this possible?

Shawnee made NCLB goals only thanks to a “Get Out of Jail Free Card” built into the No Child rules. This allows a school to be rated as meeting required progress – even if its math and reading proficiency rates are well below target – so long as the school improves those rates by at least 10 percent.

Shawnee did that.

However, even after that improvement, Shawnee’s proficiency rates remain low, with only 45 percent of its students meeting reading standards and just 24.75 percent hitting the math standard.

To get out of trouble under the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools program, Shawnee has to raise its proficiency rates above those in the lowest five percent of all Kentucky schools. That doesn’t sound like much of a target, but the Courier whines that even this modest requirement may be too much for the Jefferson County School District’s 13 Persistently Low-Achieving Schools.

Time will tell, if we ever figure all of this out. Anyway, I’m not claiming success for Shawnee right now. It’s really easy to post big increases in performance when you start out near zero. Let’s see if the school can keep it up.

Needed: Louisville government in technicolor, not 'black and white'

The Louisville Metro Council budget committee passed an amendment tonight 8-4 that's another slap in the face of taxpayers by denying a requirement that financial impact statements be issued for all new union contracts - before votes are taken on those collective bargaining agreements.

This is one of those rare times that the Courier-Journal provides more-balanced coverage on a labor issue here.

Mayor Fischer's office wants to make this about the Metro Council "interfering" in union-contract negotiations. I assume this is a strategy designed to deflect voters' attention from the real issue, which is: making it EASY for taxpayers to determine the cost of new union contracts.

When steps could be taken to make government activity more transparent and the political elites refuse to take those steps, then those politicians CANNOT in good faith claim to favor government in technicolor.

But taxpayers should demand more transparency. The more transparent government spending is -- at any level -- the lower the cost the better the product.

The full Metro Council will vote on this issue next Thursday -- Oct. 13 at 6 p.m.

Make your disapproval known before then by calling Mayor Greg Fischer's office at (502) 574-2003.

Prichard pushing flawed state rankings for academic progress

There is now no question that the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence is pushing a seriously flawed analysis of Kentucky’s ranking for academic performance against the other states in the nation.

Prichard’s new head, Stu Silberman, former superintendent of the Fayette County Public School District, has repeatedly cited the clearly dubious claim that Kentucky used to rank 49th among the states for school performance and now ranks 33rd.

The latest example, this time in print, was Silberman’s Op-Ed, “Big challenges to meet Ky. education goals,” in the Herald-Leader on October 2, 2011.

Silberman bases his claim on a ranking scheme initially fabricated by the now defunct Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center and recently revived by UK’s Center for Business and Economic Research.

I wrote about some of the obvious problems with this nonsense ranking system last summer, but I have since put together some more reasonable comparisons that don’t do silly things like ranking dropout rate data that has been officially audited and found unreliable.

One thing is now certain: Kentucky’s black students and their parents should take strong exception to Prichard’s attempts to inflate claims about educational progress in this state.

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More evidence that Louisville parents are fed up with public schools there

Another parent is facing jail time for allegedly making false statements to enroll his son in the Oldham County Public School District even though the student actually resides in Jefferson County.

Why would parents take such chances?

Certainly, the quality of schools in Jefferson County has to be an issue.

'Felonious' school choice

When rich people do it, it's called "school choice by realtor." It's the process of choosing a home based on school district quality. Lower-income people rarely have this luxury.

Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African-American mother of two used her father's address to get her kids into a better school. For this act on behalf of her children, she was charged with felonies. Kentucky has taken similar action against parents who have done the same thing.

Michael Flaherty, producer of "Waiting for Superman," talks about how some states are engaged in criminalizing the theft of "free public education."

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.

Kevin Chavous, the board chairman for both the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Democrats for Education Reform, senses that these recent events herald a new age for fed-up parents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they understand "the fierce urgency of now" involving their children's education. Hence some parents' decisions to break the law—or practice civil disobedience.

These people shouldn't be in jail. They are doing what parents do. They are fighting for their children. Should parents be punished for seeking out ways to get their kids a better education?