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.

Atlanta cheating scandal & transparency

This is a perfect example of why transparency in the education system is so important.

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.

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.

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.

Nice commentary on teachers who cheat

Reason Online makes some good points in this article about teachers making excuses for cheating to hide problems with status quo education.

KY Chamber session gets some things right about education

I was on the road when the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce held its annual conference, but a post in the chamber’s blog concerning an education discussion is worth a look.

It was a three-way panel with former US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, international education consultant Sir Michael Barber, and Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday.

Some points:

Spellings says business people must act as “the point of the spear” in fighting for education reform in order to develop a qualified workforce that meets the demands of a new economy. Both parents and business leaders should demand higher expectations from students and, most importantly, teachers and administrators.

She also said Kentucky had room for improvement in identifying and retaining effective teachers and removing ineffective teachers. She didn’t like the lack of charter schools and noted the disappointing achievement gap between white and minority students.

Barber said, “Any system that wants to make progress has to stop feeling sorry for itself and take responsibility for its own future.” He also pointed out, “Spending money alone won’t fix the system.”

Holliday admitted that a third of our kids are not graduating from high school. He also pointed to another shocking fact: “A meager four counties are graduating the vast majority of our state’s college-ready students.” That means the vast majority of Kentucky’s 174 school systems are not meeting this very important goal.

Clearly, there is much work to be done.

Educator cheating on tests increasing across the nation

Kentucky not immune

Fox News reports that there is a disturbing rise in school staff and teachers cheating on tests their students take.

Even US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is “stunned.”

And, don’t think that cheating is just happening elsewhere. Right here in Perry County, Kentucky a district-wide cheating scandal on the ACT is still an open and, so far, unpunished issue.

Read more »

Prichard joins in on education statistics fantasies

I wrote yesterday about some pretty bad analysis of education performance in a new report from a group at UK.

Today, I stumbled across more of the same in the Prichard Committee’s blog. This time, it’s a fiction that Kentucky captures most of its high school dropouts accurately.

Don’t believe it!

Prichard simplistically looks at the total number of high school diplomas and certificates handed out in 2010 and tries to compare that to the number of eighth grade students who took Kentucky Core Content Tests back in 2006.

Prichard says Kentucky had 43,711 graduates in 2010, which matches the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) data on page 14 in the June 1, 2011 Nonacademic Data Briefing Packet.

But, the KDE has not told us how many of those diplomas and certificates were awarded to students who took more than the standard amount of time to earn them. The release of that detailed data has been delayed until August, a dubious delay I have mentioned before.

However, an Excel spreadsheet report covering the previous year shows 135 diplomas were awarded to learning disabled students who spent five years in high school and another 756 students also took more than four high school years to earn a diploma. They would not have been part of the Class of 2009 back in the eighth grade.

Based on the 2009 data, I would estimate nearly 900 students who got a high school credential in 2010 were not part of the class when it was in eighth grade back in the 2005-06 school year.

Also, other research I have done indicates that in Kentucky about 1,500 students transfer to public high schools from non-public schools between grades eight and nine. Prichard’s analysis totally ignores this extra input to the class’ enrollment upon high school entry.

Putting this together, the real 9th grade first time entrants for the class of 2010 would not be the 50,841 students Prichard claims; it would be more like 52,341.

At the other end of the process, the total number of graduates from this entering group of ninth grade students would be something like 43,711 minus 900, or only 42,811.

That means we ‘lost’ 52,341 minus 42,811, or 9,530 students. But, the KDE’s Nonacademic Data Brief’s Table 1a only shows 6,647 dropping out of the Class of 2010 as it proceeded through each grade in high school.

Where did the other 2,883 go?

Don’t ask Prichard.

But, do ask KDE why it is taking so long to get accurate dropout and graduation rate information in the “education state.”

Kentucky will be the last, or second to last, state to finally report accurate high school graduation data, and that won’t reach the public until 2014.

And, I suspect I will have to point out errors in Prichard’s analysis every year until then.

Nonsense Kentucky education rankings appear again like a bad ghost

Surprise: UK’s economists are pushing the latest fairy tales

The Lexington Herald-Leader just announced a reincarnation of a totally bogus education ranking system originally fabricated by the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center (KLTPRC).

According to the article, the ‘new’ rankings are loaded with many of the very same statistical gaffs we found in the old KLTPRC reports.

For example, the UK study dares to rank scores from the ACT college entrance test for all 50 states. This is a serious statistical mistake, one students who just completed a freshman college statistics course should easily recognize.

The problem: in most states the ACT is only taken voluntarily by students who want to go to colleges that require it in preference to the SAT. Because most East and West Coast schools prefer the SAT, and because students who don’t plan to go to college don’t take the test at all in most states, there currently is a huge difference in the percentage of high school graduates in each state that take the ACT. The latest available data for 2010 shows that in Maine only 10 percent of the high school graduates took the ACT, while in Kentucky 100 percent of our graduates took this test because Kentucky now requires all students to take the ACT.

Any comparison of such wildly different test samples, especially when the Maine sample was totally voluntary and is in no way related to a statistically valid random sample, is total nonsense.

In fact, if we do a somewhat better comparison, like only looking at ACT scores for those states that had a very high percentage of graduates taking the test (96 percent or more participation), we get the following ranking graph.


Somehow, that doesn’t look too impressive, does it?

By the way, years ago when the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center first started ranking ACT scores for all the states, we called ACT, Incorporated to find out what they thought about this. The ACT told us they strongly discourage doing such inappropriate rankings precisely because participation varies so widely from state to state.

I guess the UK crowd never talked to ACT about the character and limitations of this data. I think most Statistics 101 courses go into precisely those sorts of mistakes.

The news article also says that the new rankings include state-to-state comparisons of high school dropout data. That is absolutely unacceptable.

Kentucky’s dropout and graduation rate reporting was officially audited in 2006 and found to be seriously inaccurate, creating an overly rosy picture of what is really happening in our schools.

Even though it is now 2011, the Kentucky Department of Education has yet to release any dropout and graduation rate data based on more solid information that we will get in the future from a recently introduced high quality student tracking system, so the inflation in graduation rates and the unreliably low dropout rate reporting continues in the latest data.

But, Kentucky is way behind in getting accurate dropout and graduation rate data. Most other states have had high quality reporting for some time now, and they are reporting accurate, and usually much lower, graduation rates with correspondingly higher dropout rates.

So, we again have a huge statistical ‘apples-to-oranges’ mess, with inaccurate, picture-inflating data from Kentucky matched up against much more truthful reporting from elsewhere. No wonder we look good, but this comparison isn’t trustworthy. Armed with the facts, a Statistics 101 student would turn up his or her nose.

There are a lot more problems with trying to simplistically rank scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Clearly, the people who created this report didn’t read my freedomkentucky.org Wiki item, “The National Assessment of Educational Progress,” which is often called the NAEP.

If they had, they would have discovered things like this telling map, which treats the latest available NAEP Grade 8 Math data like the statistically sampled data it is.



Once the statistical sampling errors in the NAEP are considered, only one state in the country, West Virginia, had white student scores that were lower than Kentucky’s in the 2009 NAEP Grade 8 Math Assessment. By the way, whites comprise about 85 percent of Kentucky's students.

Now, how’s that again about Kentucky’s rankings against other states?

Why would professors from the University of Kentucky’s school of economics resurrect such an inaccurate ranking system?

I wish I knew.

Read more »

Taking liberty to the airwaves: BIPPS on WGTK

Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communication for the Bluegrass Institute, will be on the Joe Elliott Show on Louisville's 970 WGTK-AM today at 1 p.m. EDT.

Waters will be discussing the current education and Medicaid challenges in Kentucky.

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

Call in to join the conversation at (502) 571-0970

Listen live here.

Taking liberty to the airwaves: BIPPS on WGTK

Jim Waters, vice president of policy and communication for the Bluegrass Institute, will be on the Joe Elliott Show on Louisville's 970 WGTK-AM on Thursday, June 16, at 1 p.m. EDT.

Waters will be discussing the current education and Medicaid challenges in Kentucky.

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

Call in to join the conversation at (502) 571-0970

Listen live here.

Newport Independent Schools in 'Rewarding Failure' video

Given recent events with Newport Independent Schools I thought it would be worth it to post this video again...



Newport Independent Schools was one of four districts profiled in Rewarding Failure: The rubber- stamping of Kentucky superintendent evaluations.

An education comparison that never gets old

Don Boudreaux asks, "What if supermarkets were run like local public schools?"



Read Bluegrass Institute education work here.

Governor's 'Pride' cannot polish dull school performance

When it comes to education, Gov. Beshear says Kentuckians ''ought to be proud of what we've done.'' While such feel-good statements provide political cover for Beshear's buddies in the teachers union, the mystery remains: What, exactly, is there about Kentucky's academic performance to be ''proud'' of?

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Beacon.

How much higher can college tuition go?

We wrote earlier on a study by The Family Foundation of Kentucky last year reporting that Kentucky's colleges and universities have failed to control costs and have been increasing tuition rates that far outstrip median households.

But that didn't stop the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky from seeking a 6 percent increase in tuition and Eastern Kentucky and Northern Kentucky universities from raising rates by 5 percent -- all well above the rate of inflation, and above what Kentucky families can afford.

"Six percent is almost three times the rate of inflation," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst with The Family Foundation of Kentucky. "Every tuition increase of this size puts a college education that much more out of reach."

Apparently, those increases were approved by the Council on Postsecondary Education's meeting recently. To see how much the price of obtaining a college degree has risen in the past 20 years, click on the graph below. This graph was published in the April 2011 edition of The Lane Report.



Blaming the increases on the need "to partially offset budgeted cuts in state funding," the council said it "will be establishing performance targets that will affect future funding and tuition levels."

A press release stepped all over itself to trumpet that its "performance targets will include metrics such as improved graduation rates."

Which raises the question: Why weren't these metrics already in place?

School choice programs boasting higher graduation rates

The evidence showing students in school-choice programs are benefiting from the competition continues to mount.

A new report for School Choice Wisconsin by University of Minnesota sociologist John Robert Warren shows students participating in Milwaukee's nationally acclaimed school choice program were 18 percent more likely to graduate than students from all economic backgrounds in Milwaukee Public Schools.

In six of the seven years of data studied by Warren, Milwaukee Parental Choice Program voucher students had higher graduation rates than their public-school peers. During that time period, graduation rates rose for both choice and public-school students.

Another group of researchers at the University of Arkansas following the MPCP's success reached the same conclusion. A report released March 30 by a team led by professor Patrick J. Wolf found that Milwaukee's school-choice program "increases the likelihood of a student graduating from high school and enrolling in college."

How these researchers did it:

"At the start of our evaluation, we carefully matched the entire group of 801 9th-grade students enrolled in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program with a similar group of 801 9th-graders in Milwaukee Public Schools," Wolf said. "Four years later, the students in the voucher program were more likely to have graduated from high school and enroll in a four-year college than were their public school counterparts. Our estimates of the higher rates of college enrollment for the students in the voucher program ranged from 5 to 7 percentage points and were statistically significant in most of the comparisons."

The Beshear administration and its naive supporters in the legislature support a policy to force students to remain in high school until they age 18.

Of course, that is a politically correct, less-risky approach for politicians than offering parents a choice. Yet, the research increasingly shows that parental choice is working not only to keep kids in school, but also to move on to college.

Our education leaders claim their top priority is getting students college/career ready, yet they work to avoid the controversy surrounding school-choice programs -- mainly provided by teachers unions and bureaucrats who are staunch defenders and their fellow staunch defenders of the status quo in the Legislature.

But that's where the rub comes.

If the research shows that school choice programs are resulting in more kids graduating and going to college, but the teachers unions don't want it because they will lose control and power, whose interests are we going to go with: the kids or the adults?