Some civil servants are just like my loved ones.
The best way to make a weak point is to repeat that point over and over.
Example: My colleague Jacob enjoys a drink now and again. He’s clearly not an alcoholic. But if you show him repeatedly drinking, like so …
… then it looks like he actually does have a drinking problem.
There he goes. Another drink. The man loves a daiquiri, I tell you what. How does he keep drinking like that?
From the C-J’s Learning Curve blog:
Twenty-eight high schools across Kentucky have so many students leave before their senior year that they are considered “dropout factories,” according to a new report conducted by Johns Hopkins University for The Associated Press.
According to the report, those schools — which include 10 high schools in Jefferson County Public Schools — are among 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide where 60 percent or less of the students who enter high school make it to their senior year.
Those in Jefferson County include: Doss, Fern Creek, Fairdale, Iroquois, Jeffersontown, Moore Traditional, Shawnee, Southern, Valley and Western.
For more on which Kentucky schools get the most bang for the buck, read Richard Innes’s report, “Bang for the Buck.”
Oh yes, “it” is.
David Adams is having a lively debate (in the comments section) with someone about the merits of the Bluegrass Institute following a Courier-Journal editorial on the subject. Kentucky Pundit responded here, though I don’t actually agree with many of his arguments.
I’ll add only this: The work that Richard Innes has done examining achievement data from the Kentucky Department of Education has been quite revealing and has not been, to my knowledge, assailed publicly by any member of Kentucky’s education establishment.
But Innes is not so much lambasting the performance of public schools (though he clearly has criticized school performance) as he is lambasting the bureaucracy that has fudged the numbers on school performance on several occasions.
That many of Dick’s recommendations have been quietly adopted by KDE speaks to his status as a respected contributor to the education policy debate in Kentucky.
The fact that several ACT-designed tests are now being given to virtually every public school student in Kentucky is, in large part, the result of Dick’s efforts at getting credible tests into Kentucky’s public schools.
The Kentucky Board of Education has released the names of finalists vying for the job of state education commissioner. At least one of the nominees is a vehement opponent of school choice.
Jim Warford, chief executive officer of the Florida Association of School Administrators. Warford, a Kentucky native, is former chancellor of the Florida Department of Education
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush implemented school choice reforms in the state, however, courts struck the reforms down. Warford is no supporter of school voucgers. Here’s an excerpt from an article in a Florida newspaper last year:
Jim Warford started off as a fan of Bush’s efforts to hold schools accountable. But the former Marion County superintendent changed his views after serving as chancellor of K-12 education in Bush’s administration.
“What I saw was that 90 percent of the energy went to undermining our public schools with vouchers and charters,” said Warford, now executive director of the Florida Association of School Administrators.
Dobbs’s ire boiled over Tuesday night when he ripped Spitzer as an idiot - and then offered an on-air mea culpa.
“I’m the idiot,” Dobbs said. “Governor, I apologize for calling you one. Your policies are idiotic. But I have to apologize for calling you an idiot.”
Yesterday, the Courier-Journal published an editorial berating the Bluegrass Institute’s position on school choice. Tne Bluegrass Institute’s communication director, Jim Waters, is the Commonwealth’s biggest cheerleader for introducing the concept of school choice. Here’s some of what the Courier-Journal had to say:
The institute’s latest missive says, “Don’t be surprised if Democrats wind up leading the charge for school choice in Kentucky. They have done it in other states.” The reference is to school-choice, tax credit and school voucher experiments in Arizona, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Will this prediction be as credible as the institute’s claim, in 2005, that it quickly would gather 100,000 signatures from supporters of legislation to let children attend schools of their choice, at state expense? Eighteen months later, that effort was still a failure.
So if the Bluegrass Institute is nothing but a puddle on the road to real education reform, why mention it at all? Well, it gives us a chance to contrast the group’s libertarian anti-government negativism against the fact-based report just released by the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center, which said, “Using 11 educational indicators we examine(d) Kentucky’s progress from 1992 to 2005 and conclude that we have made substantial progress, both in an absolute sense as well as relative to the nation.”
The reality of the situation is that both political parties in Kentucky would rather avoid experimenting with school choice because they may lose precious votes from Kentucky Education Association members during election time. The Courier-Journal unfairly dismisses the idea of school choice because of one organization’s failure to deliver on it’s promise to complete an overambitious petition drive.
The C-J editorial does point out this sobering fact:
While Kentucky may still “trails two-thirds of the states,” it’s no longer at the bottom of the educational ladder, in spite of all the obstacles to its climb.
So, does this mean Kentuckians should settle for the Commonwealth being behind in education that most of the states? At least the Bluegrass Institute is offering a possible solution, unlike most politicians and journalists in Kentucky.
