A high school diploma should be evidence that a student is ready to succeed after high school. Unfortunately, too many students today graduate, diploma in-hand, without having mastered the knowledge and skills required to be successful in college, career, and life. Ensuring Kentucky’s high school graduates are prepared for success in postsecondary, master content knowledge, and acquire skills such as creativity, communication, problem solving, and team work will require:

• High expectations through rigorous course work and adequate supports
• Greater access to early postsecondary opportunities, including relevant career pathways.
• A highly-qualified teacher in every classroom, every year.
• Innovative alternative systems for earning high school credits.

First and foremost, jobs. In Kentucky, 62% of jobs by 2020 and a majority of those paying a family-sustaining wage will require some level of postsecondary education.  Those holding a bachelor’s degree in the Commonwealth earn 51% more than those with just a high school diploma.  Research clearly documents other positive benefits of more education including: lower unemployment, less chronic disease, less dependence on public assistance, and greater rates of civic participation. A meaningful high school diploma is the gateway to postsecondary success and these benefits. But, while nearly 90 percent of Kentucky high school students graduate in four years, far fewer are meeting college and/or career readiness standards, putting them at a disadvantage for future success.  For example, 67% of those college and/or career ready transition to college, while less than 30% of those not ready do.   Less than 50% of high school students demonstrate proficiency on end-of-course exams in Math and Science, and just over 50% demonstrate proficiency in English and History.

State law requires the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) to set minimum high school graduation requirements. Currently, students must earn a total of at least twenty-two credits to graduate. This includes credits aligned to the content standards in the Kentucky core academic standards, as well as additional electives aligned to the student’s individual learning plan. Kentucky’s school accountability system since 2011 has included measures of student college and/or career readiness for high school accountability.  Kentucky’s new accountability system  builds on this measure with multiple ways for a student to show evidence of “transition readiness” in both academic and career domains.

To review KDE’s side-by-side comparison of current and proposed changes on minimum graduation requirements, click here.

There are significant concerns about whether Kentucky is delivering on the promise of future success to all high school students.  Too many are graduating with a diploma, but without the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college and career.

In response to these concerns, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) is developing revisions to Kentucky’s minimum high school graduation requirements. In spring 2018, KDE hosted town halls, roundtables with business leaders and online surveys to gather public feedback on the competencies needed for high school graduates to successfully transition.

The state Board of Education had a first reading of the proposed regulation on August 2, 2018 and is scheduled to have a second reading at their October 2018 meeting. These proposed changes are summarized in the infographic above. The public will have an opportunity to comment on any changes to the regulation during late summer or fall of 2018.

As Kentucky’s citizen advocacy group for excellence and equity in education, we are collecting public input throughout the process. We will share feedback with the Kentucky Department of Education and Kentucky Board of Education as they finalize policy decisions over the coming weeks. Tweet comments using the hashtag #KYdiploma on Twitter, comment on our Facebook page, or email us feedback directly.

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Kentucky’s young children and their families benefit from high-quality early learning that keeps each and every child on a path toward proficiency in reading and mathematics by the end of the third grade. It is imperative to increase the number of infants, toddlers, and preschool children from low-income families enrolled in high-quality child care and public preschool through policies, practices, and funding that sustain quality early learning environments.

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Kentucky’s young children and their families benefit from high-quality early learning that keeps every child on a path toward proficiency in reading and mathematics by the end of the third grade. Research demonstrates that learning begins early and high-quality early learning impacts long-term outcomes for students.

• Cognitive skill development begins early and rapidly. The Toddler Brain by Laura A. Jana, M.D. indicates that 85-90% of brain development occurs before the age of 5.
• Research also shows children who participate in high-quality preschool programs are 40 percent less likely to drop out of school and 50 percent less likely to be placed in special education.

Investments in high-quality early childhood make business sense – by the numbers – and also provide opportunities for families to access the workforce.

• 12.6% of Kentucky families with young children report having difficulty holding down a job because of a lack of affordable childcare according to the National Survey of Children’s Health.
• Lack of childcare “costs businesses over $3 billion a year” according to the S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

What’s more, the investments in high-quality early childhood education are not only a solution for reducing achievement gaps and improving academic performance but pay long-term dividends to society as a whole. These benefits include reduced need for special education, higher rates of educational attainment, a reduction in health costs, a reduction in the incidence of crime, and less demand for social welfare services.

• Early Childhood – Returns $5 for every $1 invested. – Cost-benefit analyses conducted by the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) at the University of Kentucky in 2009 estimated that investment by Kentucky in expanded early childhood education would yield a return of $5 in public and private benefits for every $1 of public investment. Other research from across the country finds the cost-benefit ratio of investing in early childhood ranging from $2:1 to $10:1.‍
• Kentucky ranks 41st in the nation in the number of three- and four-year olds enrolled in preschool.
• In 2017, only 50% of incoming kindergarten students scored “prepared” on the BRIGANCE screener. Half of Kentucky’s children are starting behind, and achievement gaps seen later in school begin early. Readiness rates are far lower for Hispanic students, English-language learners, students with learning differences, and students from families with low income.
• More than half (53% or 170,000) of Kentucky’s children live under 200% of the federal poverty level, the income necessary to meet basic needs of food, housing, health care, child care, and transportation. Yet our child care assistance program only serves families at or below 160% and currently only serves 27,000 children.

Many Kentucky children who most need the foundation of high-quality early learning do not have the opportunity due to cost and/or a lack of high-quality programs in their area. To build a strong future for Kentucky, the best economic investment we can make is in early education that gives all students a strong foundation.

The evidence is clear – a high-quality early childhood environment “can enhance children’s development, reduce achievement gaps at kindergarten entry, and even have long-term benefits in school and beyond.”

Kentucky needs greater commitment from policymakers to make the critical investments necessary, as well as greater commitment from communities to find new ways to deliver the highest quality early childhood programs. Specific steps the state can take to support a high-quality early childhood education system for all kids include:

Increasing eligibility level and investment in high-quality, full-day early learning environments – both preschool and childcare – and incentivize public-private partnerships.

• This builds learning that is the foundation for future success and helps families enter and stay in the workforce.

Supporting family engagement and maternal and child well-being through sustained investment in HANDS home visiting program.

• This shares the importance and impact of early childhood education and supports health and development in the earliest years.

With job demands continuing to increase, more workers will need some type of postsecondary education and training. By 2020, postsecondary education or training will be required by 62% of jobs in Kentucky. High-quality postsecondary education opportunities in Kentucky must be inclusive of all students, and Kentucky should ensure that all students are prepared for, have knowledge of, and are encouraged to pursue opportunities through postsecondary education pathways.

Unfortunately, the transition from high school to postsecondary education is rocky for many students. Achievement gaps remain despite recent gains in the college readiness of Kentucky high school graduates. Overall, college readiness rates grew from 34% in 2010 to 55% in 2017. But only 33% of African American students, 45% of Hispanic students, and 42% of students from families with low incomes achieved college-ready status in 2017. This means traditional college entrance exams leave many students behind and are growing inadequate for determining admission.

Despite the fact that more students were ready for college, the number of students actually going to college in Kentucky has declined from 55.5% in 2010 to 53.5% in 2014. Similarly, recent research by the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University, in partnership with the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Center for Statistics, have focused on the entirety of the college-going pathway, beginning in the ninth grade. Their analysis found that for every 100 Kentucky ninth graders, 45 seamlessly transitioned to college upon graduating, while only 34 persisted into their second year.

As outlined by the Prichard Committee in Pursuit of Excellence: Principles to Guide Kentucky’s Future Postsecondary Success, improved practices that help ensure students are prepared and encouraged to transition and persist in postsecondary education can lead to greater levels of student success. We are developing a Postsecondary Transitions Blueprint that will elevate best practices and policies that ensure every student can progress and successfully transition to postsecondary education, with an emphasis on increasing equity and closing achievement gaps. This tool will be designed to help education leaders and community members build awareness and impact practice by illuminating key data and telling success stories of high-performing schools. The Postsecondary Transitions Blueprint will also highlight evidence-based policies and practices, including:

• Maintaining rigorous academic standards that clearly establish what students should know and be able to do to achieve postsecondary readiness.
• Encouraging greater college going and persistence.
• Ensuring that high-quality early postsecondary opportunities and career pathways are available to all students.

Parents and community members should work closely with school leaders and teachers to ensure all students are prepared for, have knowledge of, and are encouraged to pursue opportunities through postsecondary education pathways. Important questions to ask include:

• Do all students have access to rigorous courses needed to prepare them for postsecondary education?
• Are all students provided with advising and support to explore career options based on their skills and interest? How can parents and community members help in this process?
• Do all students have opportunities for early postsecondary education such as dual credit and Advanced Placement courses?

Kentucky’s new School Report Cards are here! The new format for annual data on our schools has a friendlier layout and some important innovations, so I’m going to share what I saw in my first tour of the site.

When you arrive at the main landing page, you can choose any public school or district: my notes are based on looking at Toliver Elementary and Danville High School. Once you choose, you can scroll down and start seeing the news.

Clear charts of key data points

The main page is broken into five sections, each with a nice selection of charts showing important facts about each school. For example, here’s how the Overview section shows who attends Toliver:

Notice that the chart on economically disadvantaged students says data on free and reduced lunch eligibility is not available? Good charts can highlight questions about our schools, and I definitely want to ask about the missing data for Toliver. Further down the page, there are also short displays for Academic Performance, Educational Opportunity, Transition Readiness, and School Safety.

Quick links to more detailed data

Just to the right of each group of charts, there are three links to additional kinds of data. For example, for the Overview section, there’s more about students, more about faculty, staff and community, and more about access to technology. For Academic Performance, there’s more on assessment and performance, achievement gap and growth, and career and technical education.

Easy-to-read tables of information

Here’s how some of Toliver’s reading results are displayed, much easier to read than the 17-column version of the older report cards:

Great disaggregated KPREP data, including the “not” groups

The previous report card format did not include KPREP results for students who are not economically disadvantaged, do not have identified disabilities, and are not English learners. Those “not” results are key to understanding the gaps between better-served and worst-served groups, so it’s good to see them published again. The KPREP charts are also set up to show results for gifted students and for students who are and are not homeless, migrant, in foster care, or dependents of a member of the military. That information help us understand the strengths and experiences students bring with them and the effectiveness of school efforts to support each learner. (Sadly, the fully expanded list appears to be only for KPREP: data on KSCREEN, ACT, graduation, and other results are disaggregated much less.)

New looks at educational opportunity

To check out this sections, I switched over to Danville High School, looking at student work toward college and career readiness. This was great new information. For career and technical education, I learned that 94 DHS students enrolled to learn about marketing, and 29 completed a multi-course marketing “career pathway.” 57 took the first step on Project Lead The Way Engineering, and six completed that pathway. For advanced coursework, 403 students took AP courses, 204 took AP tests, and 45% of the test-takers had at least one score that qualified them for college credit (quick multiplication: that’s 108 students). There was plenty more to explore, including detail on visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and world languages.

These most recent trends show Kentucky is moving toward a better-educated adult population, with good reason to expect that to add strength to our economy and richness to all aspects of our civic life. They also show that we need to continue and accelerate our growth in attainment, with particular attention to groups who are not sharing fully in that growth, including Black non-Hispanic students and students with low-incomes.

Some Openings for Improvement

While admiring the innovations just mentioned, I do want to note some places where I thought the design could be stronger:

• The “not” groups could be included in more charts.
• Graduation rates could be easier to find: they’re under the second tab for the academic readiness link in the Transition Readiness section.
• The “Number of Instructional Minutes Students Receive per Week in Arts” could be better explained. For Danville High, the report shows 1,200 minutes per week in visual arts. That can’t mean that all students spend 20 hours in art classes. Does it mean there are four hour-long courses offered each term?
• Graduates reaching academic and/or career readiness benchmarks could be shown clearly. I could only find a “readiness count” that seems to include both graduates meeting benchmarks and English learner graduates attaining English Language proficiency. I know the new Transition Indicator reflects both kinds of data, but the detailed charts could show us those counts separately before combining them.
• A site map would be a great addition. There are five main sections with thirteen links to more detail, and many of those links lead to multiple tabs that each have several charts. A map would make this wide array of information easier to navigate.
• A “data not available” message appeared almost every time I clicked a new link. Often, that message was replaced in a few seconds by helpful information. If the data can’t be displayed instantly, it might be helpful to have replace “not available” with “being located,” so users don’t leave the page too quickly.

Overall, these new School Report Cards are a great step up in data access for the public. There’s room for further improvement, but first this project deserves a round of public applause. I recommend that every Kentuckian use it heavily to learn more about students, schools, and results in our communities.

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November 27, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For More Information, Contact:
Brigitte Blom Ramsey, Executive Director
(office) 859-233-9849
(cell) 859-322-8999
brigitte.blomramsey@prichardcommittee.org

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Jefferson County advocate receives Raimondo Leadership Award Recognized by Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence

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LEXINGTON, Ky. – An education advocate described as a passionate champion for giving every student access to educational excellence is the recipient of the 2018 Beverly Nickell Raimondo Leadership Award presented by the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.

Judith Bradley of Louisville, the parent of a high school student with special needs, has become a resource and advocate for all students with disabilities and their families.

Her conviction about her son’s potential “had her keeping up with laws on how Kentucky schools are supposed to work, reaching out to university researchers, educating teachers and administrators about strategies for supporting students with special needs and encouraging her son to identify and articulate his needs,” Prichard Committee Executive Director Brigitte Blom Ramsey said in announcing the award.
Bradley’s son, Jack, became the first Inclusion Ambassador for the Prichard Committee’s Student Voice Team where he helped interview students at the Kentucky School for the Blind, participated in strategy sessions, presented at conferences, testified before state and local school boards, and wrote commentaries for the local and national media.

In 2016, Bradley launched JackBeNimble, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing the community with tools to, as she describes it, “bridge the empathy gap between students, families, educators and policymakers.”

The award, presented at the committee’s recent annual meeting, recognizes the legacy of Beverly Raimondo, who developed the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership more than 20 years ago. Since its creation, the institute has trained more than 2,500 parents and guardians in Kentucky to effect positive change in schools for their own children and all other students.

One of Bradley’s nominators noted: “If ever there was a person who embodies Bev Raimondo’s vision of a parent leader who understands that success means working to improve the system for all children, beyond one’s own, it would be difficult to find a parent more fitting than Judith Bradley.”

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The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence is an independent, nonpartisan, citizen-led organization working to improve education in Kentucky – early childhood through postsecondary.

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence conducted extensive research on issues related to the creation of charter schools, producing a report in 2014 – Charter Schools: An Informational Guide.

The Committee does not have an official position in support of, nor in opposition to, charter schools. However, if the Kentucky General Assembly considers charter enabling legislation, the Committee believes strongly that the law must have the clear goal of closing gaps in student achievement.

In addition, as one of seven states in the nation without charter schools, Kentucky is in an excellent position to learn from the experiences of other states.The following policy statement frames Kentucky’s education progress over the past 25 years, briefly reviews the research on charter school effectiveness, and outlines clear criteria for charter school legislation in Kentucky.

‍National Efforts to Improve Student Outcomes

‍Since 1991, 43 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation allowing charter schools. Charter schools are intended to improve student outcomes by allowing for local autonomy, innovation and encouraging community engagement and support. In 1990, Kentucky chose an alternate path to those same objectives by implementing a governance model for all schools that requires school-based decision making councils to be comprised of parents and teachers.  Another common rationale for charter schools is that providing more choice or competition among schools will improve the quality of schools and increase student outcomes. Kentucky did not inject competition into its public school system as part of the 1990 reforms.  

Rather, it set up an accountability system to increase the quality of all schools and it set up collaborative systems such as Family Resource Youth Service Centers (FRYSCs) to connect at-risk students and families with community supports in an effort to decrease barriers to learning.Since 1990, Kentucky has made significant progress in student achievement for all students. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Kentucky now ranks 8th across states in 4th grade reading, is above the national average in 8th grade reading, and is at the national average in 4th grade math.  

Gains since the 1990’s place Kentucky in the top quarter of all states for positive growth in 4th and 8th grade reading and math.Despite these positive results, achievement gaps persist in Kentucky and across the nation for African-American and Hispanic students, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families. In many cases, these gaps have widened over the past 25 years. States across the nation, including Kentucky, are seeking ways to reverse this trend, considering everything from rigorous standards, innovative teaching practices, community support services, and charter schools.The most complete research evaluating outcomes of charter schools is from The Center for Research on Student Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. The center has found the overall performance of charter schools to be mixed, with significant variance in whether charter schools actually improved overall reading and math.

However, the research concludes that charters can be beneficial in urban settings with African- American and Hispanic students, students living in poverty, and English language learners.  When one or more of these designations was combined (i.e. African-American and poverty) the results were increasingly positive.Policy Criteria for Charter SchoolsAs outlined by the Committee’s Informational Guide, there are eight key questions to ask regarding charter school policy – the answers to which should guide the development of any effective charter school legislation in Kentucky:

1. What student results will charter schools be expected to deliver?
2. Which public school requirements will be waived, and which will be required?
3. How will students be admitted or assigned to charter schools?
4. Who will authorize charter schools?
5. Who will be able to apply to run a charter school?
6. Will charter school numbers and enrollments be subject to caps?
7. How will charter schools be closed if they do not deliver?
8. What funding will charter schools receive?

Since its review of the charter school issue, the Committee has identified certain principles as vital to the continued success of public schools and assuring that charter school legislation maintains Kentucky’s commitment to student achievement and ending achievement gaps. These principles address key issues of accountability, authorization, enrollment and funding.

• Charter schools should, at a minimum, be held to the same standards of expectation, accountability, performance, and data collection as required by Kentucky law of all other public schools. Further, charter schools may not be exempted from the same requirements of all other public schools regarding health, safety, civil rights, open meetings rules, open records requests, and sound financial and accounting practices.
• Authorization of charter schools should be by local boards of education following rules established by the state Board of Education that define processes for creation, conversion, renewal, revocation, closure and dissolution. Training of local boards, provided by the Department of Education, on charter school regulations, procedures and oversight should be required prior to any authorization. Authorization of charter schools should be allowable only in circumstances of persistently low-achieving schools and/or significant achievement gaps.
• Charter schools may not discriminate in the enrollment of students in any fashion, including on the basis of ability, performance, geography, socio-economic status, race or ethnicity, and also must provide free and reduced-price meals and full services for students with disabilities.
• Funding for charter schools should not diminish the resources currently available to school districts to educate and increase achievement for all students. Any proposal must guarantee that schools and districts remain adequately and equitably funded according to Kentucky law as outlined in Rose v. Council for Better Education.

Excellence with EquityWhether Kentucky enacts enabling legislation for charter schools or not, we must recognize that too many students are not achieving at high levels, putting their future at risk and keeping the state from creating and sustaining a dynamic, competitive workforce.  Policymakers, elected officials, educators, citizens and business leaders must come together to ensure Kentucky achieves excellence with equity for the education of all of its students.

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The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence is an independent, nonpartisan, citizen-led organization working to improve education in Kentucky, with excellence and equity – early childhood through postsecondary.