The Council on Postsecondary Education’s 2021 Stronger By Degrees Progress Report http://cpe.ky.gov/data/reports/2021progressreport.pdf shows growth worth celebrating in overall educational attainment, KCTCS graduation rates, and STEM+H degrees, along with slower progress on bachelor graduation rates and a concerning decline in higher education enrollment. This year, that good news is especially impressive: results reported now include successes posted as a pandemic swept over the state, disrupting learning opportunities and demanding unprecedented teaching innovations.
Respectfully, I think the Kentucky Board of Education recently made a wrong decision, and I think they made it the wrong way. At the February 3 Board meeting, the Board approved an accountability change that will count results for student groups only when a school has data on 30 or more students in that group, rather than the current accountability rule using 10 or more students per grade.
Budget work is moving with unusual speed this year, with both House and Senate moving through committee action and floor votes this week on the Executive Branch budget. They approved identical plans for the education items we track. Work by a free conference committee could still bring additional changes.
Governor Beshear introduced his proposed budget for the 2022 fiscal year last night, including some important steps up for Kentucky’s educational investments. Here comes an overview of his recommendations, which will be considered and almost certainly changed by the General Assembly.
Kentucky Youth Advocates has published a powerful look at Kentucky’s present, frank and clear on pandemic damage, racial injustice, and how they intersect. That analysis appears in the opening essay of the newest Kids Count County Data Book and it’s essential reading for our times and for work on Kentucky’s Big Bold Future.
In September, the Prichard Committee called for urgent attention to Kentucky’s failure to deliver for Black students, saying “The learners bring talent, knowledge, culture, experience, energy, and potential to our classrooms, and it must be our shared work to ensure that their many gifts are nurtured and richly developed.”
2020 Kentucky School Report Cards, released on Wednesday, offer important ways to learn about your local schools. Here’s a quick look at some of what’s there.
Basic Navigation
The report card site starts by asking you to choose a school. When you choose, the first thing you see on each school’s page is an announcement of what isn’t available: the pandemic cancelled statewide assessments and made it impossible to report 2019-20 school ratings.
Following up on yesterday’s post about public higher education institutions’ graduation results for Black students, let’s go a deeper and look at the pipeline leading toward those graduations. Here’s a starting view of some key metrics:
Kentucky’s public institutions of higher education are crucial to developing Kentucky talents fully, both to benefit individuals and to strengthen our economy and communities. These numbers show an underdevelopment of Black talent that we must change.