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Outrages

  

9486 in the collection  

    Newsweak’ offers rank ranking

    Ohanian Comment: The Bluegrass Institute is a freemarket outfit, one with which I'd find plenty to disagree, but their off-the-wall is a good characterization of Newsweek's school rating system. The system counts how many AP courses are taken. Whether or not enrollees pass the course or the test does not matter.

    by staff

    Congratulations, Newsweek. You named Holmes Junior-Senior High School – Kentucky’s worst-performing high school – as one of the 600 best high schools in the country. What nonsense! A very abbreviated list of this school’s legion of problems shows that:

    • In February 2007, the Kentucky Board of Education stripped Holmes’ site-based decision-making council of its governance authority after the audit team gave the school a failing grade. No other high school in Kentucky has ever faced such drastic action, which marks Holmes as Kentucky’s worst performer.

    • Holmes’ ACT college entrance test scores ranked 200 out of the 240 Kentucky high schools that received scores.

    • The school is in NCLB sanctions Tier 2 status (as of 2006), having failed to make goals for three years straight. If the school had not changed its grading structure in 2003, it would have failed for four continuous years. Holmes made only 31 percent of its NCLB goals in 2006. No other Kentucky high school did as poorly.

    • Holmes’ graduation rate using official Kentucky Department of Education class-membership and graduation statistics in the highly respected Cumulative Promotion Index formula was only 48.1 in the 2005-06 school year. This rate is seven points lower than the previous year. How can any high school be a “top” performer when over half its students never graduate and the trend is deteriorating?

    Clearly, Newsweek’s off-the-wall rating system ignores almost everything important that happens to high-school students. Without question, Holmes is a bottom performer. Not a low performer – a bottom performer. Our state board of education says so.

    Newsweek’s rankings offer yet another example of the unreliable information the public is getting about their schools. Such misleading information actually harms the process of making real improvements for students.

    — staff
    Bluegrass Institute
    2007-07-11

    INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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