Saturday, June 07, 2008

Depends on your definition of success

The Lexington Herald Leader can be so funny sometimes.

Take today's editorial as an example. In it, the editors claim "real progress" in a national education report showing Kentucky's high school graduation rate was 71.6% in 2005.

Now all we need to do, they claim, is throw more money at the education bureaucrats who got us to this point. One minor problem with this is those same Kentucky bureaucrats just told us a week ago our graduation rate for 2005 was 82.86%.

In a sane world, the mainstream media would be all over this illusory 11%. But no, the best answer we get from our constitutionally-protected watchdogs is a whitewash, a guilt-trip, and some revisionist history:
"No one in Kentucky has an excuse to rest on laurels, especially when the state is eliminating and underfunding reforms that have worked."

Clearly, these people can't be trusted to address how much we are going to have to dumb-down the CATS tests over the next five years to come anywhere close to mandated proficiency goals.