Hal Heiner seeks "bold moves" in education

WDRB reported yesterday on bold new ideas being sought by Kentucky’s new Secretary of Education, Hal Heiner. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Heiner isn’t cast from the standard education school mold, but he has been paying attention to education for a long time and knows what is going on and where many problems lie.

He is certainly a strong proponent of charter schools, something Kentucky has avoided up until now although these schools of choice have been adopted by 43 states and are starting to show real success for minority students in particular in states that have good charter school legislation and operations.

Heiner also brings a business viewpoint to his post. WDRB reports he has keen interests stretching from:

“…making sure local workforce training boards are churning out enough welders and tool-and-dye makers to updating the 1970s-era computer code that runs the state’s unemployment insurance system.”

Heiner definitely has his eye on helping disadvantaged kids, which brought praise from Terry Brooks, who heads Kentucky Youth Advocates, a nonprofit that lobbies for kid-friendly policies. His appointment certainly signals the beginning of new thinking about what might work best for Kentucky’s students, and that is a good thing.

While Heiner legally has no control over the largely independent Kentucky Department of Education, he is in a unique position to campaign for better education policy, and it appears he is already reaching out to the Kentucky Commissioner of Education to make that happen. After all, as Terry Brooks points out:

“You cannot possibly minimize the power of a strong public voice. We have not had a person in authority talking about these issues for a long time.”

As is typical in these sorts of articles, WDRB also sought out a Heiner critic and found one in the person of Alan DeYoung, an education policy professor at UK. DeYoung, who does not like charter schools, accused Heiner of politicking and then made an outrageous claim. Apparently, as WDRB recalls it, DeYoung indicated to them that:

“Heiner and Bevin understate Kentucky’s progress in education over the last two decades, which has actually been ‘exponential.’” It is hard to believe how anyone connected with education policy in Kentucky could be so misinformed.

Here are a few facts I posted to the WDRB article, and readers can find much more information and data in our blog that solidly discredits the idea that Kentucky’s education progress since KERA’s enactment in 1990 has been anything remotely resembling “exponential.”

I have no idea what UK Professor Alan DeYoung is looking at, but claims that Kentucky’s education growth has been “exponential” are just plain wrong. Could this be some of that “Common Core Math” many parents seem worried about.

For sure, Kentucky’s improvement over time on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) isn’t “exponential.”

For example, Kentucky’s eighth grade NAEP reading proficiency rate was only 30 percent in 1998, the first time NAEP tested this grade and subject at the state level. Flash forward 17 years to 2015 and Kentucky’s eighth grade reading proficiency rate only improved by 6 percentage points. Given this historical rate of progress, it will take another 126 years before Kentucky’s traditional school system gets our eight grade students to an 80 percent proficiency rate in reading.

For eighth grade math, between 1990 and 2015 Kentucky’s public schools only increased proficiency on the NAEP from 10 percent to 28 percent. That was an improvement of only 18 percentage points over a full quarter of a century. At this rate, the state will need more than 70 additional years to reach an 80 percent eighth grade math proficiency level.

Progress in the NAEP fourth grade testing has been a bit better, but the trend over the past two and a half decades shows we don’t maintain those somewhat higher proficiency rates as our kids enter higher grades. This is a major worry.

Here’s some more real math. Kentucky’s high school KPREP end-of-course math proficiency rate declined between 2012 and 2015. I guess a lot of those kids don’t know what the term “exponential” really means, either.

Don’t talk to our high school kids about how many of them missed the ACT readiness benchmarks for mathematics. The percentage reaching the benchmark score was only 38.1 percent in 2014-15. It was 38.6 percent in 2011-12 when Common Core testing started. That drop isn’t “exponential,” but it is certainly not improvement, either.

Maybe this news isn’t reaching UK, but others are getting the message. Just three weeks ago the Kentucky Board of Education got a briefing on test scores. That briefing was loaded with terms like “Decreased,” “Declined” and “Flat.” The board was also told that our state’s college professors are concerned that the preparation of incoming freshmen is dropping. That just isn’t the stuff “exponential” education progress is made of.

By the way, here is a graph showing Kentucky’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational progress from the most recent and earliest tests in each area and grade that goes with the comments above. It is clear that the term “exponential” does not apply here.

Most Recent and Earliest NAEP P Rates by Subject for Kentucky to 2015

Mr. Heiner knows about this data. Apparently, some at UK do not.