Ironic: New report says country should look to Kentucky and Louisville for education ideas while city’s police chief charges schools are failures

A couple of days ago, Civic Enterprises and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University released a rather problematic report about “For All Kids, How Kentucky is Closing the High School Graduation Gap for Low-Income Students.” This Hopkins report says that Kentucky leads the nation in high school graduation rates for poor students and asserts the rest of the country should look to Kentucky, including its biggest city, for education answers. However, the foundation for these claims is built on highly shaky, non-standardized graduation statistics that can’t reliably tell us anything about the quality of education each state requires to earn a diploma.

Now the irony here is that only a few days after the Hopkins report came out, the Courier-Journal reported on the massive increase in shootings this year in Louisville. In its news article, the Courier says Louisville Metropolitan Police District Chief Steve Conrad remarked at a recent forum about “failures of multiple institutions, including schools, courts, families and church (Emphasis added).” The chief pointed out that Louisville's young people are not getting prepared to succeed in life.

So, here is a question: Who is more likely to have a handle on what might be happening in Louisville’s schools – the city’s resident chief of police or some folks who live over on the East Coast?

By the way, I am still going through the Hopkins report, but I’ve already found a disturbing number of problems. I hope folks around the rest of the nation don’t rely on that report to blame us in Kentucky for misleading them about what is really happening in our schools – and on our graduation platforms.