Is KDE serious about helping underperforming schools?

The Bluegrass Policy Blog reports on the Kentucky Board of Education's approach to assisting underperforming schools. If their reporting is accurate...it is troublesome. Just ignore for the moment their attempt to make it an argument for school choice.

The highlights:

A key item on the Kentucky Board of Education’s (KBE) agenda in April was an update on the plans to improve three seriously underperforming schools: Iroquois and Shawnee Middle Schools in Jefferson County and the Holmes Junior/Senior High school in the Covington Independent School District. It was a chance to establish precedents that would make a real difference for kids in some of Kentucky’s very poorest performing schools, but the board dropped the ball.

In February 2007 the KBE voted to remove authority for school governance from the School Based Decision Making Councils (usually referred to as “site base councils”) at these troubled schools.

While this was the very first board meeting following the unprecedented transfer of site base power, initial briefings from the superintendents on plans to improve these schools received only trivial attention. Each superintendent was allowed a deplorably insignificant amount of time – a mere 10 minutes each -- to outline how they planned to turn the three grossly under-performing schools around.

...actual plans got absolutely no review and comment from the Kentucky department of Education’s staff prior to or during the board’s meeting.

Overall, the KBE’s handling of improvement plans for some of Kentucky’s very weakest schools was a “Novice” performance, at best. It exposes attitude problems on the part of several parties and implies a general lack of interest with the board. This seriously mismanaged portion of the meeting establishes a terrible precedent for future cooperation between the board and the districts and may have already poisoned the well beyond recovery.