Holliday on Kentucky Newsmakers

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday sat with WKYT's Bill Bryant this weekend for an interesting interview.

This from WKYT:

Highlights include:

• The weather and calamity days under HB 427 which allow the Commissioner to excuse up to ten days. Nobody will go to school beyond June 21.
• Holliday is looking at a switch to Average Daily Membership (ADM) rather than the current Average Daily Attendance (ADA) for calculating attendance. Probably a good move overall although it might not help small schools.
• The TELL Survey has gather responses from about 25,000 Kentukcy teachers on working conditions and leadership in the schools. Look for results in May.
• The state has removed about 17 school councils to date pursuant to (HB 176) Audit Team recommendations in low-performing schools.
• Some stuff about conservative anxiety over cursive writing, civics, math by hand, grammar, penmanship... Holiday says we are "preparing children for their futures, not our past."
• Holliday's best rejoinder came in response to concerns that today's students don't know their civics like their parents do. Holliday said, "I would challenge you: [You] pull randomly ten folks off the street and let me pull ten fourth graders and let's have a civics competition... I think our schools are doing pretty good work. Something happens when they become adults though. They forget what they learned in school."
• Holliday is still open to charter schools and believes, "If parents have a choice, they're more engaged in their child's education." But he correctly reads the data an says there are some great charters and some really bad charters.
• Rand Paul sees no federal role for education. Holliday disagrees and says [if there was no Department of Education] "I think children would suffer" particularly poor students and special needs students. "I think the federal government has a huge role to play in that.
• A little chatter on the tenure debate.
• Cooperation and collaboration with teachers, improved working conditions and fair evaluations...
• Pension and health care..."about to put us out of business"
• Stu at Prichard: "real excited about Stu going into that position"
• Holliday's one goal: More kids graduate from HS college and career-ready
• Bad budget and the Legislature: We look at 2013-14 as being a better session

AP confuses quote - No change in Silberman status

This afternoon WKYT apparently picked up an erroneous quote from the Associated Press. I don't know if it made their noon news broadcast or not.

At 12:05 WKYT reported: "Superintendent Stu Silberman says he's not interested, but would strongly consider the post should it be offered."

Silberman told Kentucky School News and Commentary the quote IS NOT CORRECT.

Silberman believes his actual quote, and one from Roger Marcum may have become confused at some point in the reporting process.

Silberman told KSN&C, "I am going to stick to the commitment I made to the community...I do feel we are on the right track here but we still have a very long way to go."
~
The correction was made at WKYT at 3:08PM on a new link. Hopefully they will kill the old one.

State Board not waiting for Jesus. Plan to go with Erwin.

I caught Marvin Bartlett on WDKY TVs 10PM newscast last night and wasn't sure I heard the story correctly.

State board of education member, Rev. C. B. Akins, was defending the board's choice of Barbara Erwin and was encouraging Kentuckians to "get in there and go to work with her."

And then, responding to critics of the process (moi?) I suppose, he said, "If they know some perfect people who would be candidates for the job, we'd be interested in interviewing them, but until Jesus comes back, I doubt that we're going to find one."

Huh? Did he just compare Erwin to Jesus Christ? Thankfully, in his comparison, Jesus won.

But the issue isn't whether Erwin is perfect. That's settled.

The issue isn't whether Erwin can withstand criticism. She's a veteran.

The issue is whether the state board of education outsourced their responsibilities for due diligence in considering candidates for this important position. And if they didn't, why was the chairman surprised to learn about it?

Marvin helped me locate the video on WKYT's site; they share news reporting with Fox. The 5AM WKTY TV newscast with Barbara Bailey and Bill Bryant reran the video. It runs a little over a minute and starts @ the 19:22 mark. (move the slide and watch the time stamp change)