House Bill 87 of the 2020 Regular Session of the Kentucky General Assembly aims to increase the number of students completing the FAFSA – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid – by making it a high school graduation requirement.
The legislation would allow waivers of the requirement under certain circumstance for hardship or if a student/parent certifies they understand the FAFSA and are choosing not to fill it out.
Recently, several states – including Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois – have adopted requirements similar to what is being proposed in House Bill 87. Louisiana saw a 25% increase in completions after implementing the change, but it is not all attributed to the requirement. Louisiana took a multi-pronged approach including peer-support programs, one-on-one assistance for students and families, phone-call reminders, and completion incentives.
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Kentucky’s K-12 data may show only small STEM gaps by gender, but postsecondary STEM degrees are another matter. At our public universities, female students are a majority of enrolled students and bachelor degree recipients, but a small minority of STEM degree recipients, and the drop-off is much worse for female students seeking associate degrees. Using data from the Council on Postsecondary Education’s data portal, here’s one way to see the problem.
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Would you drive a car whose technology hasn’t changed in 30 years? Would you trust a surgeon who uses the same techniques used 30 years ago? As a consumer, would you expect continued innovation, research, development, and respectful progress in the profession? Would you support and invest in the organizations responsible for creating and producing these products and services in hopes of receiving the best and most innovative outcomes?
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JANUARY 2020 \ ROBERTSON COUNTY
At first, the idea of a four-minute scavenger hunt seeking examples of basic geometry terms seemed like a dud. Students in Deana Rosenthal’s 4th grade classroom in Robertson County first responded by looking at each other as much as surveying the room.
Soon, however, someone noticed perpendicular lines on the door frame. Or the parallel stripes of the classroom flag. Students jumped from their seats to trace the mortar between the blocks in the wall — the right angles of perpendiculars. The flagpole was declared a line segment.
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Our education system is at a crux. A generation of students face unprecedented challenges of a global society. Experienced teaching professionals with a wealth of institutional knowledge are in a phase of the retirement process. Young teachers feel overwhelmed and under-supported, and education funding is threatened daily. Further, superintendents are faced with a dilemma: meet the requirements of a traditional, bureaucratic instructional system whose academic performance is based on standardized testing or providing cutting-edge opportunities for their students to prepare them for a workforce of the future. A lack of time, money, and support for personnel adds to the burden of creating change within their districts.
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January 29, 2020 Strategic investments still needed in early childhood, K-12 and higher education On Tuesday night, the first step in the state budget process began as Gov. Andy Beshear released his budget proposal, which placed education funding as a top priority. The Prichard Committee …
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We are pleased to see the commitment by the Governor to make strides that stem the erosion of education funding in the face of significant budget challenges.
Based on $1.256 billion in additional resources over the biennium, major elements of the Governor’s proposed budget include: investments to fully fund pensions, a $2,000 raise for school teachers, restoration of textbook funding, a 1% increase in the base SEEK per-pupil guarantee, increasing the base funding to colleges and universities, and increasing student financial aid continuing a commitment to allocate 100% of lottery proceeds to scholarships.
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At the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, we work to engage Kentucky citizens on education issues because we believe informed and empowered citizens will demand continued progress for education across the Commonwealth. Over the past several years, we have been working to this end increasingly …
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Purposeful, meaningful change in education requires innovative district-level leadership from both superintendent and school board. For instance, a school board can show support of a superintendent's ideas and through the decision-making processes to allocate resources to support initiatives, such as personnel and funding (Lavalley, 2017). Research suggests that decisions made among districts' superintendents and their school board members directly attributes to the academic performance within high-performing schools (Delagardelle, 2006).
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