Adkisson and Holliday visit Bowling Green to discuss academic standards

Kentucky Chamber President and CEO Dave Adkisson and Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday continued to promote Kentucky’s new tougher academic standards last week during a presentation to the Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce.

“There’s no more important partnership than between education and business right now,” said Holliday. Click here to read coverage of the presentation in the Bowling Green Daily News.

The visits by Holliday and Adkisson have been ongoing since last fall. The Chamber and Department of Education are partnering on this initiative through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The objective of the visits is to ask the business community to support educators in enforcing the new academic standards. Students were tested using the new standards in May. When the test results are published in October, Holliday expects pushback from parents, teachers and even legislators due to lower-than-normal scores.

“When the letters to the editors start saying these standards are too hard, we want our business leaders to write letters to the editor in response. We want them to stand up and say ‘this is important to the future of Kentucky and we need to stay the course,’” said Holliday in a video discussing the importance of the standards.

The Chamber developed a kit as part of the effort to raise support, offering communications tools that Kentucky employers can use to let their employees know about the new standards and what they mean for their communities and state. The kit, which includes such items FAQs, a sample newsletter item, an example of an e-mail message and resource information, is available here. To order a hard copy, contact ahiller@kychamber.com. The Kentucky Chamber Foundation also produced an informational brochure titled New Standards, New Tests and New Scores on the new standards. Both the kit and the brochure are available for download now.