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A Christmas Day article in the Cincinnati Enquirer (bureaucrats always want bad news published on a day when few read the paper) shows educators in Kentucky are worried about what will happen when the US government finally forces the state to get honest about high school graduation rates.

Kentucky educators know the graduation rates they have been reporting are inflated. They’ve known it for years.

The nonsense was officially audited way back in 2006, but our education department dragged its heels about fixing the problem. The dropout and graduation rate data Kentucky reports today is no better than it was when the audit was conducted.

Now, as the Enquirer points out, the US Government is stepping in to force Kentucky to report accurate graduation rates not just for all students, but also for minority groups.

Using an interim graduation rate calculation that has been found reasonably accurate in federally sponsored research, the US Department of Education claims Kentucky’s four-year high school graduation rate for all students was 76.4 percent in 2007. That is well below the 83.72 percent figure the Kentucky Department of Education claims in its Nonacademic Data reports. The difference equates to somewhere around 2,700 kids who simply vanished from Kentucky high schools without a trace – and without a high school diploma.

One comment in the Enquirer article is especially troubling. The Kentucky Department of Education excuses its failure to report even statewide graduation rate data for minorities to the US Department of Education on the grounds of protecting minority privacy.

That makes no sense.

Statewide, Kentucky has more than enough minorities in several key racial groups to report statewide data to the feds. Kentucky even reported statewide rates for minorities in its own, inflated, statistical summary. So, is this less about protecting minority privacy and more about state educators wanting to avoid embarrassment?

Anyway, only because the US Government is forcing them to do it, our state education people finally have to face the truth – and it is going to hurt.

But, maybe, just maybe, once we have better data in hand, people here will start getting serious about fixing the hidden problems in KERA. Our kids deserve no less.

Supporters of traditional teacher preparation have always “had it in” for non-traditional teacher preparation programs like Teach for America.

After all, when teachers from TFA and other non-traditional programs shine, it raises doubts that the traditional approach crowd really has it right.

So, the latest news from Tennessee about the great success of TFA teachers is guaranteed to ruffle some traditionalist feathers.

Per the Tennessean, TFA teachers in Memphis outperformed both beginning and veteran teachers across the state.

Of course, according to the TFA web site we don’t have any TFA sites in Kentucky.

Tulsa, Oklahoma has TFA.

There is one in not-very-populous South Dakota.

Even the somewhat remote Rio Grande Valley has one.

Louisville has nada. It’s not listed as a possible expansion location, either.

Why am I not surprised.

I wrote yesterday about what happened to eighth grade performance in Texas after that state started its charter school program.

Let’s look at another state where more than 100,000 students now enjoy the benefits of charter school education – Florida.

First, here is a graph that shows enrollment in charter schools in Florida has been exploding just like in Texas. In the 2008-09 school year, the Florida Department of Education reported that there were 118,169 students in its charter schools.

Like Texas, Florida’s charter program started in 1996.

So, what happened in Florida after it adopted charter schools?

This graph shows how blacks in Florida and Kentucky (which still has no charter schools) did on the federal NAEP tests. Note that Florida didn’t participate in the Year 2000 NAEP. I obtained the scores using the NAEP Data Explorer tool.

Back in 1990 when the first state level NAEP math test was conducted, Floridas’ blacks scored 231 while our black kids scored 240. Florida’s blacks continued to score below Kentucky’s until after that state started its charter schools.

Things then changed notably. By 2003 Floridas’ blacks caught up to our kids and stayed pretty much even with them for a couple of years.

After 2005, however, Floridas’ blacks moved out ahead of ours. As of the new results for 2009 which were just released a short time ago, Floridas’ blacks scored six NAEP Scale Score points higher than our kids. That is a notable difference.

Thus, over the period shown in the graph above, Florida’s blacks went from scoring nine points below our black eighth graders to scoring six points above. The relative ground lost by Kentucky’s blacks was 15 points.

Also, to reiterate, note that the difference in performance began to appear several years after Florida started its charter program.

Unfortunately, the NAEP data can’t tell us how blacks in charter schools in Florida performed over time. The NAEP samples from the charter schools were too small to provide statistically reliable information.

All we can tell from the NAEP is that the overall eighth grade math performance for all students in charters in Florida lagged the statewide average for all the state’s students in 2005 by eight points. However, things sharply reversed by 2009 when the students in Florida’s charter schools outperformed the state’s non-charter students by three NAEP Scale Score points.

As is the case for Texas, there is no way to know how the students in Florida’s charters would have scored had they remained in the regular school system. Still, the data highlighted above is consistent with the likelihood of charters in Florida being part of the reason for the state’s improvement. In fact, this data supports the idea that the introduction of competition to the public school system “raised all boats” in that the regular public schools also improved.

What we do know is that something dramatic is happening for blacks in both Texas and Florida, something far better than Kentucky has offered its blacks. And, we do know that the timing of the increase in charter school enrollment in both those states fits nicely with the possibility that charter schools have played a role, maybe a major role, in making this happen.

A couple of days ago I pointed out the explosive growth in enrollment in charter schools in Texas shown on this Texas Policy Foundation graph.

Notice charter school enrollment exploded in Texas after 1996. And, this graph does not include another group of thousands more Texas students enrolled in special charter school districts. Overall, I estimate that charter school enrollment in Texas now amounts to around three percent of the entire school population in the Lone Star State.

Because the rise in charter enrollment was so dramatic, I was curious about what might have happened to Texas on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) after charters were introduced. Was there any indication that charters impeded or helped? I focused on eighth grade math because this is one of Kentucky’s major educational stumbling blocks, especially for our minority students.

What I found is remarkable.

This graph shows how blacks in Texas and Kentucky (which still has no charter schools) did on the federal NAEP tests. Keep in mind that Texas’ charter school growth began after the 1996 NAEP was administered.

Back in 1990 when the first state level NAEP math test was conducted, Texas’ blacks scored 234 while our black kids scored 240. Note that Texas’ blacks then essentially caught up to our kids and stayed even with them until a couple of years after the Texas charter movement started. After the year 2000, however, Texas’ blacks left our’s in the dust. As of the new results for 2009, which were just released a short time ago, Texas’ blacks scored a dramatic 14 NAEP Scale Score points higher than our kids.

Basically, when it comes to the only racial minority present in Kentucky in significant numbers, KERA got shellacked by Texas’ education system.

Also, to reiterate, note that the difference in performance began to appear several years after Texas started its charter program.

Unfortunately, the NAEP data can’t tell us how blacks in charter schools in Texas performed over time. The NAEP samples from the charter schools were too small to provide statistically reliable information.

All we can tell from the NAEP is that the overall performance for all students in charters in Texas lagged the statewide average for all Texas students in 2005, 2007 and 2009 NAEP assessments but that Texas’ charters reduced that lag by two points in that time.

However, there is no way to know how the students in Texas charters would have scored had they remained in the regular school system. Likewise, there is no way to know if the nine point improvement in performance of Texas’ blacks who attended non-charter schools in 2005 to 2009 would be reduced if those schools had not faced competition from charter schools.

What we do know is that something dramatic is happening for blacks in Texas, something far better than Kentucky has offered its blacks. And, we do know that the timing of the increase in charter school enrollment in Texas fits nicely with the possibility that charter schools have played a role, maybe a major role, in making this happen.

Over at the Prichard Committee’s blog, they’ve been writing a lot lately about improving teaching as the key to improving education in Kentucky.

But, somehow, Prichard’s ideas mostly just bring to mind a most insightful comment that Kentucky Board of Education Chair Joe Brothers made back in October. Reacting to some rather similar suggestions on how to fix our education problems, Brothers said,

“I came on the local (school) board in 1987. What you just said to me is no different than what I heard in 1987. So why should I be hopeful?”

(Comment made at the October 8, 2009 Kentucky Board of Education Meeting in Frankfort, Kentucky. An audiovisual recording of this meeting is on line).

To be clear, I agree with Prichard – teaching is an important key.

It’s how we can effectively make that happen that is at issue.

Prichard’s soft, nudge-but-don’t-rile-the-bureaucracy approaches have been out there for two decades. They haven’t taken hold; haven’t produced nearly enough, nearly fast enough.

I continue to see excessive high school dropout rates, excessive college remedial requirements, continuing gross performance gaps for minorities, continued placement of the least prepared teachers with the most demanding students and teachers who still try to put the blame elsewhere when inner city kids don’t learn.

We still mostly see less than one out of three Kentucky students testing at or above proficiency in math, reading, writing and science on federal NAEP tests. In middle schools, some of those proficiency rates run closer to only one in four.

So, it’s clear, after 20 years, that Kentucky’s education community needs a kick in the pants to get true reform going. Joe Brothers is beginning to get that. He also gets the fact that the “same old, same old” isn’t getting the job done.

Prichard has been saying much the same thing for 20 years. And, while Prichard certainly has some basic ideas right, too many of our teachers still are not listening.

Given the constraints and protectionism built into our current education system, there is little reason, as Brothers put it, to “be hopeful” that things will now change if we continue doing mostly the same old stuff.

That is why we encourage Kentucky to adopt approaches that create competition within the education world. Competition spurs innovation and improvement far more rapidly and effectively than bureaucratic tinkering ever has. We owe it to our kids to do more than just rehash ideas that have a 20-year track record as non-starters. We need to offer students choices that will create competition that will in turn spur teachers to earnestly seek out better ways of doing their jobs.

“It is mothers and fathers – not any politicians – who have the greatest interest in the welfare of their children and who know their children best. As long as funding for schools is independent of parents’ choices of which schools to send their children, and as long as government owns and operates schools, government schools will respond less to the needs of children and more to the interests of the government-salaried bureaucrats who run each school as the monopoly that it is.” -Donald J. Boudreaux, George Mason University economics professor