The Bluegrass Institute’s Richard Innes speaks tomorrow, April 25, 2013 on Kentucky’s education performance and “Common Core, Why the Uproar” at a Kentuckians Against Common Core Standards meeting in Louisville.
Meeting time: 7 pm to 9:30 pm
Place: Korea Saehan Church of Louisville
10409 Taylorsville Road
Louisville, KY 40299
Note: Registration Recommended. Do that here.
Is Common Core good enough?
This is a very important question for Kentucky, because we were the first to jump on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) bandwagon for math and English language arts.
Will our kids learn enough math and language skills to compete with the emerging fierce competition from overseas?
One commentator who clearly has doubts is Michelle Malkin. Read her latest concerns here.
As a note, Malkin references a number of sources whom I have corresponded with for many years. Comments from people like Stanford University professor James Milgram and long-time engineer and math instruction researcher Ze’ev Wurman cannot be casually dismissed.
Interestingly, while the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence partnered with the Kentucky Department of Education to promote and explain the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) tests (see here and here, for example), comments from Prichard’s leader show the organization is not fully committed to the program.
This comes from an article “Silberman voices K-PREP concerns,” (subscription to read full article) from the January 18, 2013 Messenger-Inquirer from Owensboro.
Silberman isn’t sure that the new assessments cover the Common Core State Standards and has issues with the use of the ACT, Inc.’s Quality Core assessments. He apparently does not like the idea that a large number of schools fell into the “Needs Improvement” category under K-PREP, either.
I guess Silberman doesn’t think these sorts of proficiency rates from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate most schools in Kentucky are under-performing and should be so identified.
Well, I’ll let you decide whether the Prichard Committee or the department of education is more on track with this one.
(LOUISVILLE, Ky.) – A new report by the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free market think tank, reveals that the commonwealth’s largest school district continues to fail its black students.
An update to the institute’s “Blacks Falling Through Gaps” report from the Summer of 2012 shows dramatic proficiency rate gaps between black and white students continue to exist in many Jefferson County Public Schools.
The updated report – based on results from the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) tests – also reveals that the highest gaps still tend to be found in schools east of Interstate 65.
Norton and Brandeis Elementary Schools both posted astonishingly large white-black math proficiency rate gaps of more than 51 percentage points. Kentucky’s new Unbridled Learning school accountability program rated both schools in the highest classification as “Schools of Distinction” while failing to identify their achievement-gap problems.
Large gaps also continue at Dunn Elementary School.
“Dunn has a very large K-PREP math achievement gap of nearly 49 percentage points, but Unbridled Learning provides no clue about the problem,” said Richard G. Innes, Bluegrass Institute staff education analyst and author of the new report. “Unbridled Learning tells Kentuckians that Dunn is a ‘Proficient’ school, which indicates this school performs better than at least 70 percent of all the schools in Kentucky.
“Dunn may perform for its whites, but blacks in this school didn’t even reach district wide black proficiency rate for Jefferson County schools and really got left behind.”
More details can be found in the report, which is available online at www.bipps.org.
Our K-PREP Data Sourcebook is now updated to include district level white minus black math proficiency rate gaps for all school levels, elementary, middle and high schools.
By Jim Waters
Grand Canyon-esque gaps in math scores. Praise for poorly performing schools. Failed top-down policies.
So far, the developing story being told by the initial batch of results from Kentucky’s new testing system suggests that our public education system’s performance is – when compared to previous testing results – more of a déjà-vu-all-over-again narrative than a success in adequately preparing students for the future.
However, the jury is still out on how much, if any, improvement the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) will offer beyond previous testing systems in providing an accurate picture of – and thus steps to improve – our schools’ performance.
Plenty of anxieties remain concerning:
Statewide, K-PREP elementary and middle school reading proficiency rate gaps between white and black students and whites and Hispanics are larger than in the previous testing system.
An even unhappier picture emerges when individual schools are graded.
Education analyst Richard Innes reports the new K-PREP math scores reveal enormous proficiency rate gaps of at least 30 points between whites and blacks in 21 out of 88 Jefferson County public elementary schools with adequate data.
The new numbers reveal that taxpayers, who will shell out $8.4 billion during the current General Fund budget for public schools, were duped by previous rosy claims from CATS – K-PREP’s predecessor – which inflated scores and lowered the bar even as the competition for good jobs grows more global and fiercer from better educated students in China and India.
That’s the biggest gap of all – where our education system is, and where our students need to be when they search for employment.
That $8.4 billion is a massive price tag for such large learning gaps.
Displeasure with our public school system should turn to outrage once the public learns that after going through all of the rigmarole of a new testing system, evidence surfaced that Kentucky’s K-PREP seems to be playing an updated version of “calling evil good.”
In this case, it’s calling “failure distinguished.”
For instance, two Jefferson County schools – Norton and Brandeis Elementary – had math proficiency rate gaps of more than 50 points between whites and blacks, yet each is being recognized as a “School of Distinction.”
Officials claim these schools outperform 95 percent of all Kentucky elementary schools and will face no consequences for leaving their black students so far behind.
“No way do they deserve to duck consequences – especially considering their performance related to minority students,” Innes said.
While the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind was yet another on the heap of failed big-government education programs, it did sift through the mire of scores to provide some accountability for the performance of minorities and students with learning disabilities – groups previously ignored.
However, Innes notes that the K-PREP results – released with little consideration for making them more understandable for the experts (much less parents) to decipher – lump minorities and students with learning disabilities into one overall calculation.
As a result, groups once protected from being passed over by NCLB accountability again remain in danger of being left behind.
By approving Initiative 1240 on Election Day, Washington voters made theirs the 42nd state to approve charter schools. Kentucky should become No. 43, especially in light of the continuing learning gaps exposed by K-PREP and the fact that charter schools offer hope for those very students most likely to get left behind in traditional public schools.
On top of denying parents the option of choosing a public charter school for their children, now the commonwealth must also endure yet another testing system optimistically labeled “Unbridled Learning.”
Jim Waters is acting president of the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Reach him at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com. Read previously published columns at www.freedomkentucky.org/bluegrassbeacon.
Without question, a gaping hole exists in Kentucky’s new school accountability program, known as “Unbridled Learning.” That deficiency – failure of Unbridled Learning to properly identify and account for sometimes enormous achievement gaps between white and black students in the state’s new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test results.
Bluegrass Institute president Jim Waters touched on this issue in his Bluegrass Beacon column about “New Test, Old Doubts” last week. Now, I’ll start adding details.
This table provides a snapshot of the problem based on our examination of elementary school performance in Louisville.
The schools listed have the largest black versus white math proficiency rate gaps in the Jefferson County Public School District in the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test results. Each listed school posted a gap exceeding an incredible 40 percentage points.
The table first shows the black and white proficiency rates (the total of the percentage of students rated either “Proficient” or “Distinguished” in K-PREP math testing).
The next column lists the gap in the proficiency rates in each school, which is simply calculated by subtracting the black rate from the white rate (there is an insignificant 0.1 point error in Hite’s gap due to rounding of scores).
Finally, the last two columns show each school’s 2012 accountability classification from Unbridled Learning and what is called the school’s “Reward/Recognition” category.
Now, here is our main problem with what you see in the table.
Very simply, Unbridled Learning totally misses huge achievement gaps between whites and blacks in five of the schools listed. And, don’t forget, those schools have the largest gaps in the entire Jefferson County Public School District.
In fact, given the definitions in Unbridled Learning, the public is being told that the top five schools in the table are doing a superior job, ranking better than at least 70 percent of all schools in Kentucky (in the case of Dunn and Hite) and ranking in the top 10 percent of all schools for Norton, Brandeis and St. Matthews.
Actually, Unbridled Learning tells Kentucky that Norton and Brandeis rank in the top five percent of all schools in Kentucky!
Even worse, none of the schools in the table, except for King Elementary, face any sanctions and – far more importantly – will receive any help to improve the performance of their black students.
It’s as if those black kids really don’t count.
I have assembled the many blogs I created after the release of the new K-PREP scores into one convenient and indexed reference document.
You can find the K-PREP Data Sourcebook by clicking here.
As I generate more data, I plan to update this reference in the future.
We close out our first look at achievement gaps from Kentucky’s new K-PREP assessments with a discussion about the high school level data.
First, it is important to understand that, unlike the K-PREP tests for elementary and middle schools, high school K-PREP reading and math data does not come from Kentucky’s own, state-developed tests. Instead, high school K-PREP scores come from end-of-course exams (EOC) from the ACT, Inc.’s Quality Core program. Quality Core exams are well coordinated with what our students need for college and careers.
K-PREP’s high school reading results are based on the Quality Core English II EOC and the math is from the Quality Core’s Algebra II EOC exam.
By the way, ACT, Inc. indicates that Quality Core has a very high correlation to the new Common Core State Standards; however, there are reports (subscription?) the alignment is only around 80 to 85 percent.
In any event, the first graph below shows the achievement gaps in Kentucky’s high schools for white to African-American and White to Hispanic reading proficiency rates (the combined percentage of students scored “Proficient” and “Distinguished”). Results from the new K-PREP and the now defunct Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT) in reading from 2011 are both shown. Unlike the elementary and middle school situations, high school reading is only reported one time, which is dependent upon when each student completes English II (Normally, but not necessarily, the 10th grade).
As an example of how to read this table, the first blue bar on the left shows the gap in proficiency rates between whites and African-Americans for high school reading was 23.5 percentage points on K-PREP in 2012. The red bar immediately to the right of the first bar shows that last year the white to African-American reading proficiency gap reported by the KCCT in the 10th grade was somewhat lower, at 18.1 percent.
Overall, following the change to K-PREP, the reading achievement gaps were larger for both African-Americans and Hispanics in Kentucky’s public high schools. This is exactly the same trend we earlier reported for elementary and middle school reading gaps.
Here is a similar graph for the K-PREP high school mathematics achievement gaps.
In math, the achievement gaps were reduced for both African-Americans and Hispanics in Kentucky’s high schools between the last year of the KCCT and the first K-PREP testing in 2012. The high school gaps are also somewhat smaller than those in the lower level grades.
However, there is an additional factor to consider when we talk about racial achievement gaps in high schools.
The disaggregated high school graduation statistics from 2011 (latest year available, used for 2012 Unbridled Learning Accountability), which are available by clicking on the “Graduation Rate” link here, show African-Americans had a high school graduation rate of only 70.3 percent while whites graduated at a rate of 79.0 percent. Because many dropouts occur prior to the end of the 10th grade, and because almost all dropouts depart by the end of the 11th grade, the lower African-American K-PREP gaps in high school need to be considered with caution. Some, perhaps all of the gap reduction simply may be due to a larger proportion of struggling students from this minority group dropping out prior to the time these tests are administered.
By the way, Hispanics supposedly graduated from Kentucky’s public high schools at a rate of 83.0 percent in 2011. That is a notably better rate than whites posted, which raises some credibility questions. When the Nonacademic data report was released by the Kentucky Department of Education earlier this year (available by clicking here), it showed the Hispanic high school graduation rate experienced a very sharp rise in 2011 of over 8 percentage points. The Hispanic population in Kentucky is still quite small compared to most states around the nation (somewhere around 3 percent or so of all students) – and data for small student groups tends to bounce around a bit from year to year – but this is still a rather exceptional one-year change.
It also must be noted that Kentucky still has not adopted the highly accurate Cohort Graduation Rate calculation. Kentucky still relies on the somewhat less accurate Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) formula. That can introduce errors in the numbers.
Still, given that Hispanics score notably lower than whites in the new K-PREP reading and math results, the exceptionally high Hispanic graduation rate in 2011 could imply that Hispanics are being socially promoted to diplomas in exceptionally high numbers.
This is, of course, all based on cross cohort data, and the AFGR formula isn’t as accurate as I would like, but this situation will need to be revisited once better quality graduation rate data becomes available after the Class of 2013 graduates.
One of the biggest concerns about the new K-PREP program is a loss of the level of protection afforded to minorities under the now waived No Child Left Behind school accountability program. While the new Unbridled Learning accountability program does include an element that looks at achievement gaps, it does so by lumping all minorities and special students into one overall calculation. That can leave student subgroups behind.
The data shown below for Middle schools indicates that achievement gaps are a problem.
This first graph shows the gaps in Kentucky’s middle schools for white to African-American and White to Hispanic reading proficiency rates (the combined percentage of students scored “Proficient” and “Distinguished”). Results from the new K-PREP and the now defunct Kentucky Core Content Tests (KCCT) from one year earlier are both shown, broken down by grade.
To read this table, the first bar on the left shows the gap in proficiency rates for whites and African-Americans in sixth grade reading was 23.4 percentage points on K-PREP. The red bar immediately to the right of the first bar shows that last year the white to African-American reading proficiency gap in the sixth grade reported by the KCCT was somewhat lower, at 22.5 percent.
Overall, with the change to K-PREP the achievement gaps grew for every combination shown on the middle school reading graph. This is exactly the same trend we earlier reported for elementary school reading gaps during the transition from KCCT to K-PREP.
Here is a similar graph for the mathematics achievement gaps.
The white to African-American math gap situation is definitely better for math. K-PREP white to African-American gaps are lower in all three middle school grades.
However, the white to African-American gaps remain very large. For example, in 2012 in the sixth grade, whites scored 49.1 percent proficient in math while the African-American proficiency rate was only 25.7 percent.
In the case of middle school Hispanic math results, while the white to Hispanic gaps are all much lower than the white to African-American gaps, the Hispanic gaps grew notably in the sixth grade and slightly in the seventh grade. The Hispanic gap was reduced only in the eighth grade.
