Established in 2003
EDUCATION FREEDOM & REFORM
RICHARD INNES
10/13/21
ACT indicates many fewer Kentucky students prepared for college
The results from Kentucky’s annual testing of all public school 11th grade students with the ACT college entrance test came out in late September, and, while precise estimates of impacts from COVID-19 are difficult to defend, it is clear that the past two years of chaos have not been good for students.
The unfortunate picture becomes clearer when we compare data from Kentucky’s Grade 11 ACT results from 2019 to those for 2021.
Some of the relevant data is collected in the table below. It includes information about how many Kentucky students met the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education’s (CPE) Benchmark Scores that indicate there is no need for college remedial courses in the related subject area.
The section shaded in green covers data from 2019 and shows several things.
The first column shows the Number of Students in different demographic groups who were tested and produced CPE’s ACT Benchmark data in 2019. For example, for all students a total of 45,530 got CPE’s ACT Benchmarks results.
The next three columns in the green-shaded area report the percentages of students who met the CPE’s Benchmark Scores for English, reading or math. For example, among all students, 48.7% met the CPE’s English Benchmark.
All of this data is shown in normal typeface as it comes directly from the Kentucky Department of Education’s spreadsheet for 2019 ACT data.
Next, the numbers for the benchmark pool and the percentages meeting CPE benchmarks in English, reading and math were multiplied to develop an actual number of students that met the CPE’s Benchmarks in each subject in 2019. As these are calculated numbers from the raw data, they are identified as such by listing them in bold typeface.
A similar process was used to analyze the 2021 data to develop student counts meeting the CPE’s Benchmarks for each subject for that year, as shown in the yellow shaded area.
Finally, the changes in the numbers of students meeting the CPE’s ACT Benchmark Scores between 2019, the last year before COVID struck, and the newly released 2021 figures were computed as shown in the blue-shaded part of the table.
Discussion
Overall, it is quite clear that the past two years have had significant, negative impacts on the preparation of Kentucky’s public school students for college. Thousands fewer were prepared well enough to meet the CPE’s remediation-free criteria in each of the three subject areas tested by the ACT.
In somewhat of a surprise, the biggest decline in student readiness didn’t occur in math, but rather was in the crucial subject of English, where more than 4,000 fewer students were ready in 2021 compared to 2019.
But, there are plenty of other concerning issues in the table. In 2021 only 29.9% of all students met the CPE’s Math ACT benchmark, while in English 42.3% of those who tested passed muster.
For African-American students, only 11.4% met the math muster in 2021. Put another way, out of 3,783 African-American students tested in 2021, only 431 are likely to arrive at college without a need for a remedial math course.
A key phrase above is “of those who tested.” We don’t know anything about the 11th grade Kentucky students who never took the ACT in 2021 despite the fact that there were four different testing opportunities in the Spring of 2021 according to information presented by the Kentucky Department of Education during the Kentucky Board of Education’s recent meeting on October 5, 2021 (See Slide 6 in the KDE’s briefing to the state board). Looking at the change in pool numbers on the line for all students in the table above, that missing group of students could number around 3,000 or so. If those missing students had also tested, it is possible the percentages meeting the CPE Benchmark scores would be notably lower than the data in the yellow shaded area of the table shows.
But, we just don’t know how those missing kids would really perform.
What we do know is that, if they choose to even go to college, thousands fewer Kentucky public school students are likely to show at the college door without needing remedial course work.
That’s a problem – a big problem – for the CPE. And, it indicates that K-12 in Kentucky has a lot of repairing to do just to get back to where we were in 2019 when fewer than half of all the state’s public school students were adequately prepared in English and only 36.2% were likely to survive in a college credit bearing math course.
Tech Notes:
2019 Data Source:
2021 Data Source:
https://brightbytes-public.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/kde/2021/cae_2021.csv
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