Jefferson County’s NAEP performance – Grade 4 math

I covered how Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) performed on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading in an earlier blog.

Now let’s look at how Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) performed in NAEP Grade 4 Math. Figure 1 shows the story for the percentage of white and Black students in JCPS scoring Proficient or Above on the NAEP Grade 4 Math Assessment over the years.

Figure 1

Looking first at the blue line, which shows white students’ performance, we see that JCPS only broke the 50% barrier one time, in 2017. Since then, the district’s whites have been sliding backwards. As a result, the difference between the 2022 white proficiency rate in JCPS and the ones for prior years from 2013 to 2019 are all statistically significantly lower. White performance has definitely declined.

Now, check out the orange line, which shows Black student performance. As I recently blogged, because there are fewer Black students than white students in Jefferson County, the sampling errors in the Black student scores are larger and it is harder to show statistical significance as a result.

Never the less, the JCPS Black student reading proficiency rates in 2009 to 2019 were all statistically significantly higher than the dismal rate in 2022. So, Blacks lost ground, too.

The gaps, as you can see, have not changed very much. No prior gap is statistically significantly different from the gap in 2022.

Actually, the big news for JCPS concerns performance at the other end of the NAEP scale, namely those students who scored Below NAEP Basic. Figure 2 has that story.

Figure 2

When you look at Figure 2, it is important to keep in mind that because this is data for the lowest-performing NAEP group, we want the numbers to decrease, not increase.

Also, as is true with all gap information, there is a notable gap between white students and Black students scoring Below NAEP Basic. In this case, however, the Black students’ line actually appears above the white students’ line because a higher percentage of Blacks perform at this low level.

For sure, performing Below NAEP Basic is performing at a very low level. NAEP documentation tells us students performing Below Basic have less than even just a partial mastery of reading. These students are basically very weak at math.

The bad news here is that the proportions of both white and Black JCPS students performing at this very low level have increased – notably.

For white students, the 2022 performance is worse than in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. For Black students, the 2022 performance is worse than in all prior years from 2009 to 2019. Keep in mind, the sampling errors went up in 2022 due to NAEP reducing the sizes of its student samples. Thus, the fact that there are any years with statistically significantly different results from 2022 is particularly concerning.

Even more disturbing, despite the sampling issues, the changes in the gaps were so large that the 2022 gap is statistically significantly higher than the gaps in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Summing up, we can definitely say that the latest proficiency rates for JCPS in NAEP Grade 4 Math are down and the percentages of students performing at the lowest NAEP level are up in JSPS despite 30 years of education reforms in Kentucky.

In fact, the 2022 white and Black proficiency rates and the percentage of both whites and Blacks performing Below Basic are the worst results posted since JCPS started to participate in the NAEP in 2009.

And, the adverse trends generally started to go in the wrong direction before COVID came along. 

Don’t forget, as we recently reported, there is increased reason to consider that proficiency level as an indication that students in at least the eighth grade are on track for college and careers. A lot more kids in JCPS have fallen off that track for success.

https://bipps.org/blog/jefferson-countys-naep-performance-grade-4-math

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