Jefferson County’s NAEP performance – Grade 4 reading

I covered the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency rates and gaps picture for the state in two previous blogs. Now let’s start to look at how Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) performed. We will examine NAEP Grade 4 Reading first.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the percentages of white and Black students in JCPS that performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level of performance. 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.

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 has been sliding backwards. In fact, the biggest decline came between 2017 and 2019, before COVID started, but it continued downward a bit more in 2022. As a result, the difference between the 2022 white proficiency rate in JCPS and the one back in 2017 is statistically significant. 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 rate in 2015 was statistically significantly higher than the rate in 2022. So, Blacks also lost ground compared to one prior year, at least. The gaps, as you can see, have jumped up and down since 2009, but 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.

And, 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 to non-readers.

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 and 2017.

For Black students, the 2022 performance is worse than 2011 and 2015.

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.

Also, even though there appears to be notable variation in the gap in the Below Basic percentages for white and Black students by year, none are statistically significantly different from the 2022 figure. Again, when you reduce NAEP sample sizes, you are going to get less precision in the results. Overall, we can definitely say that recently proficiency rates are down and the percentages of students performing at the lowest NAEP level are up in JCPS despite 30 years of education reforms in Kentucky. In fact, the 2022 white proficiency rate and both whites and Blacks performing Below Basic are the worst results posted since JCPS started to participate in the NAEP in 2009.

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

There are clearly major problems with the teaching of reading in Kentucky’s largest school district that have not been resolved in more than three decades of KERA reform. It’s time to try something else, and that something else needs to include more school choices for parents when their child’s school isn’t even teaching them to read.

Tech Note: Proficiency rate data and percentages performing Below Basic came from the NAEP Data Explorer.

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

https://bit.ly/3UdMqIS