No Kentucky, our education system has not made that much progress

Quick Points:

• Properly analyzed, NAEP results for both Grade 4 reading and Grade 8 math show Kentucky’s education system is not performing in the middle of the pack among the states.

• Reading and math results for white students, about 80% of Kentucky’s total public school enrollment, are clearly not in the middle.

• Black student results are more alarming, as performance for them actually fell compared to their counterparts in other states after SBDM came along.

• In fact, properly analyzed NAEP data indicates Kentucky’s current SBDM law has not performed particularly well. It’s time for a change.

During legislative hearings today about Senate Bill 1, which makes important improvements to the state’s School Based Decision Making (SBDM) law, there were multiple mentions that Kentucky’s education system now ranks somewhere in the middle for educational performance.

Well, it might look that way – just for some subjects and grades – if you only compare overall average scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between states. But, that sort of comparison is highly misleading. The reason has to do with two factors:

1. There remain serious achievement gaps in every state with white students generally outperforming minority students by significant amounts.

2.  Kentucky today has a much higher proportion of white students than just about any other state in the nation.

As a result of these two factors, when we only compare overall scores for students between states, we are actually comparing a lot of white student scores from Kentucky to scores for children of color elsewhere. That creates a highly misleading picture.

As we have written before, such as in “Rankings of Kentucky’s educational performance still flawed – Déjà vu,” to get a more accurate picture, you have to break the data out, at a minimum comparing NAEP results for each race separately. In fact, our Déjà vu blog shows that is what NAEP’s own documents say.

So, let’s look at some of more accurate comparisons.

Figure 1 shows the NAEP Grade 4 Reading results for white students from the earliest and most recent assessment in 2019, which is also pre-COVID. Figure 1 only considers states that took part in both assessments (All of the states didn’t participate in State NAEP administrations prior to 2003, and some that did were missing scores for various reasons).

As you can see in Figure 1, among the 41 states plus the District of Columbia schools, Kentucky’s white fourth grade students ranked in 41st place in 1992 and only improved to the 33rd place most

recently. No state scored statistically significantly lower in 1992 and in 2019 only one state scored statistically significantly lower.

For Kentucky’s white students, their recent performance certainly doesn’t appear to be close to the middle. In fact, we might rank just one slot off the bottom.

Now look at Figure 2, which has a similar set of comparisons for Black student NAEP Grade 4 Reading from 1992 and 2019. Only the 32 states plus the District of Columbia schools that had Black scores reported in both years are included.

This picture looks MUCH worse. Kentucky’s Black students actually scored above the middle in 1992, but after 29 years of KERA education, most of those years with SBDM impacting our schools, Black fourth grade students in Kentucky now rank below the middle for NAEP Grade 4 Reading. Wow! It certainly doesn’t look like the SBDM model has helped Kentucky’s leading racial minority group.

Keep in mind, Kentucky’s performance on NAEP Grade 4 Reading is generally stronger than what happened for Grade 8 Reading or NAEP Math at either grade level.

For example, consider the eighth grade math situation. Figure 3 shows Kentucky’s white students’ comparative performance on NAEP Grade 8 Math in 1990 and 2019 for states that had results in both years.

I think the message in Figure 3 is obvious and dramatic. Comparing our white student NAEP results for participating states in both 1990 and 2019 if anything offers condemnation of SBDM.

And, we’ll round this out with a look at Black students’ NAEP Grade 8 Math results in Figure 4.

Guess what. Back in 1990, Kentucky’s Black students actually scored above the middle for NAEP Grade 8 Math. Since then, our Black students obviously lost notable ground compared to Black students in other states that participated in this NAEP in both years. In 1990 Kentucky’s Black students statistically significantly outscored their counterparts in eight other states. By 2019, they were not statistically significantly outscoring Blacks in even one other state. Losing ground? That’s the legacy of SBDM for Blacks.

So, forget the idea that SBDM has created a lot of progress. It just isn’t so. In fact, it might have worked to the detriment of Kentucky’s minorities.

Also, throw out another notion tossed around during today’s meeting of the Senate Education Committee about SBDM and Senate Bill 1 – the idea that there’s no data about SBDM performance is ludicrous. We have a long track record of NAEP data that raises serious concerns about how SBDM governed schools in Kentucky have really functioned.

We have even more disturbing examples besides NAEP. We discuss some of them in our 2018 report about SBDMs, “School Based Decision Making Policy, A Closer Look” where we examine SBDM functioning, or not, in Kentucky’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools. SBDM might work in some schools with great staff and high income parents, but in general the other end of the education spectrum certainly has not been well-served by this accountability-torpedoing approach.

It’s time for a change. It looks like the Kentucky Legislature understands that need and is moving to fix this problem.

Tech Note: The figures were assembled from the NAEP Data Explorer web tool. 

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