A New NCLB 'Stat' You Probably Won’t Find in the Papers

Kentucky’s new NCLB report for 2008 just came out, and the newspapers are doing all sorts of analyses. But, here is one “stat” they might miss.

We took a look at the White to African-American proficiency gaps in 2007 and 2008 which have to be calculated from the huge amount of data in the Excel spreadsheets for the 2008 results. The table tells the tale.



Both the gaps in reading and math got worse.

It's more of that great KERA success we hear so much about. Of course, our CATS assessment doesn't have any penalty for leaving small groups of students behind because it only looks at overall scores, which can effectively hide the performance of small student subgroups. Only NCLB gives us this sort of data and hits schools that don't perform.