New report shows Kentucky-to-national White-Black gap growing

I wrote a few days ago about a new federal report that examines White to Black achievement gaps on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). That blog and the referenced report show White to Black achievement gaps in Kentucky have grown since KERA began.

Now, I have taken the data in the report and done my own analysis – this time looking at White to White and Black to Black gaps between Kentucky and the national averages. Here is one of the more disturbing graphs from that study.


The gap between Kentucky’s White NAEP score and the national average score for all Whites is shown by the yellow bars. Notice that the gap way back in 1992 is equal to the gap in 2007 – in other words, we lag the nation just as badly as we did back in the beginning of KERA.

Things get ugly when we consider how our Blacks have performed, unfortunately. Our Blacks have gone from scoring eight points above the national Black average to scoring three points below it.

Once you realize that Blacks across the nation score 27 points below the national White average, you begin to understand how incredibly bad this is for Kentucky’s Black students.

KERA promised to solve our achievement gap problems. At this point, we have to realize that promise remains badly unfulfilled, if not actually broken.

For more on this serious situation, see the new freedomkentucky.org Wiki item on “Achievement Gaps for Kentucky Since KERA Began.”