Black/White college readiness gaps remain huge

We have been posting articles on the new ACT scores for Kentucky’s 11th grade students, including some information from the ACT Profile Report that you probably are not going to hear about elsewhere.

Here is another graph from the Profile Report that shows the gap in college preparation for Kentucky’s Black students is a huge problem. The ACT college readiness benchmark scores indicate a student has good odds of passing the first related college courses.


(Note: click on the picture to enlarge it)

Sadly, as the graph shows, only two percent – that’s all, just two percent – of our Black kids are on track for college. Compare that to 12 percent of our White kids and a much higher 28 percent of our Asian-American students.

By the way, that relatively high figure for our Asian-American students shows much higher college readiness scores can be achieved by all our 11th grade students.

Still, the sad fact is that very few of our kids are really being prepared for post-secondary education by our overly CATS focused education system. Once again, whatever CATS was testing, it wasn’t what our kids needed. Our educators and the Kentucky Board of Education need to keep that thoroughly in mind as they revise our testing program from CATS to what will hopefully be a much better system.

You can find more about the ACT in the freedomkentucky.org Wiki site here.