Notable increase in Advanced Placement Tests came from 12 “Advance Kentucky” schools

– Merit pay works – in Kentucky!

I wrote yesterday about the very nice increase in Kentucky’s Advance Placement Test (AP) performance that was announced a few days ago. In this post, I discuss a dramatic contribution to that increase that came from just 12 of the 230 or so high schools in the state – those few schools that participated in the first phase of the “Advance Kentucky” program to improve AP performance.

The 12 Advance Kentucky high schools are: Anderson County, Barren County, Corbin Independent, Henderson County, Lone Oak, Marion County, North Laurel, Reidland, Scott County, Shelby County, South Laurel, and Warren East.

According to Advance Kentucky’s press release on the 2009 results, students in those high schools made extraordinary improvement. The 12 schools increased their numbers of AP tests in the key areas of math, science and English getting a score of 3 or more by 76.6 percent while across Kentucky there was only a much lower 17.5 percent improvement.

An AP score of 3 is usually the minimum “Qualifying Score” for a student to get college credit for the course.

In fact, fully one-third of all of the math, science and English AP increases in tests receiving qualifying scores came from just the 12 Advance Kentucky high schools.

Advance Kentucky’s press release says that females in the pilot project contributed fully one-half of the entire increase in female AP qualifying scores across the entire state.

Low income students in the 12 pilot schools increased their AP course qualifying score rates in math, science and English AP testing by 148 percent and supplied nearly half of all the increase across Kentucky for similar income level students.

How did they do it?

Advance Kentucky was developed by the Kentucky Science & Technology Corporation in partnership with the National Math & Science Initiative, or NMSI. The model involves a number of coordinated actions as shown in this NMSI “pie,” but I want to mention some key ones.


Notice that there are stipends and bonuses for educators and incentives for students, as well.

Kentucky teachers of the pilot schools’ AP courses received a stipend of $100 for every qualifying score their AP students achieved. This is a teacher merit pay example – right here in Kentucky – that paid big dividends to the students involved.

In addition, the student who scored a 3 or more also received a $100 award. Plus, those students will save the considerable tuition costs for the college courses that they successfully completed while still in high school.

So, overall, the financial inducements in the Advance Kentucky program seem to have helped get everyone’s nose to the grindstone on the other items in the “pie,” which are all important.

There is one somewhat cautionary note to the good news. Minorities in the 12 schools improved their AP “pass rate” by a whopping 225 percent compared to a far more modest 31 percent rise across Kentucky (including the huge contribution from the pilot schools). However, when I checked the minority 12th grade enrollment in the 12 pilots (see table below), I found that Kentucky’s dominant minority group, the African-Americans, were notably under-represented.


Overall, the average enrollment percentage for Blacks in the Advance Kentucky schools was only 5.7 percent, little more than half the state-wide high school average of 10.0 percent, which I calculated from the listing of all schools in the state from the "FY 2009 Qualifying Data (Source - Oct 2008).xls" file availabe here.

That raises a question. Our African-American population is heavily concentrated in Louisville. Why isn’t a single Jefferson County high school in this first set of high schools or even in the additional group of 15 more high schools that will be in the “Cohort 2” phase of the project? It seems like the pilot badly needs representation from Kentucky’s largest school district.

Meanwhile, you can learn more about the Advance Kentucky program at www.advancekentucky.com. If your high school isn’t in the program, it should be.

And, “hats off” to the Advance Kentucky crowd, headed by Ms. Joanne Lang, who are making this great idea work for Kentucky students.

(minor edit added 30Aug09)