NAEP exposes inflation in Kentucky’s school tests

– NCLB implications are significant, especially for minorities

I blogged earlier on how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows scoring of the Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT) in math has been inflating over time.

Let’s look at how bad that inflation was in the 2009 math tests. We will see that the errors in reporting the true performance of black students for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are particularly disturbing.



The graph above explores the difference between the 2009 math proficiency rates reported on the KCCT and those reported by the NAEP. I present data for various reporting groupings and grades.

The far left bar, for example, shows that the proficiency rate reported by the KCCT for all fourth grade students was 93 percent higher than the rate NAEP reported, or nearly double the proficiency rate in the NAEP.

In general, for most of the categories in the graph, the graph shows the KCCT math scores are inflated to about twice the NAEP reported figures. That is a pretty significant error.

However, there is one, very notable, exception.

KCCT math proficiency rates for our black students are hugely inflated in 2009.

KCCT inflation has profound implications for the accuracy of the NCLB ratings for schools in 2009 because the KCCT math test is one of the two academic tests used for NCLB reporting.



It looks like many schools may have avoided NCLB sanctions when they actually should have failed because of this student subgroups’ true performance.

As a consequence, more schools than reported probably should have failed to make adequate yearly progress in NCLB overall.

We showed in an earlier blog that constant inflation in KCCT scores has been the trend for some time. Now, we see that inflation is significant for many student groups, but especially so for Kentucky’s ranking student minority.

Details on the graph

Here is how the graph was assembled. The “All Student” fourth grade NAEP proficiency rate in the new NAEP Report Card is listed as 37 percent. In sharp contrast, in the new 2009 Statewide Interim Performance Report shows the KCCT fourth grade math proficiency rate for all students was much higher at 71.33 percent. That KCCT proficiency rate is 93 percent higher than the NAEP rate, as shown in the left-most bar in the graph.

Note that some of the NAEP data used to contruct the graph was assembled using the NAEP Data Explorer Web tool.