It’s the gap few talk about – the performance gap for our top students, those who score at the “Advanced” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and drag home those “5” scores on Advanced Placement exams.
Now, the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy in Indiana has issued an extensive report on the growing gaps for our very top scoring kids, including a state-by-state breakdown for Kentucky. You can access both from this web page.
Here is a graph from the report that shows the growth in our top students’ White-Black NAEP Math gaps between 2000 and 2008. All of the kids included here score “Advanced” on the NAEP
Note that the graph refers to a “W-H” gap for grade 8. I believe this is a typo and should read W-B. In general, there are so few Hispanics in Kentucky’s NAEP samples that scores are not reported for them.
Similar graphs are available for reading for poor versus non-poor kids (via Free and Reduced Cost Meals analysis) and other tables and graphs cover even more gaps by sex and for AP results. In general, as the report found nationally, Kentucky’s top student performance gaps are also growing.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Education gap ‘at the top’ is widening in Kentucky
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If you run a gap analysis on the NAEP Data Explorer for Kentucky grade 8 mathematics students scoring Advanced in the years 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, you will find that the numbers of black and white students were too small to conduct statistical comparisons except between 2003 and 2007, when the t-test probability was 0.31 (i.e., not significantly different). There are no NAEP data to conclude that the gap between white and black students who score Advanced is growing. Sorry.
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