College and Career Readiness in Kentucky

One of the very interesting additions to the new academic reporting from the Kentucky Department of Education is a new series of data on College and Career Readiness. This shows the percentage of graduates from the school system that score high enough on the ACT college entrance test to avoid needing any remedial course work in math, reading or English upon entering a Kentucky public postsecondary institution. In addition, for 2010, a student who earns an industry recognized “career certificate” is also counted as a success. If you want more information, I provide that and some caveats in the “Read more” section, which you can access from the link below with the same name below.

But, this is largely straight-forward, so let’s look at how Kentucky did in 2010 on this new indicator.

• There is a huge variation in school performance on getting kids ready for college and careers.

o The top school, DuPont Manual High in Jefferson County, prepared 81 percent of its 2010 graduates for college and careers. This school is expected to achieve a 91 percent college and career readiness rate for its graduates in 2014.

 DuPont Manual is a highly selective magnet school. The fact that it still fails to prepare one in five students is very disturbing.

o The bottom performing schools – The Academy @ Shawnee, Valley Traditional High School, Western High School, all in Jefferson County and Deming High School in Robertson County – are only expected to have a 52 percent readiness rate in 2014. I seriously doubt they will reach that goal given their current, dismal performance.

 In 2010 only 4 percent of the three Jefferson County schools’ graduates are college ready!

 In Deming High School, only 3 percent are ready for college and careers.

 These are gruesome numbers after 20 years of KERA.

• In 2010 only 15 of the 228 high schools in Kentucky adequately prepared half or more of their graduates for college and careers.

• High school size doesn’t matter much.

o The correlation (a statistical calculation involving the correspondence of data) between the number of graduates and the percentage that are college and career ready is a rather low 0.32. There is a slight benefit to being a larger high school, but not much. For example:

 Among the top 10 schools for percentage of students who are college and career ready, six exceeded the state median figure and four had much lower numbers of graduates.

 In fact, all four graduated 74 or fewer students in 2010, and two tied with graduates totaling only 44.

 At the other end of the performance spectrum, only one high school exceeded the state median number of graduates, but this could be due to large numbers of dropouts in these very low performing schools.

 Out of the 10 bottom performing schools for college and career readiness, seven are found in Jefferson County.

• Many districts did not report that any students completed any industry-recognized career certificates. Does that mean that in many districts such alternate career pathways are totally unavailable or that programs don’t do an adequate job of preparing students to obtain such certifications?

o No high school in the enormous Jefferson County Public School system reported any student earning such certification.





This is how the Kentucky Department of Education describes the data presentation in its web site (slightly edited):

A readiness percentage is calculated by dividing the number of high school graduates that have successfully met an indicator of readiness for college/career with the total number of graduates. For 2010, the indicators of readiness include student performance on the ACT or attainment of an Industry-Recognized Career Certificate.

The ACT scores used for benchmarking adequate college preparation come from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE). These benchmark scores for 2010 are: Reading (20), English (18), and Mathematics (19) on any administration of the ACT.

Currently, the Career Measures indicator includes students who missed CPE’s Benchmarks on the ACT or College Placement Tests, but who received an Industry-Recognized Career Certificate.

The KDE web site also explains:

The goal for Readiness in 2014 is for schools, districts and the state to improve their 2010 Readiness percentage by at least fifty percent (50%). The improvement goal is derived by subtracting the 2010 readiness percentage from the maximum of 100% readiness, then dividing by two. This value is then added to the 2010 percentage to establish a 50% improvement goal for 2014.

There are a couple of important notes. The college and career readiness data may not show all graduates. Also, students who drop out before graduation are definitely not included in the numbers. Furthermore, the results do not consider students with learning disabilities who take the ACT with testing accommodations that Kentucky allows, but which the ACT won’t allow for testing where scores are transmitted to colleges.