Kentucky’s 2010 NCLB performance is down, again

High schools see many declines in KCCT scores

The first news is mixed, at best. The percentage of schools that made Adequate Yearly Progress is down, again.

The Kentucky Department of Education’s 10-052 News Release shows that in 2010 only 55.6 percent of the state’s schools reached their NCLB targets.

The BRIEFING PACKET, STATE RELEASE, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND (NCLB), Adequate Yearly Progress Report 2009 from last year shows that 60.2 percent of the schools met that target in 2009.

Even worse, as shown in the table below, which is derived from a table in the education department’s news release, proficiency rates declined nearly across the board in our high schools from 2009 to 2010. There were also large one-year declines in the Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT) scores in elementary school social studies and middle school science, although proficiency rates rose somewhat in the other subjects in those schools.


[Table note: Scores from KDE News Release 10-052, Change in scores by Innes]

Naturally, excuses are being made for all of this, and I’ll discuss them in the next post.

Also, I saw comments somewhere (sorry, forgot to capture the link) that superintendents are already questioning the big drops in elementary social studies and middle school science. I don’t blame them.

So, stay tuned. There could be a scoring error in the department’s new numbers.