All that educational progress: Part 2?

I’ve been assembling more comparison maps with the powerful NAEP Data Explorer tool from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Here is one I put together to show how Kentucky’s white students’ latest available NAEP writing performance compares to white students in other states that participated (five states shown in blue plus Washington, DC, didn’t participate in this voluntary assessment). I look at whites because they comprise 85 percent of the student population in Kentucky and because with demographics in other states now very different from Kentucky’s, simplistic comparisons of overall NAEP scores are misleading.


According to the NAEP Data Explorer, after all the time we spent on writing in Kentucky, as of 2007, white students in the 31 states shown in green, including a number in the South, were doing a better job than our white students. NAEP says with a 95 percent level of confidence that all states shown in green got writing scores that were statistically significantly higher than Kentucky’s on this sampled assessment.

Twelve states tied us, including Mississippi.

Only West Virginia did worse.

Now, how is that again about all the progress?