More Persistently Low-Achieving Schools identified in Kentucky

Feds: Kentucky Department of Education didn’t identify enough

Sending a clear message that the US Department of Education is fed up with schools that persistently perform poorly for students, the Kentucky Department of Education was recently directed to add more schools to the official Persistently Low-Achieving Schools list to comply with federal requirements. Apparently, the department had engaged in some of that ‘KERA math’ and didn’t correctly calculate the number of schools that had to be identified to meet the federally required percentage figures.

The two added low-achieving schools, Knight Middle School in the Jefferson County Public School District, and Newport High School in the Newport Independent School District, bring the state’s total number of low-achieving schools to 22. Here is the full list:








Jefferson County now has 13 of the 22 Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in the entire state, or 59 percent. The district has less than 20 percent of the students, however.

Check the Courier-Journal's coverage here.

Spinning the EXPLORE and PLAN results

I posted the new test results from the eighth grade EXPLORE and tenth grade PLAN testing in Kentucky several days ago.

These are found in a Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) news release titled, “EXPLORE AND PLAN RESULTS SHOW IMPROVEMENT,” which released on February 24, 2011.

At the time, I was most interested in the scores.

I missed the fact that the title of the news release and the first paragraph’s comment that “school scores moved up slightly in nearly all subject areas tested” were inaccurate spins of the rather mixed trends from 2009 to 2010.

FACT: On EXPLORE, between 2009 and 2010 scores only moved up in the individual academic subjects of math and science. The EXPLORE scores stayed flat in reading and went down in English.


FACT: On PLAN, scores also declined in English between 2009 and 2010. Science stayed flat. PLAN scores only increased in math and reading.


Overall, the PLAN Composite also stayed flat, which certainly conflicts with the KDE’s headline, as well.

I suspect that if questioned, the KDE would claim that they were talking about the whole period trends from 2006 to 2010, but I think most people reading the headline and the first sentence comment would think the comments refer to changes from last year.

Besides, if we are talking about the whole period from 2006 to 2010, the scores did improve somewhat in all areas, not just in “nearly all subject areas tested.”

KDE can’t have this both ways, and a correction would be appropriate, especially as the rather stagnant PLAN data indicates our schools are not getting the message – we want our kids better prepared for college and careers, not whatever nebulous things the soon to be defunct Kentucky Core Content Test looks for.

Come on KDE, catch up with BIPPS!

The Kentucky Department of Education is under federal mandate to post the tools used by schools and school districts to evaluate teachers and superintendents.  Federal funds await them if they are able to have these tools posted before October 29, 2010.

Of course these federal funds have nothing to do with them making information available to citizens...yeah right.

Fortunately over the summer we took it upon ourselves to find out how superintendents were evaluated.  You can find the evaluations for superintendents in districts that aren't meeting adequate yearly progress here.

Maybe the KDE could save some time and just pull the evaluations from FreedomKentucky.org.

Did the KDE lose its dictionary?

Not only is the Kentucky Department of Education creating new categories of failure for schools and school districts (Restructuring - Yr 4, Corrective Action - Yr 5), it seems they are also creating new words...

Bluegrass Institute's Definition of "Goverence" from freedomky on Vimeo.

Commissioner’s blog lays out tough numbers about Kentucky’s education performance

Education Commissioner Terry Holliday and his staff are really starting to tell it like it is with Kentucky’s public education system.

As I reported recently, this month’s meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education contained lots of hard-hitting facts about where the state really stands in making education progress.

Now, Commissioner Holliday adds to the candor with more sobering facts about education in Kentucky. His blog from August 13, 2010, “The Class of 2010, What Does Their Future Look Like?” uses the most recently available data on high school graduation rates and college success rates to project what will happen to Kentucky’s new group of graduating students.

This table summarizes Dr. Holliday’s sobering projections for this group of students.



To learn more about the disturbing numbers in this table, click the "Read more" link below.

Read more »

New Department of Education Strategic Plan pays attention to achievement gaps

New accountability program will include assessment of gap performance

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) made a lot of comments about the state’s endemic achievement gaps during the Kentucky Board of Education’s August meeting and retreat.

This discussion started with Associate Commissioner Ken Draut’s presentation during the retreat part of the meeting. Ken provided a nice review of the many different performance gaps for student groups in Kentucky using a detailed, 25-page handout titled “Academic Performance Data.” This handout is available in two parts, Part 1, with Pages 1 to 19, and Part 2, with Pages 20 to 25.

Ken’s handouts have lots of data on the gaps from such indicators as the Kentucky Core Content Tests, graduation rates (using the credible Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate formula instead of our old, inflated calculation), the ACT college entrance test and the ACT’s EXPLORE and PLAN tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

I capture just a small amount of Ken’s presentation in these two graphs, which show the gaps on the Kentucky Core Content Test (KCCT) in reading and mathematics.


Several things stand out in the reading graph. First, Asian students do notably better than whites at all school levels, but the trend gets more favorable to Asians in the upper grades. What do we need to harness from our Asian students and transplant to our whites?

Note, as well, that in Kentucky Hispanic-white gaps are notably lower than African-American to white gaps. However, the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) student’s gaps are much worse than the African-American to white gaps. Only students with learning disabilities have larger gaps.

Also notice that the gaps by racial group vary dramatically.

Here is the graph for mathematics.


The trends are generally similar, with one added note. The KCCT’s Female Vs. Male gaps in Kentucky favor females, which is definitely not what we find in other testing such as the NAEP, where males in Kentucky do better than the females. The differences are small for the sexes, but there may be an indication here of potential bias in the KCCT results by sex.

In any event, it is clear from the graphs above and the very extensive data presented in Academic Performance Data that Kentucky needs to pay attention to its persistent education gaps. Thus, it is good to see that gaps are a specific highlight area in the state’s strategic plan, which I mentioned in an earlier blog. It is also good to hear that the department intends to include a separate metric for gaps in the state’s new public school accountability program.