Substantial progress or not: You can’t have education both ways

A Tuesday news release from the Kentucky School Boards Association has me scratching my head. Why do some education boosters in this state think we don’t remember the past?

The legislature realized that Kentucky’s CATS school assessment program was not providing trustworthy information and disbanded it back in 2009. I remember that.

Never the less, a consortium of groups including the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, the Council for Better Education (CBE) and the Kentucky Association of School Councils couldn’t let go. They kept on computing a ‘CATS Index’ anyway.

Today that consortium released data disaggregated by race and special student groups such as English language learners.

The bottom line from this new release: even relying on the watered down testing left over from CATS, most student groups in Kentucky are not on track to reach the performance goals that were set back in the start of this century.

In one case, students with limited English proficiency, the scores are flat or even declining at all school levels.

So, on Tuesday, the story was about enduring achievement gaps and that major work remains to bring Kentucky education to the level we all want to see.

That doesn’t mesh with recent claims we’ve been hearing about the state making “great strides” over the past 20 years, does it?

I'm sorry ed boosters, but you just can’t have this both ways.

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More on Louisiana Vs. Kentucky on the ACT

After I started posting comments on the new ACT score release yesterday, I was engaged by an anonymous reader with an obvious bias against charter schools. That individual also seems to be having a lot of trouble getting his or her facts straight. That happens in this blog from time to time, and we do work to try to insure that our readers get an accurate picture when those who post comments are confused.

However, sometimes, good comes from those reader challenges, even when the reader is wrong.

A case in point: our anonymous – and not well-informed – correspondent alleged that Louisiana tested 100 percent of its students with the ACT in 2007. That isn’t true, but when I checked the right information for 2007, I discovered something that adds to my evidence that post-Katrina Louisiana has made some remarkable progress on the ACT.

Here is the real data on graduates tested and ACT scores for Kentucky and Louisiana from 2007. It is on line in the ACT, Incorporated’s web site, accessible under the “ACT Average Composite Scores by State” section (I removed other state data for clarity).


Notice that both states had nearly identical numbers of graduates tested in 2007 (77 percent in Kentucky and 79 percent in Louisiana) and that Louisiana scored 0.6 point lower on the ACT Composite Score than Kentucky.

Because the 2007 participation rates are so very close, I think comparison of these scores is reasonable.

Now, flash forward to 2011. Here is how ACT reported that data.


Notice that both states now test all their graduates. However, the ACT Composite Score situation has flip-flopped. Louisiana – ravaged by Katrina six years ago – now scores 0.6 point higher than Kentucky.

So, between 2007 and 2011 charter school rich Louisiana went from 0.6 point below Kentucky’s ACT Composite Score to 0.6 point above. That relative change of 1.2 points is noteworthy on a 36 point test like the ACT.

Even after I pointed this out, our anonymous nay-sayer was unconvinced. He or she tried to claim something to the effect that only the rich had moved back to Louisiana after the big storm hit.

I doubted that assertion, so I checked the percentages of students eligible for free and reduced cost lunches in the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth grade reading assessments of 2003 (Closest pre-Katrina administration) and 2009 (most recently available). I used the NAEP Data Explorer to find those figures.

Guess what: In 2003, free and reduced cost lunch eligible students in Louisiana amounted to 50% of all the students there.

In 2009, lunch eligibility in Louisiana rose significantly to 62 percent, an increase of 12 points.

In contrast, Kentucky’s poverty rate was 42 percent in 2003 and rose to only 47 percent in 2009.

So, Louisiana had 8 points more poverty in 2003 and that rose to 15 points more by 2009.

If anything, based on the most recently available student poverty rates in NAEP, Louisiana should be at a notably higher disadvantage relative to Kentucky today than it was back in 2003 before Katrina hit. That makes Louisiana’s progress on the ACT even more remarkable.

The ACT doesn’t report on poverty rates, so for now the 2009 data is the most recent I can offer. But, most school statistics don’t change all that rapidly, so it is still very likely that poverty in Louisiana remains notably higher than Kentucky’s even today.

This adds more evidence that something in Louisiana is boosting their performance, and charter schools, which now enroll 70 percent of the students in New Orleans, for example, certainly seem likely to be a part of the process.

How many Kentucky high school grads in 2011 were prepared for college and careers?

Not many

This graph, which I developed from data in the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release 11-067 about the 2011 ACT scores, tells the tale (click on it to enlarge).


Note that I only include years where Kentucky conducted 100 percent testing of all graduates.

Also, keep in mind that the benchmarks are developed by ACT after a survey of a number of colleges that use this assessment for admissions. Thus, the benchmarks represent an average level of rigor across a number of different colleges. Students with lower scores might survive in colleges with lower levels of rigor, but their educations will probably be of lesser quality, as well. On the other hand, students will need even higher performance to survive in more demanding schools.

Currently, a little more than half of our students are going on to postsecondary education. It looks like most of them are ready for a freshman college English composition course.

However, in math, only one in four Kentucky public high school graduates is ready for college algebra, generally the minimal math requirement for most degrees except elementary school teachers (and, that is a mistake I have often commented about before).

Only two out of five Kentucky public high school graduates read well enough to survive a freshman social studies course in a typical university.

Less than half of our college bound students are likely to survive in freshman biology or another science course.

Finally, only 14 percent of our graduates are fully prepared for a liberal arts education across all four areas.

As you examine the graph, you will see that progress so far is coming at a painfully slow rate, generally improving by only a percentage point or two over the past three years. We need to jump start this process if we are going to do justice to our kids, who are about to enter a very changed adult world where yesterday’s education simply will no longer do.

Kentucky’s non-public students boost overall state scores in new ACT reports

The Bluegrass Institute is always being asked if we have any idea how private school students in Kentucky perform academically.

The answer is, yes, we do have some information. And, that information just got a new update.

And, it shows that private and home school students in Kentucky are doing a really good job.

The ACT college entrance test scores for the graduating class of 2011 were released earlier today, and I’ll be doing a lot of analysis of this very important information.

A few hours ago, I also got a copy of the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release 11-067, which includes ACT scores for graduating public schools students only. Earlier, I obtained the overall average scores for all Kentucky graduates, public, private and home schools combined, from the ACT Profile Summary Report for Kentucky for 2011.

That allows me to do a little algebra to compute how many non-public school students graduated in Kentucky in 2011 and how they did as a group on the ACT.

Here are three tables that tell the tale from 1993 to the present.

The first one presents overall results for all students combined. These are scores directly released by the ACT, Incorporated in its reports.


Notice that the overall scores for Kentucky dropped notably in 2009, which is the first year the state tested all students with the ACT. That added about 25 percent of our graduates who had not previously chosen to take the ACT when it was optional, and taken at student cost.

This next table covers public high school students’ performance in Kentucky. These scores come from the Kentucky Department of Education’s news release.


Notice here that our ACT Composite score was 19.1 in 2009, the first year we started 100 percent testing, and dropped to 19.0 the next year. Then, in 2011, we came back up to 19.2. So, our improvement since the first year of 100 percent testing has been 0.1 point. That isn’t a lot to crow about, but it is an improvement.

Finally, this last table covers the performance of the non-public school students. I had to calculate these figures.


There are some very important things to consider here.

First, I have no way to know whether or not the 4,232 students tested in 2011 represent all of the non-public school graduates in Kentucky. However, I suspect that a rather high percentage of the non-public school students in the state do take the ACT.

Second, the number of non-public school students tested dropped slightly from 2010 but still represents nearly a tenth of all the students in the state. That is enough for private and home school graduates to make a notable difference in the all-student scores in the first, blue-shaded table above.

I suspect the private school drop is related to the economic situation.

Next, Kentucky’s non-public students notably outscore our public school students, and the gap has been growing recently.

For example, in 2009 public school graduates had an ACT Composite of 19.1 and non-public school graduates scored 22.1, a difference of 3.0 points.

In 2010, the gap grew to 4.0 points.

For this year’s graduates, the public to private/home school gap enlarged further to 4.4 points.

Thus, in 2009, private school graduates pulled up the public school ACT Composite of 19.1 to an overall average score of 19.4, a difference of 0.3 point.

In 2010, the non-public school graduates’ 23.0 ACT Composite pulled up the public school composite of 19.0 to an overall average of 19.4, a difference of 0.4 point.

Finally, in 2011, Kentucky’s private and home school graduates pulled up the public school average again by 0.4 point.

So, in evaluating only overall scores for Kentucky, it is important to keep in mind that they reflect an important contribution from Kentucky’s non-public school graduates.

When we look at the trend in scores only for Kentucky public school graduates since we adopted 100 percent ACT testing, we have only improved performance by the minimum amount detectable, 0.1 point.

Still, the trend is starting to go in the right direction. This offers hope for the future even though Kentucky clearly has a very long way to go and really needs to look at what is happening in a key charter school state, Louisiana, which I blogged about earlier today.

Southern charter school state handily beats Kentucky in new ACT test results

The new ACT results are out, and I already posted a blog earlier today with the news that Kentucky did edge up slightly in ranking among those states where ACT testing is essentially universal.

But, a really big story concerns how Kentucky stacked up against hurricane-racked schools in Louisiana. Louisiana rebuilt its post-Katrina school system largely by harnessing the power and flexibility of charter schools to move out much more quickly than traditional, regulation- and union-constrained public schools could ever accomplish.

Here is our comparison graph again of states where ACT testing is virtually or totally universal.


Note that Louisiana, one of the nation’s strongest charter school states, and also a Southern state, outscored Kentucky by 0.6 point for the 2011 high school graduates’ ACT Composite Score. Here is a further breakdown of ACT Composite Scores by race for the two states:


In particular, notice that blacks in Louisiana outscored Kentucky’s blacks by a full point on the ACT Composite Score. That is a notable difference.

However, the white situation is much more dramatic. Kentucky’s whites languished behind whites from Louisiana by a whopping 1.6 points! That is a very dramatic difference in state-to-state comparisons.

Keep in mind, both states tested all of their graduates, so these comparisons are quite appropriate.

When you consider the challenges Louisiana has faced, this is clearly rather remarkable performance – for them. Good job, Louisiana!

The situation shows that Kentucky could make stronger educational gains, faster, if it would finally establish a good charter school program.

Data sources: ACT Profile Reports for Kentucky and Louisiana, on line here.

Kentucky edges up in 2011 ACT test reports

Data released today shows Kentucky’s performance improved slightly in ACT college entrance test results for the high school graduating class of 2011. It’s an encouraging sign that Kentucky’s schools are finally changing focus to preparing students for college and careers instead of preparing for meaningless CATS assessments.

At a press conference today in Nicholasville, Kentucky and in their web sites, the ACT, Incorporated and the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) posted data listing the combined average performance of all students in the state, both public and private.

The reports show among those states that test all, or virtually all, students with the ACT college entrance test, that Kentucky improved its position by one place in the rankings, swapping places with Tennessee (See graph below; click on it to enlarge).


Still, in a fair comparison of states where testing percentages are virtually identical, it is clear that Kentucky has a long way to go to match top-performers like Illinois and Colorado, which pioneered the policy of testing all their students with the ACT a decade ago. In 2011, those states posted ACT Composite Scores for all their public and private school students of 20.9 and 20.7, respectively. Kentucky scored more than a point lower at 19.6, a very notable difference.

For example, in Kentucky, only 28 percent of the graduates met the ACT College Benchmark score that signaled adequate preparation for a college math course in algebra. In Illinois, 42 percent were prepared to take that same college algebra course.

It is important to note that ACT performance in Kentucky cannot be validly compared to performance in most other states because those states do not conduct universal testing with this assessment (UK Center on Business and Economic Research, are you listening?).

For example, ACT participation rates for high school graduates in 2011 ranged from a low of only nine percent in Maine to full, 100 percent participation in eight states in the graph above and nearly universal participation (98 percent in North Dakota for the first time in 2011, so also included in the graph for that reason).

In most states, students voluntarily take the test, so the ACT results do not represent a valid random sample and therefore cannot be reasonably compared to states where testing is universal.

There is a lot more to discuss from the results of this very important testing program, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, you can find some of the 2011 reports from the ACT, Incorporated here.

Keep in mind, the reports released by ACT, Incorporated cover overall averages in each state for all students, public and private. We’ll talk about public school only performance in Kentucky in a later blog.

Don’t know much about geography, either!

New federal testing results for geography were released today, and the results are not impressive.

In fact, Education Week’s headline pretty much sums it up.

“Students Lose Way in NAEP Geography Test”

Between 1994 and 2010 scores rose a bit for fourth grade students but stayed flat for eighth graders and declined by a statistically significant amount for high school seniors.

Not surprisingly, Daniel Edelson, the vice president of education at the Washington-based National Geographic Society, took a dim view of the new scores. He said:

“The basic story here is that we have not invested in geography education at all in the last decade. Both for workforce preparedness and national security, there are big costs to neglecting geography education. You need people who can reason about geographic challenges … people who understand water and energy systems.”

One interesting comment from EdWeek says:

“Geography and other social studies are often lumped together in courses, which can reduce students’ ability to form a coherent foundation of knowledge over time.”

Could that be a problem in Kentucky, too?

Unfortunately, the new report only provides nationwide results. Individual state performance was not surveyed.