Governor cites Prichard nonsense

Governor Steve Beshear treated the Boone County Education Foundation to nonsense education statistics a few days ago.

As reported by the Kentucky Enquirer in “Beshear touts education,” the governor touted Kentucky’s supposed dramatic improvement in the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program compared to other states.

Well, as we’ve pointed out before, those rankings of NAEP performance, which the governor got from the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence – not a proper state agency – are mathematical nonsense.

Kentuckians deserve better data and a more reasoned evaluation of the performance of our education system.

Read more »

All that educational progress????

Once again, the Prichard Committee is talking about all the educational progress we have made in Kentucky at the same time they admit we have a long way to go.

I most definitely agree with the part about having a long way to go, but I just don’t see that what has happened so far is significant.

Take a look at this graph, which shows the latest available proficiency rate scores (percentage scoring at or above Proficient) from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The full bars show the most recently reported proficiency rates by subject and grade. Inside of each bar I show the earliest available proficiency rate data for that same subject and grade (click on the graph to enlarge it, if necessary).


Overall, notice that after 19 years of KERA (17 for writing, which was last given in 2007) we generally only find about one in three students are proficient in Kentucky in the listed subjects. For eighth grade math and writing, the proficiency rate is little more than just one in four.

Now, consider where we started on grade 4 reading and math and grade 8 math in the early days of KERA (other subjects didn’t start to test until 1996 or later).

In grade 4 reading, between 1992 and 2009, a 17-year period, our proficiency rate only increased by 13 percentage points. That works out to an average improvement rate of only 0.765 point per year. At that rate, it will take us more than 70 years to reach a proficiency rate of 90 percent! Clearly, we’ve barely started on the journey towards high academic performance, and we are a long way from attaining that goal in fourth grade reading.

I have run more estimates to reach 90 percent proficiency for other subjects in the graph, and you can click the “Read more” link to see that.

Bottom line, anyone who thinks the proficiency rates in the graph above signal significant progress doesn’t have very high standards. And, it is for certain that if we don’t do something dramatic (like establishing charter schools) to stimulate the sluggardly pace of improvement in our schools, the competition is going to bury our kids.

Read more »

Prichard Committee still pushing statistical nonsense

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence has pushed statistical nonsense about the real performance of our public school system on and off for years. Sadly that trend is continued within this recent Op-Ed from Prichard head Robert F. Sexton.

The Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center (KLTPRC) has been shut down, but that doesn’t stop Sexton from citing statistical garbage in one of their last papers.

Which is really sad. Prichard owes Kentuckians a more honest accounting.

Of course, if Prichard really did that, more would understand that Kentucky’s very expensive education reform, which Prichard played a major hand in creating and nurturing, has not really done that much for the students in Kentucky.

Read more »

Charter school shootout on KET, Part 1

Per our alert yesterday, last night’s Kentucky Tonight show on KET was all about charter schools.

It brought together State Representatives Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville and Carl Rollins, D- Midway with Jefferson County Teachers Association president Brent McKim and Bluegrass Institute board member Phil Moffitt to hassle it out about charter schools.

Of course, as is usually the case with Kentucky Tonight shows, there were plenty of ‘opinions,’ only some of which are really true. I’ll discuss an obvious one in this first blog.

One of the key issues in the charter school debate is whether or not the current, plodding pace of Kentucky’s regular public schools is adequate.

Around 49 minutes into the show (which is now viewable on line here), McKim stated that Kentucky used to score around 48th or 49th on a whole host of education indicators in the early 1990s. One indicator he mentioned was the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Well, here are some facts.

Back in 1992, Kentucky’s overall eighth grade math scale score on the NAEP ranked 28 out of 41 states. Thirteen states scored lower than Kentucky did that year (so, we didn’t rank 49th or 48th, not even close). On a percentile basis that can be compared to the 2009 results, when all states participated, this is about the 34th percentile.

Flash forward to 2009.

Kentucky’s overall eighth grade math score on NAEP tied one other state for a rank of 34 out of 50 states. Fifteen states out of this larger testing group scored lower than Kentucky. Kentucky’s performance falls at about the 34th percentile for comparison to the 1992 situation.

In other words, in eighth grade math our relative performance didn’t budge for all students compared to other states between 1992 and 2009. But, back in 1992 the state’s performance wasn’t equivalent to a 48th or 49th place performance, either.

Adding insult to injury, as of 2009, the NAEP says Kentucky’s eighth grade math proficiency rate is only 27 percent, little more than one in four. How can anyone call this significant progress?

Read more »

Where’s All the Writing Improvement?

Kentucky Tonight just held a discussion of the pending CATS Task Force that will be looking at the state’s public school assessment program. It was three educators against our friend Martin Cothran from the Family Foundation, so the educators were outnumbered.

One item the educators brought up repeatedly was how much improvement they have seen in writing. That’s just more evidence our educators see too much in too little, so I called in to the show to share the latest results on eighth grade writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I thought you might like to know about that, too.

The NAEP 2007 Writing Report Card says Kentucky’s eighth graders made no statistically significant change in writing performance between 2002 and 2007. That’s half a decade of flat performance.

The 2007 NAEP proficiency rate for our eighth graders was only 26 percent – just one of four Kentucky kids scored proficient for writing. That was a statistically insignificant change from the 25 percent proficiency reported in 2002. In fact, since 1998, a decade ago, the NAEP eighth grade writing proficiency rate in Kentucky has only gone up 5 points – but there is a catch.

While posting its miniscule score improvement between 1998 and 2007, Kentucky’s exclusion rate for students with learning disabilities shot up faster than anywhere else in the country, rising from two to six percent of the entire NAEP raw sample of students. This big increase probably means most, if not all, of the tiny writing score rise since 1998 is an illusion. Scores look a bit better if you simply prevent a lot more of your weakest kids from taking the test.

By the way, over that same period, the CATS said our middle school kids “on-demand” writing sample, which was collected in a manner similar to the sort of testing conditions the NAEP uses, exploded from just 5.92 percent proficient to 42 percent proficient. So, CATS went from being graded far too hard to being graded much easier than the NAEP. That’s just perfect if you are an education person trying to make yourself look good.

It’s terrible if you are a member of the public searching for the truth about how schools are really doing.

And, all of this shows how CATS just confuses educators and the public alike.