Education gaps and a tale of two editors

The Courier-Journal and The Hechinger Report are continuing their series on education in Kentucky under Common Core, which we first noted yesterday. However, the next article, which deals with how students with learning disabilities are faring in the era of Common Core, provides some interesting issues to discuss.

First off, consider the titles the editors at the Courier and Hechinger chose.

Hechinger’s headline shouts:

“It’s unfair” special education students lag behind under Common Core in Kentucky.”

To put it mildly, the Courier’s “take” is dramatically different:

“Closing gap for challenged kids can help others”

The text of the articles appears to be the same in both publications, even though the editors’ main takes are dramatically different.

In this case, I think that Hechinger gets it more accurately. Here’s why.

The article does discuss the growing gap between students with disabilities and those without, which mirrors the growing white minus black achievement gaps we talked about in our earlier blog and in our “Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, The 2016 Update” report back in February. However, the Courier/Hechinger article also claims that the Field Elementary School in Jefferson County (Louisville area) is doing a really great job of improving performance for learning disabled students.

Really?

The published test scores do show impressive improvement for Field’s learning disabled students over the past few years, but there is a fly in the ointment – or maybe it’s an elephant.

You see, Field shows up in our Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps report with the second largest white minus black achievement gap of all Jefferson County elementary schools. The gap is just shy of a staggering 50 percentage point difference!

That sounds ominous already, but there is more.

The 2015 Kentucky School Report Card for Field Elementary shows that in both reading and math, the proficiency rate for the school’s African-American students was only 27.6 percent. However, the school’s overall reported proficiency rate for its students with disabilities was much higher at 47.4 percent.

Does that really make sense? Should African-American kids, as a group, score much lower than kids with known learning disabilities?Should this school really be used as a model for the rest of Louisville, something the article says is being considered by Jefferson County Schools?

Or, do we really need more answers about what is happening in this school such as an explanation of how scores for all black students can be so much lower than scores for students who are acknowledged to have learning issues?