Much of the morning in yesterday’s meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education was devoted to discussions of improvements needed in the state’s Unbridled Learning public school accountability program. National experts from the Education Trust told the state board some of the same things that we have been saying in our reports for more than two years(such as “Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning School Assessment Program: Can we trust what it’s telling us about schools?” and Kentucky’s ‘Unbridled Learning’ – Unrigorous School Accountability for African-American Students?" and our “KPREP Data Sourcebook” series which was first issued on November 20, 2012 with Revision 1 available online here).

Specifically, Unbridled Learning isn’t capturing an accurate picture of achievement gap problems in Kentucky’s schools.

The Education Trust looked at accountability programs in three states that have good data publicly available. Their “Key Finding” is:

Right now, school ratings are not powerful signals if you care about individual groups of kids.

•In each state, schools are getting top ratings despite low performance for some groups.

•In fact, the differences are so large that top rated schools often perform similarly for their low-income students and students of color as middling to low-rated schools do for their white and higher income peers.

For example, here is one of the slides from the Ed Trust’s presentation (used with permission) that shows the combined math and reading proficiency rates in two Kentucky schools.

Because Unbridled Learning’s focus is on overall average scores, both schools got the highest rating of “Distinguished.” However, as soon as the data is broken out by special student categories, it is clear that School B is doing a far better job for minority students, the poor, and the students with learning disabilities who have an Individual Education Plan (IEP). In fact, School B has a much better education program for all its students. But, Unbridled Learning doesn’t tell us that.

To be sure, a lot of other states probably have similar issues to Kentucky’s. Thanks to waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act, states once again are devising their own accountability systems. It looks like the first victims of this process, whether intentional or not, are groups of students like the poor and minorities that No Child focused on before it was gutted. Those special groups of students are again getting left behind.

The good news is that the Kentucky Board of Education seems to be really listening, now. I think we will see improvements in the visibility of special student groups in the revised Unbridled Learning, though how much of that will actually happen is still very much open to question. To be sure, not everyone in education is interested in openness and transparency in this area, and that could pose problems as the board tries to improve Unbridled Learning.

Closing Note: You can learn more about the Education Trust’s research in this area here. It is well worth a read.