How Many Students Were Failing in JCPS in Fall 2020?
Probably a lot more than some think
Pastor Jerry Stephenson, a good friend of BIPPS’, by the way, took part in a Let Them Learn press conference in Louisville this morning. Let Them Learn is a fast-growing group of parents
According to a Twitter comment, Stephenson said something like 20,000 to 30,000 students in the Jefferson County Public School District (JCPS) were not being engaged. The Tweet questioned his figures.
Well, I didn’t provide Stephenson his numbers, but the Twitter comments got me thinking. It would be interesting to explore data that WFPL reporter Jess Clark recently published about the percentages of JCPS students who received failing grades in the first six-week grading period of the 2020-21 school term. I already had some JCPS school enrollment data by race from the spring of 2019 to which I could mate with Clark’s data to develop an estimated overall head count of students who were failing.
This table shows what I came up with.
The green-shaded section shows the percentages of students failing by race and school level. These data points come from “Percent of Students Who Received A Failing Grade By Race/Ethnicity,” an interactive graphic in Jess Clark’s article, “Away From The Classroom, Disadvantaged JCPS Students Fail At Higher Rates,” which ran in WFPL’s web site on February 5, 2021.
In reading this green-shaded part of my table above, notice in the top left corner it shows that Clark’s article reported 8.6% of JCPS’ elementary school Black students failed in the first six-week grading period of the 2020-21 school term. Other numbers in the green-shaded section contain the rest of the failing percentages Clark found.
The middle part of the table, shaded in orange, contains counts of students by race and school level developed from grade-by-grade enrollment by race figures found in the 2019 SAAR Ethnic Membership Report from the Kentucky Department of Education. This is an end of year enrollment count. I would like to be able to use 2020 end of year enrollment figures, but thanks to COVID-19, it appears the 2020 numbers were never collected or at least published. The 2020 numbers probably would not be really accurate in any event due to students going absent.
Regarding what is shown in the orange-shaded part of the table, notice that in the top left cell it shows that 15,969 JCPS elementary school students were Blacks. This is calculated from the sum of the Kindergarten to Grade 5 individual grade data shown in the 2019 SAAR Ethnic Membership Report. A similar process for Grade 6 to 8 and Grade 9 to 12 data was used to assemble the numbers for middle and high schools.
Now look at the blue shaded area of my table. Applying Clark’s percentage of 8.6% failure for Black elementary school students in JCPS to the best available enrollment data of 15,969 Black elementary school students in JCPS indicates that around 1,373 Black elementary school level students in JCPS received failing grades in the fall of 2020. You will find this figure in the top left portion of the blue-shaded area of the table.
The other data was processed in the same manner to fill in the rest of the blue-shaded portion of the table.
Next, the various subtotals of numbers of failing students for each school level were calculated and entered into the “Failing Totals” line. Finally, those three school level totals were added together to get an overall estimate of the number of students failing based on the data Clark’s article provided.
That total failing figure in JCPS is just over 25,000 students, which happens to fall right in the middle of the estimate Stephenson mentioned this morning.
To reiterate, Pastor Stephenson didn’t get his figure from me. He tells me he based his estimate on information JCPS provided in the spring plus his own, on-the-ground impressions about what was really happening in West Louisville. But, it looks like his more subjectively derived estimate agrees with the more data-aligned work you see above.
In other words, Pastor Stephenson makes a pretty fair estimate if you accept that failing probably aligns with not being much engaged.
And, while I stress it is also an estimate, 25,000 kids failing in JCPS is a whole lot of kids.