Hundreds of thousands of Kentucky kids in reading trouble
It was a stunning announcement.
During discussion about his literacy bill (Senate Bill 115, 2021 Regular Legislative Session) at the Kentucky Senate Education Committee meeting on February 11, 2021, Senator Stephen West (R Paris) talked about the need to reach 200,000 Kentucky students who currently cannot read well, if at all (Listen to a KET recording of the meeting from an archive listing here). It’s an astronomical number considering the currently reported Kindergarten to Grade 12 enrollment in Kentucky’s public school system is 648,000.
Essentially, Sen. West was saying that about 31% of all of Kentucky’s students are in trouble for reading. That’s nearly one out of three public school students in the state.
Wow!
Can this be right?
Let’s check the numbers.
To begin, Kentucky regularly takes part in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Assessments. The latest NAEP Grade 4 Reading results are from 2019. According to the NAEP Data Explorer web tool, 33% of Kentucky’s public school Grade 4 students scored in the “Below Basic” achievement level. In the same year, 27% of the state’s eighth graders scored Below Basic, as well.
But, what does scoring “Below Basic” really mean? Other NAEP documentation tells us that the next higher NAEP scoring level, called the “Basic” achievement level, only “denotes partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.”
So, students scoring “Below Basic” in NAEP have even less than a partial mastery of prerequisite skills in reading.
Without question, students scoring Below Basic on NAEP Reading are in trouble.
What about high school performance?
The NAEP doesn’t provide state-level results for any high school grades. But, it turns out that in 2019 the actual test used for Kentucky’s KPREP reporting was the respected ACT college entrance test. All of the state’s public school Grade 11 students took that ACT, and scores are available for reading.
Kentucky broke the ACT reading scores out into scoring bands for the KPREP reporting. Those bands were denoted as “Novice,” “Apprentice,” “Proficient” and “Distinguished” achievement levels. These 2019 KPREP results are available in an Excel spreadsheet from the Kentucky Department of Education titled ASSESSMENT_PROFICIENCY_GRADE. This spreadsheet shows that the 2019 ACT-based KPREP reported that an average of 32.9% of all of the state’s eleventh graders performed in the lowest category, “Novice.”
But, what does Novice really mean?
According to a presentation by the Kentucky Commissioner of Education in April, 2019, a Novice score on KPREP indicates a student “has not demonstrated even a basic understanding of grade level content.”
That sounds a lot like the idea of NAEP’s “Below Basic.” But, there is more.
The commissioner added in his presentation:
“To put it more plainly, a student scoring at the Novice performance level is in a state of academic emergency.”
Clearly, scoring Novice on KPREP indicates something analogous to scoring Below Basic on NAEP. And, that performance is really low.
Since NAEP “Below Basic” is similar to the KPREP “Novice,” let’s average together the Grade 4 NAEP Reading and Grade 8 NAEP Reading percentages of students scoring Below Basic with the Grade 11 ACT-based KPREP reading percentages for “Novice.”
The result works out to be 31%. That’s the same percentage that results when we compare Sen. West’s 200,000 students claim to the state’s currently reported 648,000 Kindergarten to Grade 12 enrollment.
So, Senator West is right on target. About 200,000 Kentucky public school children really do have major problems with reading. That averages out to about 15,385 students in trouble for reading in every single public school grade, Kindergarten through Grade 12.
Senator West tried to do something about this problem with his SB-115.
But, SB-115 died in the Kentucky House. How that happened is another story for another day. But, know right now – more than three decades after the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (often called KERA) promised to fix education issues like this – that literally hundreds of thousands of Kentucky’s public school students are not being properly served in reading instruction. That is, as the past Kentucky Commissioner of Education put it, an academic emergency.