Lots of folks in the K to 12 education business tell us that poverty is the biggest and most important player in education achievement gaps. Fix that, these folks say, and education gaps will go away.

Some educators rely on this poverty assertion as an excuse for the rather low performance we are seeing in our schools. They say they can’t fix poverty and shouldn’t be blamed for the fact that it impacts learning.

Well, maybe not.

It turns out that some of the information hidden in the new KPREP scores for Kentucky released on October 1, 2019 indicates that some big gaps might be due to other issues, and, I’m not the first one to bring this KPREP situation up. Mandy McLaren, one of the education reporters at the Courier-Journal, started to raise this issue a week or so ago in a series of tweets you can look at here.

McLaren examined the differences in white minus black reading proficiency rates versus the differences in proficiency rates for students who were eligible for the federal school lunch program compared to those students not eligible for that program due to higher parent income (essentially, a poverty gap measure).As McLaren points out in one of her Tweets concerning schools that had data to compute both types of achievement gaps: “A number of these schools have income-based gaps that are *significantly* smaller than their racial gaps.”

That got my attention, so I assembled a spread sheet for those Kentucky schools that had reported reading proficiency rates for white and black students in addition to the same type data for students eligible for school lunches and those who were not eligible.

I sifted and sorted the listing to only include those schools with very, very low black student reading proficiency rates of less than 20%. I additionally only included schools which had a difference between their white minus black reading proficiency rate and their not-lunch eligible versus lunch eligible reading proficiency rate of 10 percentage points or more.

The table below shows the resulting listing of schools that met all of my criteria (click on the table to enlarge. You can also access the Excel spreadsheet version by clicking here).

The table shows proficiency rates separately for white and black students and then computes the gap in those two rates. Next, the table shows reading proficiency rates for students not eligible for the federal school lunch program versus the reading proficiency rate for students who do qualify for free or reduced cost school lunches. The data is sorted by the black proficiency rate (middle of the yellow-shaded area) in increasing order of that rate.

Let’s discuss some things in this table.

The top school in this list, Webster County Middle School, has some really dismal numbers. Its white students’ reading proficiency rate is notably lower than the statewide middle school average for whites (shown at the bottom of the table as 63.9%), but the black reading proficiency rate of zero simply can’t get any worse. So, the school has a white minus black proficiency rate gap of 56.1 points even though its white reading proficiency is already low.

However, note that the poverty rate gap in Webster County Middle is not nearly as severe, only 28.4 points. But, the real kicker is that the school’s black reading proficiency rate is MUCH lower than the lunch eligible (poor) students’ rate, 0.0% versus 41.0%.

The biggest problem in this school isn’t poverty, it seems to be something related to race.

In other schools near the top of the list, which again was sorted by the black students’ reading proficiency rate, the racial achievement gap is notably larger than the poverty gap.

Also note that the first eight of the schools listed have only single-digit black reading proficiency rates.

In the case of the Todd County Central High School, which is the fourth school down in the list, the not-lunch eligible versus lunch eligible gap is actually moderately low at just 13.0 points but the white minus black gap is REALLY, REALLY large at 43.8 points. So, the poverty gap is 30.8 points lower in this school than the racial reading proficiency rate gap. It doesn’t look like just curing poverty alone is going to solve the problems for children of color in this school.

We are often critical of Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), but It is worth mentioning that the problems of race versus poverty gaps are not confined to JCPS, although it is clear that plenty of JCPS schools are found in the table. For example, one of the high schools in the table, Tates Creek High, is in Fayette County, the state’s second-largest school district. Tates Creek also has notable gap issues that seem more related to race than poverty.

These it’s-not-just-poverty issues are not confined to one region of the state, either. Newport Intermediate School and Lloyd High School are found in Northern Kentucky, while the Warren Elementary and the Warren County East High School are in the south-central region of the state.

Thus, it looks like there is something going on in some (I emphasize certainly not all) Kentucky schools that has more than poverty issues behind it.

By the way, concerns here were echoed using a different approach to data in our BIPPS series about Blacks Falling Through Gaps. The latest edition is online here. Beginning on Page 7 in that report, we discuss the fact that the biggest white minus black achievement gaps in Jefferson County’s schools tend to be found in the upper-scale schools in the east side of the district. The report points out that blacks in some of those JCPS schools that do really well for white students do even worse for black students than schools located in the heart of the lowest-income parts of Louisville.

So, as McLaren states in another Tweet:

“Poverty absolutely plays a role in America's racial achievement gap. But we do ourselves no favors in pretending that if we solve poverty, we'll solve the achievement gap.

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING WITH RACE AND WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT.”

Ms. McLaren, BIPPS wholeheartedly agrees.

Tech Note: Scores in the table came from the new Kentucky School Report Card Data Excel spreadsheet for Assessments/Accountability, Accountability Proficiency, by Level. (Updated to correct misspelled name)