Jefferson County’s NAEP performance – Grade 8 reading
I already covered the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading proficiency rates and gaps picture for Grade 4 students in Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS). Now let’s examine the NAEP Grade 8 Reading Assessment results.
Figure 1 shows the percentages of white and Black students in JCPS that scored At or Above Proficient.
Figure 1
As you review this, keep in mind we recently reported there is increased reason to consider the NAEP’s proficiency level as an indication that students in at least the eighth grade are on track to be ready for college and careers. Students who don’t reach this performance level are more likely to face challenges in adulthood.
Looking first at the blue line, which shows white students’ performance, we see that JCPS’ white students have never broken the 50% level of proficiency on the NAEP. But things regressed in 2022, probably mostly due to COVID.
Most telling, none of the previous proficiency rates are statistically significantly different from the 2022 rate for whites of 37%. In other words, as far as the NAEP can tell us, white performance has really been flat throughout the period JCPS has participated in NAEP.
Now, check out the orange line, which shows Black student performance. The trend here is essentially completely flat, once you allow for the sampling errors found in all NAEP score estimates.
Regarding the achievement gaps in proficiency rates, no prior gap is statistically significantly different from the gap in 2022.
Essentially, given the measurement error in the NAEP scores, we cannot claim there has been any progress for either white or Black Grade 8 students in reading proficiency rates back to 2009.
Actually, the big news for JCPS concerns performance at the other end of the NAEP scale, namely those students who scored Below NAEP Basic. Figure 2 has that story.
Figure 2
When you look at Figure 2, it is important to keep in mind that because this is data for the lowest-performing NAEP group, we want the numbers to decrease, not increase. But that isn’t what has happened as of 2022.
Also, as is true with all gap information, there is a notable gap between white students and Black students scoring Below NAEP Basic. In this case, however, the Black students’ line appears above the white students’ line because a higher percentage of Blacks perform at this very low level.
And, performing Below NAEP Basic is performing at a very low level. NAEP documentation tells us students performing Below Basic have less than even just a partial mastery of reading. These students are basically very weak to non-readers.
Looking at the orange line for Black student percentages scoring in the NAEP Below Basic area, we see most prior years of data are not statistically different from the new, 2022 percentage of 54%. However, there had been an improvement in the 2015 results (recall we want the numbers to go down for the percentage of students in this lowest NAEP performance category), but that improvement has now been completely erased.
In fact, despite sampling issues with the 2022 NAEP assessments, which mean the plus and minus sampling errors are generally larger, the 2022 percentage is statistically significantly higher than the 2015 percentage. We don’t want to see that, but there it is.
The percentage of JCPS’ white students scoring Below Basic has been relatively constant but the numbers for 2017 and 2019 are never the less statistically significantly lower than the new 2022 number. Again, we don’t want numbers for this statistic to be increasing, but that is what happened.
Again, thanks to sampling errors, none of the gaps in the NAEP Below Basic statistics for JCPS in Grade 8 reading are statistically significantly different from the 2022 figure.
Overall, there has been a statistically significant increase in the percentages of JCPS students scoring at NAEP’s lowest performance level compared to some previous years, and that isn’t what we want to see. Keep in mind that the sampling errors went up in 2022 due to NAEP reducing the sizes of its student samples. Thus, the fact that there are any years with statistically significantly different results from 2022 is particularly concerning.
Stepping back to take in the big picture, there clearly are major problems with the teaching of reading in Kentucky’s largest school district. When only about one in three white students and only a dismal 12% of Black students are reading proficiently after 30 plus years of traditional school-based education reforms, it is time to try other things.
One of those other options is retraining all teachers about what science shows works best to teach reading. That is just now starting to happen with the Reading Academies program created by Senate Bill 1 in this year’s legislative session. But the Reading Academies won’t solve problems overnight because fewer than 2,000 teachers signed up for the first group, or phase, to go through this training while across Kentucky about 20,000 teachers probably need this program.
So, other options, such as school choice, also need to be in the mix. Because when not much more than one in three white students and hardly more than one in ten Black students in Kentucky’s largest school district are reading with adequate skill, the current situation just isn’t acceptable.
Tech Note:
NAEP Scores and data about statistical significance came from the NAEP Data Explorer.