Have Kentucky Educators lost their poverty excuse?

We’ve heard excuses for years that Kentucky’s education system suffers a disadvantage in comparison to other states because of higher student poverty rates.

Well, that may no longer be true. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicates – believe it or not – that Kentucky’s poverty rates are now essentially equivalent to the national average, at least for those students who were actually allowed to take the NAEP in 2013.Click the “Read more” link to learn the rest of this amazing story.

What started me down this path is a new report series, “ADEQUACY FOR EXCELLENCE IN KENTUCKY: REPORT 1” (available online here) and “ADEQUACY FOR EXCELLENCE IN KENTUCKY: REPORT 2” (available online here).

Both reports were paid for with $130,000 of your tax dollars provided by local school districts to Kentucky’s “The Council for Better Education” (CBE).

There are a number of concerns with the CBE-financed report, which examines the supposed education performance in the state, so I have been checking the data.

For example, Page 7 in Part 1 of the December 2, 2014 update version of the report says that Kentucky’s:

“…free and reduced priced lunch counts surpassed the national average. In 2011-12, 54.4 percent of public school students in Kentucky qualified for free/reduced priced lunches – the 12th highest rate in the country. The national average was 49.6 percent….”

When I checked on the statistics for that year from Table 204.10 in the forthcoming Digest of Education Statistics 2013, those lunch eligibility rates for 2011-12 were confirmed. In 2011-12 there was a fairly small, 4.8-point gap in lunch eligibility rates between Kentucky and the national average.

The same table had data for 2000-01. In that year, Kentucky’s lunch rate exceeded the national average by 9.3 percentage points. The gap has been cut in half since. And, the 4.8-point difference may not be very notable, in any event.

But, there is more.

Because the new CBE report talks about Kentucky’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), I also wanted to see how school lunch eligibility looked for the students who actually took that federal assessment. That’s when I got a big surprise, as this table shows.

Percent of Students Eligible for Lunch Who Participated in NAEP in 2013 in KY and Nation by Grade and Subject

In all of the different 2013 NAEP testing events in math and reading, the sample of Kentucky students actually tested had lunch eligibility rates that were essentially equal to the national average once the statistical sampling errors in the NAEP data were considered – EQUAL, not higher than.

So, comments in the CBE report and a lot of other comments we have heard recently about Kentucky’s supposed disadvantages due to high poverty rates seem to be a thing of the past. For whatever reason, in the latest NAEP testing the Bluegrass State’s poverty rates – using school lunch eligibility rates as a poverty proxy – are essentially equal to those around the rest of the nation.

So, excuses based on supposed higher poverty in Kentucky no longer seem valid. Under any condition, the small difference in school lunch rates for Kentucky versus the nation as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics doesn’t seem very significant. And, when we look the latest NAEP, the poverty excuse for Kentucky vanishes.

By the way, there is still more to the story behind the CBE report, so stay tuned.