Kentucky Tonight Follow-Up – What’s the real story on Kentucky’s College and Career Readiness?

I was pleased to participate in Monday’s Kentucky Tonight broadcast on KET along with Kentucky Senator Mike Wilson, Kentucky Representative Derrick Graham, incumbent head of the Prichard Committee Brigitte Blom Ramsey and guest show host Renee Shaw (show online here).

We had a lively discussion about many education issues that are likely to come up in the 2016 session of the Kentucky legislature, including the issue of charter schools. However, when so many topics are covered in only one hour, a lot gets left unsaid. So, I’ll be following up with some blogs about things you might want to know more about.

One subject was brought up repeatedly by Kentucky Representative Derrick Graham, who is the chair of the House Education Committee. This was Kentucky’s supposed rapid increase in the percentage of students who are reported as “College and Career Ready.”

Representative Graham trouped the numbers out like they were good as gold, saying around 9 minutes and 35 seconds into the broadcast that “in 2014 sixty-two percent of our students were ready for college compared to in 2010 thirty-four percent (were ready).” In fact, the 2013-2014 Kentucky School Report Card for the state shows under the “Delivery Targets,” “CCR” tab that 34.0 percent of our high school graduates in 2010 met “College and Career Readiness (CCR) Targets” while in 2014 a total of 62.5 percent of the graduates met the targets.

If you think it sounds incredible that Kentucky could almost double readiness in just four years, your doubts are well-supported. In fact, as I blogged in December the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) has raised serious questions about the validity of the CCR numbers that are being reported. Very simply, those numbers really don’t have a lot of credibility right now. You can learn why by clicking the “Read more” link.

Let’s do a little higher order thinking. Even if the reported CCR rate was valid, here is how that fits into our overall education situation.

The same 2013-2014 School Report Card shows in the “Delivery Targets,” “Graduation Rate” tab that in this school year 87.5 percent the students who entered school as 9th graders three years prior graduated. Even if we include students who took five years to graduate, that number only edges up to 88.0 percent.

Keeping this simple, out of every 100 entering ninth grade students who became part of Kentucky’s High School Class of 2014, 88 students got a diploma.

But among those 88 graduates, only 62.5 percent were ready for either a career, or college, or possibly both. This means – even if we were to rely on the published figures – that only 55 students who entered as ninth graders in this class survived to get a full education.

It can be argued that the effective high school graduation rate in Kentucky in 2014 was only 55 percent, a figure no-one is likely to try to defend.

The rest of the students who got a diploma may have received a rather hollow piece of paper. That paper might get them in the door of some hiring offices in the short term, but once business figures out what is going on, the value of such hollow diplomas is going to sink rapidly.

And, this bad news applies if the CCR data was accurate.

However, the OEA’s “A Look Inside Kentucky’s College And Career Readiness Data,” raises a number of credibility issues about the numbers Representative Graham was throwing around on Monday.

You can check the blog mentioned earlier in this post for full details and graphs, but here is a quick summary of some of the problems:

• Calculation of the CCR statistic is inconsistent over the years from 2010 to 2014 because new college ready and career ready criteria didn’t exist before 2012.

• Test security issues could impact the CCR results (as demonstrated by the cheating incident in Louisville Male High).

• Difficulty clearly varies among the different tests used to show students are college ready. OEA provides evidence some of the new college readiness tests may be too easy, luring under-prepared students into regular college courses they will not be able to handle.

• Inflation might be present in one test used to determine college readiness due to use of special calculators, which are now banned for future testing.

• OEA showed that it is possible for schools with similar CCR rates to have significantly different academic performance.

• The terminology is wrong. What is currently being reported isn’t a “College and Career Ready” figure. What is being reported actually is a College and/or Career Ready number, which creates very different, and notably larger, numbers.

The OEA points out that the only consistent readiness data available between 2010 and 2014 is from the ACT. OEA’s report shows that in 2010 only 30 percent of our graduates met that standard (apparently using new criteria from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education that were not in use in 2010, hence the difference from the 34 percent rate officially reported). By 2014 a consistent readiness calculation based on the ACT was only 37 percent. That’s not much to crow about.

But, if anyone tries to sell you the 2013-2014 CCR rate stuff, just point out that this means our effective high school graduation rate was only 55 percent in that school year. I’ll bet that will quiet things down a lot. Then, point these folks to the OEA report.