Kentucky’s Black elementary students really left behind in reading and math in 2021

The Kentucky Board of Education got a 2020-2021 Data Release Update briefing on October 5th and slide 19 in the briefing package (shown below) especially caught my attention. This slide shows the percentages of different elementary school level student groups that scored proficient or higher on the state tests for reading and mathematics. Those tests are now called Kentucky Summative Assessments, (KSA) instead of the old KPREP name, by the way, because they are new tests based on new education standards for each subject.

I added highlighting arrows for what jumped out at me on the slide. In both reading and math, Kentucky’s Black students actually performed worse than even the state’s students with learning disabilities.

Wow!

Another slide in the briefing package shows that only 76.1% of the registered Black students actually took the tests while 88% of the students with disabilities got tested. Perhaps if more Black students had shown up to test, the scores would look different, but there is no way to tell if that would result in the disabled student minus Black gap looking even worse.

Still, the visual in the slide shown above is very disturbing.

By the way, this isn’t just a COVID thing.

I checked out data in the 2019 Kentucky School Report Card web pages.

In elementary school reading, back in 2019 Black students were 31.1% proficient while students with disabilities tested 34.2% proficient.

In elementary school math, back in 2019 Black students were 25.5% proficient while the students with disabilities tested 27.7% proficient.

Those 2019 results probably are not very comparable to the 2021 information due to incomplete testing and new assessments based on new education standards used in the past school year, but it is clear that Black students performing below even learning disabled students isn’t a new issue in Kentucky.

That’s just not right.

And, this gives even more evidence that Black students especially need more choices in education. The current K-12 system just isn’t meeting the needs of these children of color.