Kentucky’s charter school regulations were built around those for Georgia – Why it matters

Kentucky’s current charter school laws were enacted by House Bill 520 back in the 2017 Regular Legislative Session. The law was crafted with an eye towards doing what had worked best in other states that already had these schools of choice.

The legislative motive to create the best was furthered when the Kentucky Department of Education, under the guidance of then commissioner Stephen Pruitt, produced the regulations required to flesh out HB 520 into a workable system. Pruitt came out of the Georgia school system and knew a lot about charter operations there.

Pruitt also knew that Georgia had a really solid charter school system, the kind of system Kentucky’s students deserved.

How solid is the Georgia system?

Results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provide some interesting insight.

This table shows the results from the NAEP Grade 4 Reading Assessment for Black students, a group that has been particularly poorly served in Kentucky’s public schools. The table shows the average reading Scale Score for students in each listed state’s charter schools and the scores for other students in the non-charter public schools in the state. This data comes from the NAEP Data Explorer.

I then computed the score differences, ranking the states by those differences.

Unfortunately, due to limited samples taken in most of the listed states, the plus and minus sampling errors in the scores are rather large. In fact, the sampling errors in many states were so large that the NAEP didn’t even report the scores at all. Even with scores reported for the 14 jurisdictions listed in the table, in most cases the difference in charter versus non-charter scores is not statistically significant.

Thus, in the end, only two jurisdictions, Georgia and the District of Columbia schools, overcame the sampling error issues to produce statistically significant score differences.

As you can see, the clear winner in the state-level NAEP charter versus non-charter contest for Black students is – Georgia. So, Dr. Pruitt had it right to concentrate on Georgia.

Let’s give the score differences in Georgia a little more meaning. A number of researchers who work with the NAEP, such as Tom Loveless, use a rough rule of thumb that a score difference of 10 NAEP Scale Score points is equivalent to a full extra year of learning.

So, the 21-Scale-Score-point difference for Black students in Georgia puts the charter Blacks about two full school years ahead of their racial counterparts in that state’s traditional public school system! Wow!

For still more context, while Black fourth-graders in Georgia’s charter schools scored 225 on the 2019 NAEP in reading, in the same test Blacks – all in traditional schools, of course – across Kentucky only scored 199. Jefferson County’s (JCPS) traditional public school Black students only scored 196. So, Blacks in Georgia’s charter schools outperformed their racial counterparts in Kentucky and in JCPS by more than two extra years of learning.

In fact – are you ready for this –

Wow! The gap – at least between charter school Black students in Georgia and whites in Kentucky’s traditional public schools – has been erased!

By the way, according to Table 11 in the US Census Bureau’s data for the 2018-19 school term (Fiscal Year 2019), total current education spending in Kentucky and Georgia was virtually identical. Kentucky spent $11,291 per pupil and Georgia spent $11,228. It isn’t a money thing.

Kentucky clearly needs the kind of performance in its public school system that Georgia is already enjoying. This is why Kentucky badly needs to get on with starting charter schools. The law and regulations are already in place to take advantage of what has happened in Georgia. Now, it’s up to Kentucky’s court system to step aside and let the process begin.