Kentucky’s new federal reading scores are flat

The National Assessment of Educational Progress just released the 2011 results for math and reading for all 50 states.

Certainly, the 2011 reading and math results for Kentucky don’t look good.

Let’s look at reading first. In both forth and eighth grade reading, as these maps taken from the new NAEP Reading Report Card show, Kentucky had no statistically significant improvement in reading performance from 2009.

G4 Reading Map, Change from 2009, All Studs

G8 Reading Map, Change from 2009, All Studs

In fact, performance nationwide wasn’t terribly impressive. Only three states showed a statistically measurable difference in performance in grade four, while nine states did improve at grade eight.

Actually, Kentucky’s grade four reading performance has been flat since 2005.

It should be noted that the raw published scores for Kentucky do show a small rise over time and between 2009 and 2011 at the eighth grade. However, but the statistical sampling errors in the NAEP make it impossible to know for certain that these small score rises are really valid.

In the fourth grade, Kentucky's NAEP Scale Score for reading actually declined by a statistically insignificant amount between 2009 and 2011. That's really flat.

Never the less, just watch for the usual, statistically inappropriate claims to flow that Kentucky made a little more progress.

In fourth grade and eighth grade reading, no-one who understands the NAEP would support such a claim.

Certainly, the new NAEP reading results don’t agree with the trend lines we got from the now defunct CATS tests.

Stay tuned for the math maps and a whole lot more.