We hear a lot of excuses from some of our educators that one reason Kentucky’s education system fares rather poorly is because we have a lot of students in poverty, far more than most other states.

Really?

Well, this is another case where our educators might not be very up to date with their statistics.

I decided to look at the school lunch data for all the states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I selected 1998, the first year NAEP had lunch data, 2003, the first year all 50 states took NAEP Grade 4 and Grade 8 math and reading, and 2013, the last year before changes to the school lunch program made it unsuitable for use as a proxy for poverty.

I looked at Grade 4 reading results for these years, setting up the Main NAEP Data Explorer Tool to pull the lunch data for all 50 states, where available. I then used the Data Explorer’s statistical significance test tools to rank Kentucky’s lunch rate against the other states.

For 1998, only 3 states in the nation out of the 39 that had NAEP results had a statistically significantly higher school lunch rate than Kentucky did. A total of 22 states had statistically significantly lower lunch rates. If we ignore the sampling errors and just rank the rates as published, Kentucky ranks 9th from the top for student poverty based on lunch rates.

For 2003 things are not much different. Again, only 3 states in the nation out of the 50 that had NAEP results had a statistically significantly higher school lunch rate than Kentucky did. The state still ranked 11th from the top for this poverty proxy. This time 34 states ranked statistically significantly lower than the Bluegrass State for lunch rates.

Flash forward to 2013, and things have notably changed. Now, 14 states have statistically significantly higher lunch rates and only 21 states have statistically significantly lower rates. Ignoring sampling error, the NAEP Data Explorer ranks Kentucky in 22nd place below the top poverty state for school lunch rates.

To be sure, Kentucky continues to have significant poverty issues, but when we compare ourselves to other states, it is important to understand that poverty has been growing faster elsewhere and this excuse doesn’t work nearly as well for the Bluegrass State as it did in the past.

I assembled the tables below with the NAEP Data Explorer tools. You can click on this to expand it if necessary, but Kentucky’s relative position over time is quite clear. And, this makes it clear that Kentucky’s small performance improvements on NAEP compared to other states might not be quite so impressive, either.