Kentucky’s white students losing ground in 2017 NAEP – Grade 8 Reading

Without question, one of the more unpleasant surprises for me as I uncase the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results is the disturbing picture for the state’s largest racial group, its white students.

Let’s look at Eighth grade NAEP reading in the Bluegrass State. In 2015 as this graphic assembled with the NAEP Data Explorer web tool shows, Kentucky’s white Grade 8 students were outscored by whites in 17 states by a statistically significant amount. Our whites only statistically significantly outscored whites in 4 states.

Grade 8 Reading Whites 2015

The state was statistically tied with the national public school average reading performance, as well.

Without question, Kentucky’s NAEP Grade 8 Reading performance for white students notably decayed in 2017, as the next graphic shows.

Grade 8 Reading Whites Map for All States

Instead of only being outscored by 17 states, in the new NAEP Grade 8 reading results Kentucky’s white students were statistically significantly outscored by a whopping 35 states/jurisdictions and Kentucky only statistically significantly outscored whites in just one state/jurisdiction.

Kentucky also scored statistically significantly below the white public school national average for Grade 8 reading in 2017, yet another decay from the 2015 situation.

By any measure, this isn’t progress.