2022 Kentucky school testing results show it

October was the school testing data dump month for Kentucky.

• First, the ACT, Inc. released its reports on their well-known college entrance test.

• Then, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) released its state test results and additional information on how Kentucky’s public school 11th graders, who all take the ACT, did in 2022.

• Finally, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released results from its 2022 testing of fourth and eighth graders in reading and math.

The overall results weren’t a surprise: they were consistent, and they were down notably.

The ACT, Inc.’s reports, which include results for both public and private high school graduates averaged together, show Kentucky’s ACT Composite Score average dropped from 19.8 in 2019 to 18.6 in 2022 – a substantial decay on this 36-point test.

Drops on Kentucky’s state-run 11th grade ACT testing weren’t much more encouraging. In 2019, the overall 11th grade Kentucky Composite Score average was 19.0. In the new 2022 results, Kentucky’s 11th grade Composite Score dropped to 18.3, another notable loss.

Finally, the 2022 NAEP rang in with more unwelcome news. In fourth-grade reading, for example, the NAEP showed Kentucky’s proficiency rate declining from 35% to 31% between 2019 and 2022. For eighth-grade math, Kentucky’s NAEP proficiency rate slid more severely back from 29% to just 21%.

There are, however, some silver linings.

A few Kentucky school districts broke the curve and actually posted unexpected increases in their Kentucky Grade 11 ACT Composite Scores between 2019 and 2022. Top performers in this group, listed in Table 1, both increased their ACT Composite Score by at least 0.4 point between 2019 and 2022 and also scored above the 2022 statewide average. 

Table 1

What’s behind this unexpected performance?

It wasn’t a poverty thing – the education establishment’s excuse du jour for falling test scores and widening achievement gaps. Poverty differences didn’t explain anything in Table 1. As you can see, six of the 10 districts had above-state-average eligibility rates for the school lunch program while four districts had lower-than-state-average eligibility.

So, what was going on?

I was able to contact staff members at eight of the 10 top performing districts in Table 1.

While several factors were mentioned by different districts as contributors to these surprising results, one common theme emerged across all the districts: each pushed getting their students back to in-person classes as quickly as they could.

So, at least as far as high school juniors were concerned, getting back to in-person school as quickly as possible was a common factor in the surprising improvement in these districts’ ACT scores.

But, what about younger students?

That piece of the puzzle came into better focus on November 15, 2022 when I wrote “More on how teaching reading properly works for students.” This blog discusses third grade reading scores on the Kentucky Summative Assessments in 2022. Using the Education Consumers Foundation’s very neat reading performance graphing tool, I produced several graphs like the example in Figure 1. This particular graph compares poverty versus reading proficiency in Laurel County Elementary Schools (Labels shaded in green) to some high wealth elementary schools in Northern Kentucky and Jefferson County.

Figure 1

As we’ve previously noted and the above graph shows, third grade reading performance in low-wealth Laurel County truly shined in 2022 even when compared to wealthier school systems.

Laurel County’s elementary schools in 2022 beat the odds from both COVID and poverty, posting remarkably high third grade reading proficiency rates well above the Kentucky average.

Table 2

As shown in Table 2, each Laurel County elementary school scored well above the state average third grade reading proficiency rate in 2022. In fact, all but one Laurel County elementary school exceeded the statewide average by at least 20 percentage points.

Remarkably, Keavy Elementary more than doubled the statewide average for third grade reading proficiency despite its 71.9% school lunch eligibility rate.

 My conversations with Laurel County officials, including Superintendent Doug Bennett, confirmed that some of the district’s strong reading performance is fruit borne from using a science-based approach to reinstruct teachers about how to best teach reading. The district uses the same program as nearby Clay County, which has also produced remarkable improvements in reading, as we analyzed in a Policy Point earlier this year.

In addition, however, Laurel County, just like the top-10 districts on the ACT, pushed getting kids back into in-person school.

By the way, pushing to get kids back into classrooms seats sooner rather than later helped Laurel County’s older students, too. Laurel County posted an increase in its 11th grade ACT Composite Score of 0.3 point between 2019 and 2022, just missing getting into the top 10 districts list for ACT score improvement noted in Table 1.

Summing up

In all these school systems – despite COVID-based tendencies toward panic and the resulting serious learning lags found in most Kentucky school districts – students’ needs trumped adult “needs.” Conscientious, student-centered staff understood that distance learning – especially after kids had returned to classrooms – just wasn’t working and hastened to remedy the situation. Kids showed up, teachers showed up (hat tip to them), and it worked.

Tech Notes:

ACT Scores came from 2019 and 2022 School Report Card datasets for academic performance.

• 2019 Data Here

• 2022 Data Here

The NAEP Data Explorer is online here.

Statewide school lunch and third grade reading data came from the Kentucky School Report Cards.