Kentucky Tonight’s February 3, 2014 show was all about Charter Schools.

The debate was lively, but cordial. Along the way, some pretty “interesting” comments were made, some revealing a remarkable lack of understanding of the real level of educational performance in this state.

One of those “interesting” comments came around six minutes into the show when State Representative Marylou Marzian (D – Louisville) said, “We have excellent public schools in this state and especially in Jefferson County where I’m from.”

To be sure, Jefferson County does have a few outstanding schools like Louisville Male High School, but Male is a highly competitive magnet school.

However, Marzian really was trying to say that there is no need for charter schools because Kentucky’s traditional public schools generally are doing just fine.

Well, that’s just plain wrong. And, the show’s viewers didn’t have to wait long to hear about that.

Sobering facts about the real situation across Kentucky and in Jefferson County were brought out a few minutes later by UK professor Dr. Wayne Lewis.

Lewis pointed out:

“On our KPREP Middle School Reading Assessment here in Kentucky, 2012-2013 numbers, we have about 51 percent of all students that are scoring either at the Proficient or Distinguished level. That’s all students. In Jefferson County, that number is 42 percent of all kids in Jefferson County. At the state level, 54 percent of white students are scoring Proficient or Distinguished, and at the state level in comparison 30 percent of African-American students. If we break that down to Jefferson County, 52 percent of white Jefferson County kids are Proficient or Distinguished in reading, 27 percent of African-American kids in Jefferson County.” Lewis added a bit later,

“To suggest that public schooling in Kentucky is doing everything right, to suggest that we don’t have these very real, very significant problems and that we don’t need to look outside of what we’ve always done for alternatives – it’s just not true.”

And, Lewis is absolutely dead on target when we are talking about Louisville, where nearly half of all the state’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (recently renamed “Priority Schools”) are found.

Lewis could have added a lot more (I do some of that in the Read More section of this post), but his point is well-taken. Kentucky’s traditional public school system continues to have major problems, and those who continue to deny that are not doing our children any favors.

In addition, with Kentucky about to celebrate the 24th anniversary of aggressive education reform since the passage of KERA in 1990, the continued low performance of our traditional school system cries out for better alternatives like public charter schools, which are starting to show really positive impacts in states which have strong charter school laws and charter management programs.

A review of Jefferson County’s overall proficiency rates in middle school KPREP math testing is sobering.

In the district’s middle schools, well under half of the white students, just 43 percent, scored Proficient or higher in math.

The district’s middle school African-American math proficiency was truly dismal in the 2012-2013 school year, ringing in at just 18 percent – less than one out of five of these children of color. It’s hard to imagine how a legislator from Louisville who also serves on both the House Education Committee and the state’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee would not be vividly aware of this.

Jefferson County also came up very short in the improved high school graduation rate report for 2013. This new graduation rate calculation, called the Cohort High School Graduation Rate, is supposed to be more accurate than the former calculation. The Cohort rate data shows only 76.5 percent of all students in Jefferson County high schools graduated in 2013. Across the state, the rate was significantly higher at 86.1 percent.

The Cohort High School Graduation Rate for African-Americans was still lower, 74.2 percent in Jefferson County against a not much better 78.4 percent across the commonwealth (note: since about 1/3 of all African-Americans in Kentucky come from Jefferson County, differences between the district and statewide averages for this racial group tend to be smaller than the white differences).Another real indication of problems is that in Jefferson County only 20.0 percent of the learning disabled students graduated, while across Kentucky a much higher 52.3 percent got a diploma. Those numbers stand out because Marzian and another KY Tonight participant, Jefferson County Teachers Association president Brent McKim, have asserted that charter schools don’t do right by students with learning disabilities. Well, it looks like Jefferson County’s traditional public school system doesn’t, either.

There even is a disparity by sex.

In Jefferson County only 72.7 percent of the males graduated, while 80.8 percent of the females got their diploma. Statewide, males and females performed much better, and much closer to each other, with rates of 84.0 and 88.7 percent, respectively.

So, I think it’s worth repeating Dr. Lewis’ very on-target comment:

“To suggest that public schooling in Kentucky is doing everything right, to suggest that we don’t have these very real, very significant problems and that we don’t need to look outside of what we’ve always done for alternatives – it’s just not true.”

And, as long as some in Kentucky live on in denial, we continue to deny students a chance to make things better.

--Tech Note: Jefferson County and Statewide education data come from the Jefferson County School Report Card for 2012-2013, available here.