National study backs up BIPPS concerns

Not long ago I did a series of blogs about apparent growing inflation in KPREP test results versus scores for the same students from the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Now, a new study from a national group with lots of involvement in the Common Core State Standards surprisingly backs up my concerns.

This group, Achieve, says Kentucky continues to have “moderate” proficiency rate differences between its KPREP test proficiency rates and proficiency rates the state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Reading through Achieve’s short paper indicates that Kentucky’s discrepancies between KPREP and the NAEP are some of the largest of any state in the nation.

For example, Achieve says Kentucky’s NAEP to KPREP proficiency rate gaps for fourth grade reading and eighth grade reading and math all exceed 10 points in 2015 testing.

In fact, as the table below shows (derived from Achieve’s data), for eighth grade math Kentucky’s NAEP versus KPREP proficiency rate gap ranks as one of the worst. Only six states had even higher negative discrepancies out of the 44 states where Achieve had results from both state and NAEP Grade 8 Math testing.

In 2015 Grade 8 Math testing, NAEP showed only 28 percent of our students scored proficient while in the same year the KPREP reported 44 percent of Kentucky’s students were supposedly proficient. Taking the NAEP proficiency rate and subtracting the KPREP rate results in the minus 16-point difference seen in the table.

Note that the table is sorted so states with the most challenging state assessments are shown at the top and those with the least challenging assessments, which clearly include Kentucky, appear at the bottom.

By the way, as my earlier blog on this subject shows, the difference between NAEP and KPREP Grade 8 Math proficiency rates was 15 points in 2013 and increased to the 16-point gap shown above in 2015.

In fourth grade math, another of my earlier blogs shows more dramatic inflation in KPREP, with the discrepancy to NAEP of just 3 points in 2013 growing to a 9-point gap in 2015.

For parents or students, this can make a lot of difference. Based on the Grade 8 enrollment in Kentucky in 2014-15 of 51,159, a difference in proficiency of 16 percentage points works out to 8,185 more students who really were not proficient in math even though both the kids and the parents were told they were. That’s an awful lot of kids and parents who got misled.

Data Sources:

KPREP scores: Kentucky School Report Cards

NAEP Math Scores: Main NAEP Data Explorer