More news you didn’t know

I wrote yesterday about the highly disappointing decay for Kentucky’s black student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 8 math exam. I have now taken time to look at what happened between the earliest and latest NAEP state administrations for Grade 4 math, and the picture isn’t much better.

NAEP first conducted a state Grade 4 math assessment in 1992, and Figure 1 summarizes how that turned out.

Figure 1

As with the Grade 8 testing in 1990, participation in the NAEP Grade 4 Math Assessment in 1992 was voluntary for the states, and a number chose not to participate. Among those states plus the District of Columbia schools that did take part, not one state posted black scores statistically significantly higher than Kentucky’s blacks scored. Among the 34 states and the District of Columbia systems that both participated and got scores for black students, a total of 23 other states statistically tied Kentucky, and 12 jurisdictions, 11 states plus the DC schools, scored statistically significantly lower than Kentucky. No state scored statistically significantly higher than Kentucky for black scores in the 1992 NAEP Grade 4 Math Assessment.

Kentucky’s black students also scored above the national average score for blacks in the 1992 NAEP Grade 4 Math Assessment.

Now, look at Figure 2 to see what happened in the latest, 2017 NAEP.

Figure 2

Without question, Kentucky’s black fourth graders saw a big decline in ranking in 2017.Now, blacks in 12 states plus the blacks in DC schools statistically significantly outscore the Bluegrass State’s leading racial minority group. Instead of statistically significantly outscoring 12 other jurisdictions in the NAEP, Kentucky’s blacks only bested those in two other states.

Even blacks in the DC schools, which has a lot of charter schools, by the way, outscored our black students.

Worse, instead of scoring above the National public average, Kentucky’s blacks now score below it by a statistically significant amount.

Using the NAEP Data Explorer to rank the state’s NAEP Grade 4 Math Scale Scores for blacks in 1992, Kentucky shows up in the fifth place from the top among the 35 jurisdictions that participated and got scores for black students. None of the four states ahead of us outscored our blacks by a statistically significant amount.

Using the same web tools with the 2017 NAEP shows Kentucky’s blacks now sit way down in 32nd place among the 43 jurisdictions that got black scores in that year.

As you can see in the figures, Kentucky’s NAEP Grade 4 Math Scale Score for blacks only rose from 200 in 1992 to 218 in 2017, a rise of only 18 points.

In sharp contrast, the national public Grade 4 NAEP Math Scale Score for black students rose from 192 in 1992 to 223 in 2017, an increase of 31 points far larger than Kentucky posted.

No matter how you slice this, the 2017 NAEP shows a major performance problem for Kentucky’s black fourth graders in math since state NAEP testing began for this grade and subject in 1992. Kentucky’s leading racial minority is falling behind its peers in other states, and it is clearly time for the Bluegrass State to get serious about this decay in relative performance.

The maps and other NAEP information were obtained from the NAEP Data Explorer.