The 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 8 Science Assessment results have been released, and when you look at overall scores across states, Kentucky is ahead of the national average.

Sadly, that isn’t true for by far our largest student group, our white students.

This first map (created with the Main NAEP Data Explorer) shows how our white students, who comprised 84% of the students in Kentucky in 2011, compared to white students in other states around the country. States and jurisdictions shown in green outscored our white kids by a statistically significant amount. States in tan tied us, and only four states shown in salmon color got scores statistically significantly below our whites.

Our educators always want to play the poverty card, so here is another map that shows results only for white students who were eligible for the federal free and reduced cost lunch program.

This time, only two states did statistically significantly worse. We did tie a lot of states, partly because the NAEP isn’t very sensitive to small score differences when student populations are small (which happens in a lot of other states when we look at poor whites).

On the positive side, our black kids did outscore blacks in most other states, and so did our Hispanic kids. But, combined these racial groups only comprise a small minority of the overall student population in the state.

Without question, Kentucky’s largest racial group, our white students, didn’t fare very well in NAEP science in 2011.A few more points:

• Kentucky’s overall science score for all students in the state didn’t make a statistically significant change between 2009 and 2011, either. That’s not progress. Elsewhere, scores rose in 16 states. Also,

• Kentucky’s eight grade whites were only 37 percent proficient in science

• Kentucky’s eight grade blacks were only 12 percent proficient in science

So after more than two decades of KERA, only around one out of three of our kids tests proficient in this critical subject.