New ACT results: How did Kentucky’s public and non-public school students perform?

The new ACT scores are out, and that allowed me to update my long-running analysis of public school and non-public school student performance on this assessment. Here is how that looks.

This first table shows the performance over time for Kentucky’s public school students who took the ACT under the standard testing time conditions.

Kentucky Public High ACT Trends to 2013

You will note that the scores dropped sharply in 2009, the first year that all Kentucky graduating seniors took the ACT. Prior to that year, only around three out of four graduates took this college entrance test.

Since 2009, the public schools have made fairly constant progress after a slight stumble in 2010. However, the rate of progress is still slow.

Now, here is how Kentucky’s private and home schools performed.

Kentucky Other Than Public High ACT Trends to 2013

Note the trends in scores are different. Several years after the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, the other than public school students’ ACT scores in Kentucky started to drop, a process that continued until 1998. Since then, the other than public school ACT scores in Kentucky started a remarkable recovery. And, in 2013 these schools of choice hit their highest performance ever with an ACT Composite Score of 23.9, well above the statewide public school average.

Clearly, Kentucky’s few schools of choice (private schools and home schools) are doing a remarkable job. We just need more schools like them.

Technical Notes: A discussion of how I compute these scores is found in this freedomkentucky.org Wiki post.

Unfortunately, we are experiencing technical difficulties with the Wiki and I cannot update that article right now. However, the process used is the same, I just used current data.

I also need to mention that I was careful to only use scores for students who took the test within the standard ACT time limits. There were multiple sources for this information over the years, most of which are identified in the Wiki article.

For the 2013 data, I used public school scores from the Kentucky Department of Education’s News Release 13-082.

The All Graduates Standard Time scores I used came from the Kentucky version of the ACT Profile Report – State, Graduating Class of 2013, Table 1.7, from the ACT, Inc.