New Report: Does Kentucky’s ‘Unbridled Learning’ school accountability program leave minorities behind?

(LOUISVILLE, Ky.) — A new Bluegrass Institute report reveals evidence that Kentucky’s school accountability program provides inconsistent and sometimes unreliable assessments of school performance.

The report, “Kentucky’s ‘Unbridled Learning,’ Unrigorous School Accountability for African-American Students?,” examines math performance for whites and African-American students in all of Kentucky’s schools. Some of the findings are surprising:

• Fayette County’s Scapa at Bluegrass’ has an African-American middle school math proficiency rate of 9.1 percent is a rate less than half of the statewide rate for this racial group, and far below the 82.1 percent proficiency rate turned in by the schools’ white students. Yet despite its dismally low African-American math proficiency rate, Scapa at Bluegrass received a superior Unbridled Learning classification of “Distinguished,” ranking the school among the top 10 percent of all schools in Kentucky.

Supposedly, even with overall high scores, Unbridled Learning will tag a school with serious achievement gap problems as a “Focus” school. However, Scapa somehow avoided “Focus” school flagging despite the poor math performance for its African-Americans. This raises concerns that the “Focus” mechanism needs work.

• Latonia Elementary School in Covington was not only identified as a “Proficient” school, a top 30 percent classification, but it also was shown as a “High Progress School” under Unbridled Learning. That is hard to reconcile with the fact that this school’s African-American math proficiency dropped from an already dismal 8.8 percent in 2012 to 0.0 percent in 2013. Still, Latonia just got praise from Unbridled Learning. It didn’t get a “Focus” flag.

• Danville High School got a “Proficient” rating from Unbridled Learning, supposedly placing this school’s performance among the top 30 percent in Kentucky. But Danville’s African-American students’ math proficiency tumbled from 33.3 percent last year to a depressing 0.0 percent proficiency rate in 2013. The school still dodged becoming “Focus” school, raising more concerns about what Unbridled Learning tells us about this school.

• Overall, the report shows three elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools had 0.0 percent math proficiency rates for their African-American students in 2013. Only five, less than half, of those 11 schools got a “Focus” flag.

“After 23 years of KERA reforms, the idea that Kentucky still has schools turning in single digit, indeed sometimes zero, math proficiency rates is incredibly disappointing,” said Richard Innes, staff education analyst at the Bluegrass Institute and author of the new report. “The fact that Unbridled Learning isn’t identifying those problems is highly problematic.”

Innes called on the Kentucky Department of Education to address such a dramatically low performance by making changes to the Unbridled Learning assessment policy before the next round of results are released after the current school-term ends.

For more information, contact Richard Innes at dinnes@freedomkentucky.com or 859-466-8198 or Bluegrass Institute President Jim Waters at jwaters@freedomkentucky.comor 270-320-4376.