(FRANKFORT, Ky.) Kentucky’s public school system has a long-standing reading crisis. About 200,000 of the state’s K-12 students read at levels even lower than what the National Assessment of Educational Progress deems only partial mastery of reading. Basically, these students are very poor readers, at best. 

The problem has persisted for decades with many educators and school leaders often blaming the reading difficulties on high student poverty levels in many of the commonwealth’s schools.

A new report, however, from Bluegrass Institute researcher Richard Innes, “Reading proficiency rates rising in some Appalachian schools,” shows that reading proficiency can be achieved despite poverty.

Using a powerful tool that compares school performance for third grade reading proficiency against the percentage of students in the school that qualify for the federal school lunch program – a proxy for poverty – the institute’s report identifies some schools that produce impressively high reading performance despite high poverty. 

A number of these high performing schools are found in the Clay County school system, where Goose Rock Elementary School, for one example, posted a third-grade reading proficiency rate of 89.7% in the last pre-COVID KPREP testing in 2019 despite having a school lunch eligibility rate of 85%. 

Other high poverty elementary schools in Clay County also performed remarkably well in 2019. Three more schools, Hacker Elementary, Paces Creek Elementary and Burning Springs Elementary all produced 80% or higher third grade KPREP reading proficiency rates in 2019, far above the statewide average of only 52.7%. All of these Clay County schools did this despite having school lunch eligibility rates at least 10 points higher than the statewide average. 

The reason behind Clay County’s performance is due, in large part, to targeted support they received from the Elgin Foundation to improve reading instruction. Elgin equips schools to take advantage of programs aligned to what is now called the “Science of Reading” both for initial instruction and for remediation, when needed. 

The institute’s new report shows that in the early days of the Elgin program, reading performance was notably lower in Clay County. Back in 2012, Goose Rock’s third grade proficiency rate for KPREP reading was only 23.1%, compared to the school’s 2019 rate of 89.7%. 

Report author Innes said, “The Science of Reading works. It works for high poverty schools. Clay County’s schools show that.”

Innes continued, “The institute’s new report has great news for Kentucky. Poverty doesn’t preclude the ability to learn to read. The key is that teachers need to learn how to teach reading effectively.” 

The message is clear: once teacher retraining happens, even schools in deep Appalachia show that Kentucky’s kids don’t have to be left behind in reading. It’s now up to other schools around the state to learn this lesson from Clay County.

Contact Bluegrass Institute president and CEO Jim Waters at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com or @bipps on Twitter.