The ‘GAP-ing’ hole in ‘Unbridled Learning’

Without question, a gaping hole exists in Kentucky’s new school accountability program, known as “Unbridled Learning.” That deficiency – failure of Unbridled Learning to properly identify and account for sometimes enormous achievement gaps between white and black students in the state’s new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test results.

Bluegrass Institute president Jim Waters touched on this issue in his Bluegrass Beacon column about “New Test, Old Doubts” last week. Now, I’ll start adding details.

This table provides a snapshot of the problem based on our examination of elementary school performance in Louisville.

The schools listed have the largest black versus white math proficiency rate gaps in the Jefferson County Public School District in the new Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress (K-PREP) test results. Each listed school posted a gap exceeding an incredible 40 percentage points.

Black and White P Rates and Gaps in top Gap Schools in Louisville Table

The table first shows the black and white proficiency rates (the total of the percentage of students rated either “Proficient” or “Distinguished” in K-PREP math testing).

The next column lists the gap in the proficiency rates in each school, which is simply calculated by subtracting the black rate from the white rate (there is an insignificant 0.1 point error in Hite’s gap due to rounding of scores)

.Finally, the last two columns show each school’s 2012 accountability classification from Unbridled Learning and what is called the school’s “Reward/Recognition” category.

Now, here is our main problem with what you see in the table.

Very simply, Unbridled Learning totally misses huge achievement gaps between whites and blacks in five of the schools listed. And, don’t forget, those schools have the largest gaps in the entire Jefferson County Public School District.

In fact, given the definitions in Unbridled Learning, the public is being told that the top five schools in the table are doing a superior job, ranking better than at least 70 percent of all schools in Kentucky (in the case of Dunn and Hite) and ranking in the top 10 percent of all schools for Norton, Brandeis and St. Matthews.

Actually, Unbridled Learning tells Kentucky that Norton and Brandeis rank in the top five percent of all schools in Kentucky!

Even worse, none of the schools in the table, except for King Elementary, face any sanctions and – far more importantly – will receive any help to improve the performance of their black students.

It’s as if those black kids really don’t count.

I know some school apologists will point out that Norton, Brandeis and St. Matthews have black math proficiency rates above the Jefferson County district-wide average (though none of the rates are worth bragging about). However, these schools have much more impressive performance when we compare their white scores to the district-wide results for whites. The question simply cannot be ducked, “Why are blacks in these three schools left so far behind?”

Next, consider Dunn and Hite. Their black math proficiency rates are WELL BELOW Jefferson County’s district-wide averages, but they escape all sanctions, too. That’s just not right.

In fact, thanks to their “Proficient” rating, Unbridled Learning tries to tell us that both Dunn and Hite perform better than 70 percent of the rest of Kentucky’s schools.

I’m sorry, but these Unbridled Learning results just won’t fly. And, it won’t due to delay another year before we address this obvious problem.

Technical Notes:

We calculated the black and white proficiency rates by taking the simple average of the separately reported proficiency rates for grades 3, 4 and 5 in each school. Those by-grade proficiency rates are reported in a simply enormous Excel Spreadsheet from the Kentucky Department of Education (over 255,000 line items), which is available by clicking here and then clicking on the “Grade” link under the “Assessment” and “KPREP” section of the web page (don’t even bother unless you have Excel 2007 or later).

King Elementary’s white scores (highlighted in yellow in the table) are missing for grades 3 and 4, probably due to very small white enrollment, so we took the school’s fifth grade average math proficiency rate as representative. If the Kentucky Department of Education decides to report proficiency rates for an entire school instead of just one grade (information we used to get under No Child Left Behind reporting), we will be happy to update the data for King accordingly.

The Unbridled Learning classification and reward status for each school is found by clicking here and then clicking on the “Accountability Profile” link under the “Accountability” section of the web page.