We’ve been covering multiple areas of interest for Black History Month, but one area of fairly recent education history in Kentucky is impossible to ignore – the continuing problem of white minus Black achievement gaps in the state’s public schools. We’ve already looked at data for the fourth grade, so now let’s see how middle school Black students in Kentucky have performed since KERA came along in 1990.

Kentucky’s white minus Black achievement gap picture for Grade 8 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading in 2022 is yet another disappointment of non-improvement.

The 2022 NAEP Grade 8 Reading white minus Black proficiency rate gap of 20 points isn’t statistically significantly different from any earlier year, not even 1998, the first year state-level Grade 8 Reading was assessed by the NAEP.

That’s an especially disappointing history after three decades of education reform in the Bluegrass State had promised to fix such issues.

Never the less, after allowing for statistical sampling errors in NAEP’s scores, Black scores have been essentially flat since in 1998.

White scores recently even went backwards by a statistically significant amount and most recently are actually tied with where they were in 1998, as well. But, even with the dip in white scores, the gaps essentially remain unchanged.

So, that’s another 3-decades long Kentucky education history lesson. It isn’t a pretty story for Kentucky’s Black students. Perhaps if Kentucky would enact the sorts of school choice options that are producing notable reduction of achievement gaps elsewhere, this could change.

The NAEP scores come from the NAEP Data Explorer.