The “rest of the story” on what the teachers union says about charter schools: Part 4
I’ve now discussed three of the many incomplete or incorrect Kentucky teachers’ union claims about charter schools. The first deals with how the union folks only cite certain findings from a major report while the second deals with the union penchant to try to fool you into thinking charter schools are really private schools.
The third post exposes the ridiculous union assertion that Kentucky doesn’t need charter schools because our School Based Decision Making Councils (SBDM) cut through red tape and empower our school administrations.
Today, I’ll touch on another claim – Kentucky’s public schools outperform schools in adjoining states.
Before you buy into that nonsense, take a look at this map, which shows states where white students outscored whites in Kentucky (shaded green), tied Kentucky’s whites (shaded tan), or did worse than Kentucky’s whites (just 3 states, shaded salmon color) in the 2011 NAEP Grade 8 Math Assessment. This map was generated using the Main NAEP Data Explorer tool.
G8 NAEP Math White Map
Oh, Yeah! Kentucky has lots of poor kids. It does indeed. But, that excuse doesn’t work, either. When you run the data from the NAEP for white students who are eligible for free and reduced cost lunches, it turns out the Bluegrass State only outscores TWO other states in the 2011 NAEP Grade 8 Math Assessment.
So, just keep this slide in mind the next time someone starts spouting off about how Kentucky ranks 33rd or 14th or whatever in state rankings. In eighth grade math, our white students are in a tie for something like fourth worst in the nation. And, Kentucky is nearly all white.
If you have the courage, click the “Read more” link to learn still more.
Here are some grim realities:
Kentucky has one of the highest proportions of white students of any state in the nation – 84 percent in 2011 according to the NAEP. In some states like California whites now form a small minority – about 25 percent. In those states you find many more minority students. They score a lot lower than whites. This gives Kentucky a huge advantage when ranking schemes only look at overall student scores because large minority populations drag down the overall average scores in other states. This is why you have to disaggregate the NAEP scores by race before you can begin to learn what is really going on. The racial demographic problem undermines the validity of any simplistic rankings of NAEP scores.
Kentucky also leads the nation for the proportion of students with learning disabilities that it excluded altogether from the 2011 NAEP reading assessments. That is why I won’t show you a map for reading scores. After all, even the Kentucky Commissioner of Education admits our reading scores are in question.
In fact, a recent draft of the Statement of Consideration for Kentucky Administrative Regulation 703 KAR 5:070 admits our NAEP scores cannot be fairly compared to other states due to our very high exclusion rates (final version not yet on line).
Those high exclusion rates are caused by a very bad feature in Kentucky’s public education system: for years we have read the state reading tests to the majority of our learning disabled students!
If these kids are getting any instruction in reading, you can’t tell it from the scores.
Most likely, these kids are being carried all the way through their schooling with everything being read to them. They will come out illiterate, but our reading scores don’t show anything is amiss. You have to look at what is happening with the NAEP to understand the dimensions of the tragedy that is likely occurring in these kids’ lives as no-one makes an effort to teach them to read. NAEP requires kids to really read for its reading assessment. Those who cannot read according to their individual education plans are excluded. This not-teaching-reading situation should not be going on in a state where education is really improving, but it has been standard procedure in Kentucky since KERA was enacted.
There actually is a lot more I could say on this subject, but in the interests of time, I’ll close. If you search the blog using keywords like “NAEP,” “ACT,” and “Exclusion,” you can learn a lot more.