For those who think schools can’t overcome achievement gaps

I have been looking at the 2016-17 white minus black math proficiency rates in Kentucky’s schools and decided to see if there were any examples of schools where the achievement gap was less than five percentage points while at the same time both white and black students in the school outscored the statewide average proficiency rates for their racial groups.

As things turned out, some schools do indeed meet this rather demanding set of criteria.

I even threw in a comparison of the eligibility rate for free or reduced cost school lunches to see if these schools had abnormally low poverty rates.

The table below shows what I found for elementary, middle and high schools.

Low Gap Schools in 2015-16 KPREP for Math

As you can see, not very many schools met this demanding set of gap requirements, but Kentucky does have schools that produced higher than average math proficiency rates for both whites and blacks and except for the high school in the table, all had above state average school lunch eligibility rates, as well. In fact, the high school’s lunch rate wasn’t much lower than the state average, either.

In a real eye-popper, school lunch eligibility rates at the Glenn O Swing Elementary School and Foust Elementary School are so astronomically high that these schools just about obliterate often heard excuses that schools cannot overcome poverty problems to get better performance for racial minority kids. And, neither school is posting very low gaps just by performing poorly for white students. Both have win-win situations for both races in comparison to average performance in Kentucky.

I hope folks at the Kentucky Board of Education and in the Kentucky Legislature take a look at this and invite the school staff from these schools to come in and tell everyone what they are doing that works so dramatically well. Then we might be able to get more of Kentucky’s schools to start turning in similar performances.

After all, it would be nice to see some real progress in our schools instead of just hearing excuses that the schools can’t be held responsible for low student performance due to poverty, etc.

Technical Notes

The school math proficiency scores and the school lunch rate information came from the “Data Sets” section of the 2015-2016 Kentucky School Report Cards. The scores came from the ASSESSMENT, KPREP, LEVEL Excel spreadsheet and the lunch data came from the LEARNING_ENVIRONMENT, STUDENTS/TEACHERS Excel.

My full Excel Spreadsheet with math gap information for all regular (Class A-1) schools in Kentucky that had math scores reported for both whites and blacks in 2015-16 is available in this Excel spreadsheet: White Minus Black Math Achievement Gaps for All School Levels for Blog.