The 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for Grade 4 and Grade 8 mathematics and reading have finally been released, and it is time to examine a key problem in Kentucky’s schools – the chronic achievement gaps between the state’s white and black students. I already discussed the Grade 4 NAEP reading gap for Kentucky, so let’s look at the NAEP Grade 4 white minus black proficiency rate gap for math.

Here is how the NAEP Grade 4 Mathematics Assessment proficiency rates have trended for Kentucky’s white and black students since NAEP first reported state results in 1992.As was the case for Grade 4 reading, this isn’t a happy graph. Click the “Read more” link to learn why.

First, a few comments about how the graph is designed.

All the proficiency rate numbers come from the NAEP Data Explorer web tool and are shown in yellow shaded boxes.

The Data Explorer puts a superscript number 1 after the number for each year (1992 and 1996) where the NAEP didn’t offer any testing accommodations. More recent NAEP results include scores for learning-disabled students who did receive NAEP-accepted accommodations.

White proficiency rates are found along the blue line and black scores are found along the red line.

The gaps between the white and black proficiency rates for each year are shown by the numbers in the middle of the doubled-headed arrows for each test year. For example, in 1992 whites scored 13 percent proficient on NAEP Grade 4 reading while only three percent of the black students met this level of performance. That difference was a proficiency rate achievement gap of 10 points.

As a note, the NAEP Data Explorer offers a statistical significance tool, and that tool shows the 1992 gap is statistically significantly lower than the gap in 2017, so the number 10 for the gap in 1992 has an asterisk. Other gaps for 1996, 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2007 are also statistically significantly smaller than the 2017 gap and likewise have an asterisk to show that.

Thus, even the NAEP – despite a considerable amount of statistical error in the scores – is still sensitive enough to positively establish that Kentucky’s Grade 4 NAEP Math achievement gap for whites minus blacks has been growing for years.

Now, let’s explore what else the graph shows. There are some pretty disturbing things in NAEP’s messages about math trends in Kentucky.

To begin, the 2017 proficiency rate achievement gap of 30 percentage points is the largest ever reported.

Furthermore, the NAEP Data Explorer indicates that the black Grade 4 NAEP Math proficiency rate in 2017 is essentially no different from rates all the way back to 2005 once the sampling errors in the scores are considered. In other words, as much as we can determine from the NAEP, the state’s black fourth grade math performance has been flat for more than a decade, which includes the entire time the state has been using Common Core State Standards for math (while the math standards are under review at this time, they have not been officially changed since Common Core came along in 2010).It is clear that after more than a quarter of a century of KERA, Kentucky’s average math proficiency for black students is only an abysmal 15 percent. This makes it hard to deny that our public school system has failed to deliver on a promise to better serve these students’ need to learn to read.

As we discussed before, there are concerns the NAEP’s transition to digital testing in 2017 might have created some problems for comparison to earlier testing, and the impacts might be more severe for less advantaged students. To examine that possibility, I also looked at the KPREP fourth grade math scores for both races for 2015 and 2017. The results are in this table.

Like the NAEP, KPREP reported only an insignificant improvement in white proficiency rates but a notable drop in black Grade 4 math proficiency between 2015 and 2017. The magnitude of the changes for both races were rather similar to what NAEP reported even without considering the NAEP sampling errors. So, at least for this grade, subject and racial groups, I don’t see evidence that NAEP’s digital testing in 2017 resulted in conclusive problems for either white or black students’ results.

In fact, there appears little doubt that there was real performance stagnation in Grade 4 math in Kentucky in recent years for white students and a decline in performance for the state’s black students.

As with the earlier case of NAEP Grade 4 Reading, after more than a quarter of a century of KERA, when KPREP says only about one in four of the state’s black students does math proficiently and the NAEP says that the proficiency rate for blacks is even lower than that – and that the trend for blacks is getting worse – Kentuckians need to ask some very serious questions about the performance of their schools. Clearly, it is time for some changes, and given the current economic climate in Kentucky, it doesn’t look like just throwing still more money at this problem is likely to produce the desired results. Something else, like expanding school choice, certainly seems in order.