White minus black achievement gaps continue problematic in new NAEP results – Grade 8 Reading

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 Kentucky’s Grade 4 NAEP white minus black students’ reading gap and mathematics gap in earlier blogs, so let’s look at Kentucky’s NAEP Grade 8 white minus black proficiency rate gap for reading.

Here is how the NAEP Grade 8 Reading Assessment proficiency rates have trended for Kentucky’s white and black students since NAEP first reported state results for this school grade and subject in 1998.As is the case for the Grade 4 testing, this isn’t a happy graph. Click the “Read more” link to learn why.

G8 Reading White Minus Black Gaps on NAEP by Year

First, a few comments about the graph’s design.

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

All of these NAEP proficiency rates include results for learning-disabled students who received NAEP-accepted accommodations.

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

The gap between the white and black proficiency rates for each year is shown by a number in the middle of the doubled-headed arrow for each test year. For example, in 1998 Kentucky’s whites scored 32 percent proficient or above on NAEP Grade 8 reading while only 11 percent of the black students met this level of performance. That difference produces a proficiency rate achievement gap of 21 points.

As a note, the NAEP Data Explorer offers a statistical significance tool. That tool shows all of the earlier gaps are not statistically significantly different from the latest gap for 2017. In other words, despite nearly two decades of expensive education reform efforts, as of 2017 the white minus black eighth grade reading achievement gap in Kentucky has not improved at all, as far as NAEP can determine.

Now, let’s explore what else the graph shows.

To begin, notice that, even if we ignore the statistical sampling errors in the scores, there has been very little improvement in black reading proficiency since 1998. No rational person would cheer about Kentucky’s black eight graders improving their reading proficiency rate from 11 percent to only 16 percent over a period of nearly two decades.

However, the statistical significance tool in the NAEP Data Explorer actually shows that the 16 percent black proficiency rate for NAEP Grade 8 Reading in Kentucky in 2017 is not statistically significantly different from the rate for any previous year all the way back to 1998. In other words, once the NAEP’s sampling errors are considered, Kentucky cannot claim to have made ANY detectable progress in black NAEP Grade 8 Reading for nearly two decades. That’s just not acceptable.

It gets worse. The Kentucky white students’ NAEP Grade 8 proficiency rate in 2017 is not statistically different from the whites’ rates in 1998, 2002, 2003, 2009, 2011, 2013 or 2015 either. So, Kentucky’s 2017 white eighth grade students have not made any statistically significant progress in reading from the much earlier NAEP Grade 8 Reading Assessments conducted around the turn of the century, either.

The dismal reality is that there has been no really notable reading progress in Kentucky for either whites or blacks since NAEP started to test this subject at Grade 8 back in 1998. And, currently scarcely more than one in three of Kentucky’s white eighth grade students reads proficiently and only about an abysmal one out of six black students in the state is on track for reading in the same grade.

Of course, this period of flat performance includes the Common Core period that started in 2010.As we discussed before, some have raised concerns the NAEP’s transition to digital testing in 2017 might have created some problems for comparing the new results to earlier testing, and the impacts might be more severe for less advantaged students. To examine that possibility, I looked at the state’s KPREP eighth grade reading scores for both races for 2015 and 2017. The results are in this table.

KPREP G8 Reading for 2015 and 2017

Keep in mind that, unlike NAEP, Kentucky tests virtually all public school eighth grade students, so there are essentially no sampling errors in these KPREP scores. That doesn’t mean the scores necessarily present an accurate picture of proficiency, however. Without question KPREP scoring is less demanding than the NAEP. For example, in 2017 KPREP declared 61.1 percent of Kentucky’s white eighth grade students were proficient in reading while the NAEP declared only 37 percent met the proficiency muster. For blacks, KPREP declared in 2017 that 31.9 percent read proficiently but NAEP says Kentucky’s black eighth grade reading proficiency is only about half of that at 16 percent. These are notable differences much larger than anything that can be excused by NAEP’s sampling errors. Basically, for the subject of eighth grade reading KPREP shows proficiency rates nearly twice those shown by the NAEP.

The trends in KPREP are interesting to compare to NAEP. Note that between 2015 and 2017, KPREP reported that white reading proficiency in Kentucky increased by 3.9 percentage points to a rate of 61.1 percent. Referring back to the graph of the NAEP Grade 8 Reading scores, the federal test says white proficiency declined by two percentage points between those two years, though that change was not statistically significant. NAEP also says Kentucky’s black reading proficiency in Grade 8 increased by a statistically insignificant point while Kentucky’s own test showed blacks lost a little over a point in proficiency. Still, those pesky sampling errors in the NAEP scores are larger than these small changes, so again the best we can say is that NAEP cannot confirm any progress in Kentucky’s reading proficiency rates for either white or black students, and that the gaps are likewise frozen in time.

Furthermore, whether we look at NAEP or KPREP, with the white minus black Grade 8 reading proficiency rate gap still running well over 20 percentage points after decades of expensive education reform efforts in Kentucky, it is clearly time to try something else to improve black scores. Pouring more money into the existing traditional schools hasn’t worked since it started in 1990 and seems unlikely to suddenly work much better now.