Why Kentucky Needs School Choice #3 – High Charter School Enrollment States and Grade 8 Reading

As Kentucky wallows on without a single charter school in the state, other parts of the country have been moving out to improve school choice options for students. The impact associated with charter schools is really showing for Black students in results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Our first two blogs in this series looked at the NAEP Grade 4 Reading and Math scores for Black students in states with high charter school enrollment percentages. Now, lets examine the results for NAEP Grade 8 Reading.

This table was assembled using the NAEP Data Explorer web tool. As with our Grade 4 Tables, the earliest and latest available years of NAEP data have been used. This was done with the Grade 4 data to prevent effects from charter schools from impacting the first year of data. However, NAEP Grade 8 Reading didn’t have its first state-level assessment until 1998, and there might be some charter impacts on the 1998 scores, but this impact was probably small.

All of the listed states (except Kentucky) had the highest reported percentages of their total enrollment – at least 5% – located in charter schools in 2019. The percentages reported here were from the statistics for the NAEP 2019 Grade 8 Reading Assessment.

The 1998 and 2019 NAEP Grade 8 Reading Assessment Scale Scores for Black students in each state are also listed as found in the NAEP Data Explorer.

I then calculate the score differences for each state as shown in the far-right column. The table is rank ordered by those score changes.

I next added Kentucky’s information, positioning the Bluegrass State in the rankings according to its increase in Black Grade 4 NAEP Reading scores between 1998 and 2019.

The Bluegrass State doesn’t rank all the way at the bottom on this comparison, but it isn’t far from it, either. Maybe just as alarming, the state saw a decay in scores for Black students in NAEP Grade 8 Reading from 1998 to 2019. That is certainly not what we need to see, though in fairness the score change was not large enough to be statistically significant. Still, even flat results when as of 2019 only around 14% of Kentucky’s Grade 8 Black students can read at the level NAEP says shows proficiency is very alarming.

So, while vested self-interests in Kentucky try everything they can to kill the important school choice option of charter schools, the reality is that Black students have benefitted in states where such options are available.

Kentucky, it’s time. Our kids of color, in fact all our kids, deserve better.