Eyes rolled as soon as he said it.

Dejuan Wright, a Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) teacher, made a blanket statement in his testimony before the Kentucky House Education Committee on February 14, 2012. Said Wright:

“One record I’d like to set straight today is that JCPS scored four points higher in both reading and math compared to state average. Which, things like that we often don’t have an opportunity to hear.”

No other teacher at the table disputed this assertion, and neither did any legislator. Still, readily available testing scores show –Mr. Wright is wrong. Seriously wrong.

The Kentucky Department of Education’s reporting on 2011 testing includes a “Gap to Goal” Excel spreadsheet for “All Districts” (available here).

This readily available public data made it easy to generate Table 1. Table 1 compares a variety of different student groups’ proficiency rates in reading and math in Jefferson County (highlighted in yellow) to similar statewide figures (highlighted in light blue).

Table 1

I calculated the proficiency rate differences between Jefferson County and the Kentucky statewide average for each student group in the pink area of Table 1.In every single case, whether we talk about overall scores for all students or scores for any one of the student subgroups, Jefferson County Public Schools UNDERPERFORMED statewide averages in 2011 for both reading and mathematics.

So, Mr. Wright’s blanket assertion is absolutely wrong.

However, I dug deeper. Surly, I thought, Wright might have been confused by some data that would support his 4-point claims.

So, I also downloaded the Interim Performance Report for Jefferson County and a corresponding report with the statewide summary (available here using pull down menus). I compared differences in proficiency rates for reading and math, grade by grade, for Jefferson County and the statewide average.

Table 2 shows what I found.

Table 2

In every case, Jefferson County’s elementary (grades three to five) and middle school (grades six to eight) students seriously underperform the state averages.

Things are different, however, for the high school data. Jefferson County exceeds the statewide overall average proficiency rate slightly in 10th grade reading by 1.47 of a percentage point. Jefferson County also beats the statewide proficiency rate for 11th grade math by a somewhat larger margin of 5.79 percentage points.

Average those two numbers (1.47 and 5.79) together, and the combined average exceeds the state’s combined math and reading proficiency rate average by 3.63 percentage points, which would round to Mr. Wright’s 4-point assertion.

Of course, even the data in Table 2 does not support Wright’s bold generalization that JCPS outperforms the state in both reading and math by 4 points, but the data at least provide a hint about where he might have gotten confused by the numbers.

Still, can it be that Jefferson County’s high schools are somehow performing a miracle, turning around notably lagging performance in the district’s elementary and middle schools?

Hold on!

I think there is an explanation for Jefferson County’s apparently better high school performance, and it is no success story!

The latest available high school graduation rate data (for 2010) show Jefferson County had a notably lower high school graduation rate than the statewide average (80.50 percent versus only 74.56 percent). Also, many of the extra dropouts in Jefferson County come from the district’s lowest performing high schools.

The reason this could impact high school test scores in favor of Jefferson County is that many of those extra Jefferson County dropouts leave before testing in reading occurs at the end of the tenth grade. Relative to the rest of the state, still more Jefferson County kids probably drop out before math is assessed at the end of the 11th grade. If you drop out relatively higher percentages of low-performing students, the overall scores are going to be inflated compared to the statewide averages.

Not many kids drop out of high school if they are doing well. The kids who leave have a host of problems, and those generally get reflected in low test results. The extra dropouts from Jefferson County would drag down the district’s math and reading scores relative to the statewide results if those leavers had remained in school.

Possible evidence of the impact of extra dropouts actually seems apparent in the 10th and 11th grade data.

Notice in Table 2 that in comparison to statewide results, reading tends to be a little stronger than math in Jefferson County’s middle schools. The reverse is true in the high school data, where the 10th grade reading performance isn’t as strong as the 11th grade math results. One possible explanation: Even more kids have left Jefferson County schools before the 11th grade testing is conducted, which would boost the math scores even more than the reading scores.

So, it seems very likely that even the high school testing performance in Table 2 does not tell the whole story.

Also, even the most optimistic data available does not support a blanket assertion that Jefferson County outperforms the rest of the state in both reading and math. That is simply incorrect.

Why do teachers in Jefferson County have such an inflated sense of their school district’s real performance? How does that help improve the schools there?

Given that Jefferson County’s teachers clearly overestimate their actual performance, and given that teachers in almost all the district’s schools have tight control over those schools through the School Based Decision Making Councils, how can the public have any hope that the traditional schools in Jefferson County are likely to undertake badly needed and meaningful improvements?

Charter schools may not be the entire answer to the under-performing schools problem in Kentucky. However, success stories from charter schools in large cities like New York City, Boston and elsewhere make me think that if Jefferson County had some well-designed, well-run charter schools, those Louisville charters might finally wake up the district’s traditional public school teachers’ corps.

Right now, Jefferson County’s teachers seem to be sadly slumbering on, immersed in a mixture of denial and inflated misconceptions that ultimately seem awfully student-hostile.