Data Source: Excel Spreadsheet on CCR in the Kentucky School Report Cards web site. Go to the web address and click on “CCR” under the “Delivery Targets” section. Next, open the Excel spreadsheet and scroll all the way down to the state data at the bottom. The second to last line shows the actual statewide CCR “scores” which really are the percentages.

The one-year increase from 2012 to 2013 was only 6.9 points!
I am still researching the real implications of the numbers in the table above. At this point I suspect that the growth in 2012 and 2013 is notably due to changes in the state accountability system that started in the 2011-12 school year, including CCR as an accountability element for the first time and creating a number of new ways students could be counted in the success column.

Here the different ways a student can be listed as college and/or career ready:
The College Ready indicator includes graduates who met the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) system wide Benchmarks for Reading (20), English (18), and Mathematics (19) on any administration of the ACT. Students also are counted college ready if they passed a college placement test (Compass or The Kentucky Online Testing (KYOTE) placement testing system).

The Career Ready indicator includes graduates who met benchmarks for Career Ready Academic (ASVAB or ACT WorkKeys) and Career Ready Technical (Passed the KY Occupational Skills Standards Assessment [KOSSA] or received an Industry-Recognized Career Certificate). Students must pass an element in both areas, academic and technical, to be counted as career ready.

Source: Kentucky School Report Card, State, “Accountability – College and Career Readiness (CCR), from PDF version, Page 36.

The key here is that Kentucky schools probably are still adjusting to the fact that they can qualify students as either college or career ready in more than one way. Some, perhaps a great deal, of the growth in the CCR numbers might be due to more students having the opportunity to take the alternate readiness elements that were not formerly used for accountability and may not have been widely available to students before accountability began. At this point, I cannot say for sure.

What I do know is that the growth in CCR between 2010 and 2013 shown in the table above is not reflected in any notable increase in performance on the ACT college entrance test in Kentucky.

Throughout the period from 2010 to 2013, all Kentucky public school students have taken the ACT. Unfortunately, the public school Benchmark results have not been consistently reported over this four-year period because Kentucky switched from using ACT’s own Benchmark scores to using different Benchmark Scores set by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE).

However, here are the percentages of all Kentucky students, public and private combined, who have achieved the ACT Benchmark Scores by year. Because private school enrollment in Kentucky is fairly low, the numbers largely reflect the trend for the public schools only.

Here is one example of what happens when we disaggregate NAEP performance for eighth grade math

Whites in all the states in green got math scores statistically significantly higher than Kentucky’s whites did in 2013. The seven states in tan tied us and only one state, West Virginia, did statistically significantly worse. That’s all — just one state. Is this a target for Oklahoma?

There are more maps like this for Grade 8 reading and for 4th grade math and reading in the Bluegrass Policy Blog.

Let me discuss another example. This is for Southern States that test 100 percent of their students on the ACT.

(If you cannot enlarge this with your e-mail reader, you can find this table here)

Notice that Louisiana scored 0.1 point lower than Kentucky when you look at overall scores. However, when you break the data out by race, Louisiana outscored Kentucky for every single racial group and clearly has a somewhat stronger education system. However, this truth is buried in the overall average scores.

So, what happened to that overall score?

The answer is something that even has a name, Simpson’s Paradox. It is a hazard in working with averaged data when the underlying student demographics vary dramatically.

Because of the achievement gaps for all the minorities, a state like Kentucky with a very large white population gets an unfair advantage in any simplistic comparison of only overall average scores. This is very important to understand when others point to things like Kentucky’s supposedly high ranking in the latest Quality Counts report from Education Week. Quality Counts is largely a popularity contest for current education fad ideas, but it also includes some NAEP scores. However, with one small exception, Quality Counts only looks at overall average scores. They thus trip all over Simpson’s Paradox.

In closing, the jury is still very much out on Kentucky’s real education performance since CCSS came along, but there already is a disturbing amount of evidence that much of the hoopla about Kentucky’s supposed improvement is not on target.

For sure, almost every claim about Kentucky in the Chamber’s pamphlet is absolutely incorrect. I would love to know who fed them this nonsense.