Science achievement and gaps

Good news:

• As I blogged earlier, Kentucky fourth-graders overall outscore their peers nationwide by a significant margin in science.
• The graph above also shows a statistically significant lead for black students in the free and reduced lunch program and for white students both in and out of the program.

Not good news:

• The gap between our black students in the lunch program and our white students not in the program is a huge 31 points.
• The gap between our white students in the lunch program and our black students not in the program is 11 points.

Poor white students outscore non-poor black students in Kentucky's strongest NAEP subject. That's fast, painful evidence of an ongoing truth: we still let race divide us and we still let race undermine our children's shared future.