Five Years: Student Group Results Improved Too Slowly

| Post By Susan Perkins Weston |

2012 to 2017 KPREP results showed proficiency progress for most historically underserved student groups, but that progress was quite slow. As shown in the chart below, English learners lost ground, and African American students gained less than five points (looking at a weighted average of all tested subjects).

 
This small progress is better than a pattern of losses, but if improvement continues at this limited pace, reaching full proficiency will take:

• 30 years for students of two or more races
• 36 years for students eligible for free/reduced meals
• 68 years for Hispanic students
• 69 years for students with identified disabilities and IEPs
• 96 years for African American students

As with the slow pace for students overall (discussed in yesterday’s post), these group results reflect progress, but not the kind of progress we need for all students who are now in our schools and who must be equipped to play central roles in building our commonwealth’s future. Changing these patterns will require bolder strategies, stronger efforts, and deeper investments.

Results for each group are shown in more detail below.

Notes for Number Lovers: Percent proficient or distinguished for each subject come from KDE’s school report card portal, except that independent calculations were needed for students who are not English learners, who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals, or who do not have identified disabilities. For the weighted average, elementary and middle school writing and language mechanics were combined into one subject score, with writing getting a 80% weight and language mechanics 20%: the same distribution the Department of Education used in Unbridled Learning calculations. Then those two scores and the other 11 subjects were summed together and divided by 13 to summarize the overall trend.