Excerpts from Lexington Herald-Leader

All signs pointed to ACT score increase

By Charles Wolfe

ASSOCIATED PRESS

      A mediocre showing on the ACT by last year's Kentucky high school seniors defied developments that should have made scores go up instead of down.

    Fewer Kentucky students took the test last spring...If the pool is smaller, the average score should be higher.

     A greater percentage of students who took the ACT had also taken the more rigorous "core curriculum" that supposedly prepared them for college work. Kentucky colleges and universities require the ACT for admission.  Again, a motivation factor.

    The scores might prove to have some political significance because this was the high school class of 2002.  Its members were in Kindergarten in 1990, when the General Assembly passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act, pumping money into schools and otherwise giving public education a top-to-bottom overhaul.  They were the first students to have gone completely through elementary, middle and high school under the new system.

    Yet, the state's ACT average dipped to 20.0 on a scale of 1 to 36.  It had been 20.1 in each of the three previous years.  Kentucky students were below the national average in every test area: English, math, reading and scientific reasoning.

    Then the writer went on and quoted several officials who expressed disappointment  about the scores. One of those was Gene Wilhoit, the former Director of Arkansas's State  Department of Education.

Kentucky and SAT/ACT Bad News

    The recent ACT scores release is loaded with bad news for Kentucky and its KERA  education reform, but ACT is far from the worst news about Kentucky education.

    New data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that non-college bound students are doing even worse than the college aspirants.   This data, summarized in the attached Word document, shows that Kentucky's youth unemployment rate (for ages 16 to 19) has now risen so high that it even eclipses West Virginia's rate.  For the first time since 1988, none of the seven states surrounding Kentucky have a higher rate.

    This is extraordinarily bad news for KERA.  When the reform began in 1990, one of its greatest promises was that underprivileged children would be specially benefited.   The unemployment data shows that promise has failed, miserably.

    It is also important to note that this recent data covers kids who have been involved with KERA from the beginning of their school careers.  They are the KERA "babies," and their failures can no longer be laid at the feet of former education programs.  In fact, the graph included in the attachment makes it very clear that Kentucky's kids were generally no worse off before KERA began than they are today.

    Coupled with the ACT results, it is becoming clear that something is going seriously wrong with our education program and the statistics being generated by its CATS assessment program.  It simply isn't possible for our schools to really be getting much better when our kids are doing so much worse in the real world.

Please contact me with any questions.

Richard Innes