Monday, March 02, 2009

Education bureaucrats caught taking credit for private school success

Another Kentucky Department Education KERA success claim exposed. For years the Kentucky Department of Education has reported ACT scores that didn't look half bad. But the data they reported didn't separate out private school scores. Some of us have wondered all along whether the scores that the Department was reporting didn't make make public schools look better than they were by incorporating higher nonpublic school scores.

Well, whadya' know.

Dick Innes at the Bluegrass Institute got his hands on the numbers which the Department apparently didn't want to publicly release. Here they are:

Private schools outperform public schools in all years but one, which Innes attributes to an influx into the private schools of less well-prepared public school students.

Read the rest of his analysis here.
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1 comment:

  1. SPWeston3:52 PM

    Martin,

    Richard's graph shows that over 16 years, public school ACT composite rose 0.7 points. The scores held basically steady for from 1993 to 2002, and then made the entire 0.7 point improvement from 2002 to 2008.

    Over the same 16 years, other-than-public-school scores rose 0.5 points, with a decline and then a recovery. 2007 was the first year that sector did better than 1993.

    Statewide, the total improvement was 0.8 points.

    I agree that public schools should not take credit for a 0.8 improvement when they only produced a 0.7 improvement.

    Only, I wish that you'd share your evidence that public school officials have claimed that credit. Richard's recent post doesn't show that, and his earlier post links to one article that doesn't show it and one that is no longer available.

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