Each year, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) touts the ACT scores achieved by Kentucky high school students. What they don't say is that those scores are skewed upward by the inclusion of scores made by private school students in the state.
The KDE, a state government agency, plays no role in the education of nonpublic-school students.
Accountability for our public schools has been a key federal government issue since 2001. The Bluegrass Institute has published a report that points out this reporting discrepancy and asks why Kentucky's public school officials "would rather hide behind the stellar performance of Kentucky’s nonpublic-school students than acknowledge more than a decade of stagnation in the commonwealth’s public schools. "
KDE spokeswoman Lisa Gross addressed the question by questioning the motives of BIPPS researcher Richard Innes.
"We have concerns about Mr. Innes," Gross said. "I can't refute his numbers but his conclusion is that we are intentionally trying to mislead people. If we had time to do that, we would do a better job of it."
Gross said that scores of thousands of nonpublic students are included in the KDE press releases because the ACT reports them to the state that way. ACT confirms this.
But is the incorrect picture of state school achievement simply the cause of laziness or lack of curiosity on the part of school officials? Gross said it isn't.
"We don't have any way of breaking (public versus nonpublic results) out," she said.
Innes scoffed at this claim. He said that the state's Office of Education Accountability, part of the state's Legislative Research Commission and located less than three miles from KDE, has public school ACT results for individual students going back to 1990. Figuring out the difference between public and private results is then just a matter of subtracting the number of public school students and their scores out.
"It's a simple algebra equation," Innes said.
