The ACT is a standardized college admissions exam taken by students across the country. In Kentucky, every student enrolled in public schools takes the ACT during their junior year. ACT scores are a very important component of college applications, and high ACT scores can help students qualify for scholarships. Students’ performance on the ACT is reflective of both their general academic knowledge and their preparedness for the exam.
JCPS students currently sit at the 25th percentile of Kentucky students with a mean composite ACT score of 18.2. The KY public school mean composite score is 19.1.
Overall, racial disparities have persisted since 2012. Both within JCPS and KY public schools, Black and Hispanic students receive lower composite ACT scores than their white and Asian counterparts. These gaps are not narrowing. A gap over over 5 points currently exists between Asian, the top performing group, and Black students, the bottom performing group.
There is almost a 1 point composite ACT score gap between females in JCPS (18.5) and females in KY public schools (19.4). Both males and females in JCPS continue to lag behind their state counterparts. Females in JCPS and in KY public schools receive higher composite ACT scores than their male counterparts.
Within JCPS and across KY public schools, students who do not receive free or reduced lunch receive much higher ACT scores. While the gap between JCPS and KY students not receiving free or reduced lunch is minimal, JCPS students on free and reduced lunch continue to fall behind their state counterparts.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
