You’ve heard it before. Kentucky is a high poverty state, so it’s hard for our education system to show improvement.

But, how much higher than average is our poverty rate? It turns out Kentucky’s proportion of low-income students is only 8.6 points higher than the national average. Surprised? In the top poverty state, Mississippi, low-income students run a whopping 20 points above Kentucky’s rate and an astronomical 28.6 points above the national average. And, we think we have problems?

How about another important demographic factor – the number of students with limited English proficiency? Kentucky educators are starting to complain about this issue, too.

You can find data on the state limited English proficiency rates in a series of two-page reports from the US Department of Education. The Kentucky “dashboard,” as US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has nicknamed each of these reports, is formally titled “Mapping Kentucky’s Educational Progress 2008.”

I quickly sorted the data for all 50 states on several different statistics. Some of the results are a real surprise.

Did you know only two states in the nation have a lower proportion of limited English proficiency students than Kentucky? Just two.

I’ll bet folks in California, where the overall percentage of limited English proficient students is a whopping 24.4 percent (and higher still in the lower grades), would love to trade places with us and our miniscule 1.5 percent of students who are limited English proficient.

Still, despite the tremendous differences in the proportions of English learners, some in Kentucky are quite content to ply you with simplistic comparisons of national test scores for Kentucky and California and other states without ever even mentioning the huge disadvantages faced by California. Are such simplistic comparisons fair?

Oh, by the way, here is another surprise – California’s kids are not so “golden.” That state’s proportion of low-income students is 47.6 percent, within two points of Kentucky’s rate.

With virtually equal poverty rates, we don’t even get to use our old standby “we are poor” excuse where California is concerned.

But, don’t count on the purveyors of nonsense state rankings to tell you any of this. The raw scores make Kentucky look better, after all. Let’s not confuse things with a few inconvenient facts.

There is a lot more to be learned from the data in the “dashboards,” but I’ll close this blog entry and let you tell me if there is interest in digging deeper.