In September, the Prichard Committee called for urgent attention to Kentucky’s failure to deliver for Black students, saying “The learners bring talent, knowledge, culture, experience, energy, and potential to our classrooms, and it must be our shared work to ensure that their many gifts are nurtured and richly developed.”

2020 Kentucky School Report Cards, released on Wednesday, offer important ways to learn about your local schools. Here’s a quick look at some of what’s there. Basic Navigation The report card site starts by asking you to choose a school. When you choose, the first thing you see on each school’s page is an announcement of what isn’t available: the pandemic cancelled statewide assessments and made it impossible to report 2019-20 school ratings.

The Council on Postsecondary Education’s 2020 Stronger By Degrees Progress Report offers progress worth celebrating in overall educational attainment, KCTCS graduation rates, and STEM+H degrees, along with slower progress on bachelor graduation rates and a concerning decline in recent high school graduates enrolling in higher education. Here comes a closer look at those developments.

Kentucky’s K-12 data may show only small STEM gaps by gender, but postsecondary STEM degrees are another matter. At our public universities, female students are a majority of enrolled students and bachelor degree recipients, but a small minority of STEM degree recipients, and the drop-off is much worse for female students seeking associate degrees. Using data from the Council on Postsecondary Education’s data portal, here’s one way to see the problem.