This month, the Kentucky Department of Education announced results from last year's standardized testing as a whole.

Kentucky students stayed the same in reading, made modest gains in math and fell short in science compared to last year.

In tonight's Education Matters report, a state lawmaker who's also an elementary school principal gives us his take on what the scores mean.

Pretend that we are kindergartners or first graders.

And I want you to explain to me and my colleagues what the word proficiency actually means.

For me, I would say slightly above average when I say slightly above.

Maybe if you want to look at percentile ranks, maybe in that 70th percentile, 67th percentile.

We don't want to lower any standards.

But on the other hand, we want to make sure that we are given an accurate measure where our students are.

And that's something that our parents can understand and also make those decisions based on that.

I agree completely.

6070 percentile somewhere in that range, which is above average.

Yes, sir.

Sometimes quite a bit above average.

So it's really easy for me to find something negative in all this that I see.

But I want to focus on something positive.

Or you could make it very positive.

In Kentucky, 47% of our students are proficient or distinguished.

So that would mean that 47 almost half of our kids are above average, some of them significantly above average.

Correct.

So I think sometimes we get confused thinking that's a negative thing.

Proficiency is great, but for some kids, proficiency may not be attainable.

You know, it may be a kid that's, you know, that can't speak English, lacked purpose.

And Jackson was talking about that.

But but thank you for clarifying that.

And I want to keep pounding that that, you know, proficiency is something that is above average in everything you look at.

It's above average.

State Representative Kevin Jackson of Bowling Green says ESL students may not be assessed fairly by standardized testing.

English learner students are exempt from testing the first year they're enrolled in Kentucky.

Public schools.