What has Kentucky to show for its last decade of ramping up school spending and fiddling with its school systems? For one thing, an approach that fails to prepare black students for college.

The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions says "only 3 percent – just three out of 100 – of black students who graduated from Kentucky’s schools in 2008 and who took the college entrance test were fully prepared for college."

That's a decline of a full percentage point from the previous year.

So how does the state's education establishment respond? By fiddling with statistics to improve the picture.

Read more in this report (PDF).