Basic skill performance levels of third-, fifth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade students attending schools in the Appalachian School Districts of Kentucky are reported and discussed. School district scores on the reading, language and mathematics subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills clearly show that children in most Appalachian school districts in the state perform significantly worse than children in non-Appalachian districts. Explaining why education is poorer in the mountains than in other parts of the country seems much more problematic now than would have been the case in the 1960s. It has been argued that poor performance in mountain schools stems from genetic deficiencies, cultural deprivation, local poverty conditions, or a combination of the three. Alternate explanatory models emerging in educational theory, i.e., the critical theory and status group competition models, view poor school performance in the Appalachian region as functional to capitalist social structure or as functional to the boundary maintenance and control needs of professional (or political) educators, respectively. These conflict models appear to be at least as plausible as previous culture of poverty explanations. It is hoped that the data presented in this paper will encourage further research on educational performance in Appalachia and open up discussion of who benefits and who loses when mountain children fall behind children in other parts of the country. (Author/RH)