BY DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

 

The Kentucky Department of Education is collecting community input to make its state education accountability system more meaningful and useful for students – with a recent stop in Bowling Green.

More than 60 attended the Jan. 21 town hall, one of nine planned by KDE across the state, that time held at the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative. Many were school or district leaders; teachers, local board of education members, parents and other community members attended, as well.

Public schools must address categories of federal accountability that for Kentucky include math and reading; English language learning; culture and safety; transition readiness; and graduation rates. Part of the purpose is for states to identify schools that qualify for several forms of support.

States use annual testing via a uniform summative assessment to meet these requirements.

The ongoing initiative, called “Kentucky United We Learn — Framework 2.0,” intends to streamline accountability to continue meeting federal requirements. While doing so, KDE plans to enhance relevance by identifying areas in local districts that their communities feel are important to focus on and address local and global demands. KDE considers another iteration, a “Framework 3.0,” likely, Kentucky Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher said.

“The goal of the accountability system was to have an accountability system that is meaningful and useful to all Kentucky learners,” Fletcher said. “And in order to have a meaningful and useful accountability system, it needs to have some individuality for the districts.”

Fletcher said that this work began in 2021. An April 2024 timeline for it was presented at the convening of the Kentucky United We Learn Council, a future-focused stakeholder-formed body that, according to KDE, “recommends new policy and practice or recommends changes to existing policy and practice.”

The council and educational stakeholders statewide have “clearly called for reimagining assessment and accountability to create systems that are more meaningful and useful for all learners, educators and communities,” according to one of the main 2025 KDE Framework 2.0 documents.

KDE intends to have the General Assembly approve the new framework in the latter’s 2026 legislative session. The town halls, through mid-February, are part of that timeline; KDE will eventually recommend the model to the Kentucky Board of Education, engage the General Assembly in spring and advocate for the change beginning summer 2025 to get it enacted by summer 2026, according to the KDE website.

Following the enactment of this legislation, there’ll be a pathway to ensure districts develop a local accountability model to be a part of the process, Fletcher said.

Several key changes

School districts will have choice, time and support in designing their respective systems, and they must agree to a set of shared assurances, according to the Framework 2.0 document.

For the latter, they must “engage in an inclusive community engagement process to capture local priorities that inform system design and continuous improvement strategies,” according to the document. Another part of the agreement is “build(ing) a public reporting data display that provides a rich picture of the local system and shows strength and growth areas in lieu of (the current) color rating system.” And they must also “report all student-level outcome data disaggregated by student group whenever sample sizes allow.”

KDE also plans to change how scores are compared one year after another. KDE assessment and accountability testing compares scores for a subject among one grade of students at a given school with the same grade of students the following year – despite the original class progressing to the next grade after one year. In contrast, the new framework pushes for scores to follow a class from one grade to the next – indicating “growth” instead of “change.” This aligns with a bill being sponsored by Rep. Kevin Jackson, R. Bowling Green, to enable just that.

And notably, there’s a strong local focus.

The framework entails identifying the areas within a local community that community members feel are important, while having collaboration among districts in the Commonwealth to say “this is what matters within our community, these are the things that we want to be held accountable to, this is how we want to grow,” Fletcher said.

For example, Fletcher said, a district may especially want to focus on its Portrait of a Learner, which KDE defines as an “agreed-upon set of school- or district-level aspirations for what every learner will know and be able to do when they leave school.” In that case, Fletcher said, the question would be how a district could build an accountability system based on competencies within that profile of learning.

“So, again, really supporting that local accountability model, but also too, making sure we meet the federal requirements,” Fletcher said.

A key focus of the day was what’s referred to as vibrant learning, where students can demonstrate their knowledge through a variety of methods – often, tackling real-world problems. For example, Fletcher referenced a high school that he said had an engineering class design a tiny house, a carpenter’s class build it, an electricity class wire it, an art class paint it and a budget class deal with the budget.

“There’s a local accountability piece where districts are trying to identify what’s important to their community,” Fletcher said. “For example, you may have one community that has a focus on industry certifications – that may be tremendously important to them – whereas another district, it may be more about ACT scores, or it could be a combination of both, or it could be their Portrait of a Learner … We’re just trying to leave that open.”

He stressed the importance of collaboration for this framework both within a community and among districts.

“If you have two school districts that maybe are similar geographically, may have a similar type of economic resources, what are some things that maybe they could work together (on) to develop that local accountability model too?” he said.

The framework would also incorporate new interim assessments in fall and winter.

“What we’re trying to provide with the interim assessments are assessments that are aligned to that (mandated federal) summative (assessment),” Fletcher said. “So, with that interim assessment, teachers can get real-time data that they can impact instruction tomorrow.”

KDE would put a request for proposals out to different companies to bid on to create those assessments, and those companies would bid for the contract. Districts that have their own interim assessments via systems such as iReady can use their own, or they could alternatively use the new state interim assessment, Fletcher said.