Kentucky’s commissioner of education is interested in hearing what the public thinks about his department’s newly proposed system for how schools and districts will be held accountable for their performance.

Stephen Pruitt will host the seventh of 10 planned forums in Glasgow High School’s auditorium from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Thursday.

Larry Hammond, Glasgow Independent Schools’ interim superintendent, said he expects a strong local interest.

“I think any time the commissioner comes to town, it’s a positive,” he said. “It should generate some enthusiasm.”

So far, the Kentucky Department of Education’s proposed accountability system has been warmly received, based on the feedback Hammond said he’s heard.

“One of the major parts that was positively received was the effort to give state and local control,” he said.

According to KDE’s website, the proposed system will consider several factors to determine how well schools are doing.

“Under the as yet unnamed system, schools would be evaluated on how well they perform on five indicators: Proficiency, Achievement Gap Closure, Student Growth (elementary and middle school only), Transition Readiness and Opportunity and Access,” according to the website.

KDE spokeswoman Nancy Rodriguez said Kentucky, like all other states, is formulating new accountability standards as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which, in 2015, replaced No Child Left Behind.

“When that passed, it called for all states to come up with new accountability standards to reflect what the law said,” she said.

Since then, KDE has been working to create the system based on the new federal law and a previous round of public opinion forums Pruitt held, Rodriguez said.

Now that a provisional plan is complete, the department needs public opinion on it so it can be tweaked if necessary, she said.

“So now he’s coming back, saying, ‘Here’s the proposal,’ ” she said.

Michelle Tinsley, Glasgow Independent’s district assessment coordinator, said the proposed system is an improvement over the model schools used in the days of NCLB, which based assessment and accountability on performance in “core areas” such as math, science and reading, but did not consider factors like student growth and how resources are distributed throughout a district.

In the past, this often made identifying areas where schools needed to improve difficult, she said.

Under NCLB, a school could potentially be deemed successful based on how well students did in subjects like math and science while failing to meet the needs of certain groups of students, Tinsley said.

“You receive(d) a reading score but it (didn’t) tell you what areas kids are having trouble with,” she said.

The accountability system KDE has proposed is a multi-dimensional standard of judgement that better clarifies where improvement is needed, Tinsley said.

At the same time, she said she hopes the new, more multifaceted and complicated system can be streamlined to make it easier for the general public to understand.

“I think it has been a little cumbersome so I’m hoping they can simplify it,” she said.

Rodriguez said feedback from the open houses, which are spread throughout the state to allow for a wide set of viewpoints, will be used to make changes to the system as it’s being finalized.

According to the KDE’s website, a submission to the U.S. Department of Education is due in September.