With feedback gathered from townhall meetings at the start of 2025, Kentucky’s education leaders are revising the state’s assessment and accountability framework to give districts more choice in how they assess student mastery of content and skills and to give their communities full rein to design local school accountability systems tied to their locally developed portraits of a learner.

These portraits reflect broad competencies that communities expect their K-12 students to achieve before they graduate high school. The competencies extend beyond math and reading to encompass skills such as communication and collaboration. Such locally developed portraits have been adopted in more than 140 of the state’s 171 districts. “The fact that so many districts have stepped up to do the portrait of a learner work is a real solid piece of data that says folks see the value,” said Lu Young, vice chair of the Kentucky Board of Education.

The Kentucky state board adopted a statewide Portrait of a Learner in October 2022. It defines core competencies—such as communication, collaboration, and adaptability, as well as mastery of challenging academic content—that Kentucky graduates should attain in order to thrive after high school. Locally developed portraits by pioneering districts inspired the statewide portrait, but the state portrait in turn encouraged more districts to develop their own local portraits.

While the revised assessment and accountability framework would give districts more freedom to innovate in how they measure learning, the state is requiring that each district show how it is providing every student with vibrant learning experiences—those marked by relevance, joy, and authenticity; shaped by student agency, cultures, gifts, and interests; and culminating in student demonstration of their knowledge and skills.

“The goal is to change the student experience,” said Robbie Fletcher, Kentucky’s commissioner of education, during a March state board meeting. “If we come back in five years and the students are doing the same things in the classrooms … if we can’t expand that so that all students have that same type of opportunity and access to these types of experiences regardless of zip code, then this work is not what it is intended to be.”

State leaders see changing the assessment and accountability system as integral to changing classroom learning. “Unless we change the assessment and accountability system, instruction has no chance of changing into a vibrant, competency-based system,” Young said. “If the assessment and accountability system is able to capture vibrant learning then, of course, schools and teachers are going to operationalize around vibrant learning…. Until the assessment and accountability system changes, teachers don’t feel like they have the permission of the state to teach the way they want to teach, quite frankly, to meet students where they are, to capitalize on teachable moments, to build in a lot of inquiry- and project-based experiences into the classroom.”

Math Badging

In 2022, Kentucky launched a math badging pilot program in six schools with the Kentucky Center for Mathematics and the XQ Institute. The initiative was part of state leaders’ bid to move “from a system based on seat time for earning credit to one that requires students to demonstrate mastery,” said David Cook, former director of innovative learning at the Kentucky Department of Education. “While our Portrait of a Learner work spans K-12, there is an obvious focus on high school transformation in our state’s model competencies and through our work on initiatives like the XQ Math Badging pilot because high school is the culmination of the vision contained in the portrait.”

The program lets high schoolers earn badges to mark their math achievement. Badges are bigger than a standard but smaller than a traditional course; each badge represents a discrete set of concepts and practices, such as linear equations. During the 2022–23 school year, local and state leaders mapped six badges that constitute a traditional Algebra 1 course aligned to state standards. They also aligned the curriculum to the badges to prepare for classroom implementation. The following year, students in select Algebra 1 classrooms started earning up to all six math badges by demonstrating mastery through assessments that include a portfolio of tasks that require students to solve real-world problems.

As one student shared, “[T]his curriculum has helped boost my confidence. Because our class has learned math in so many different ways, I now feel more confident about future work.”

“The math badging project is a core part of our efforts to bring [Kentucky’s] vision to life,” said Sarah Snipes, the department’s current director of innovative learning. “By increasing rigor and access to real-world problem solving in our Algebra 1 classrooms, we are creating stronger alignment to the math needed for secondary, postsecondary, and career success.”

Learning from Districts

Capping more than a decade of innovation by districts, state leaders in 2022 released a report, United We Learn, that emphasized “a more vibrant experience for every student, encouraging innovation in our schools—especially when it comes to assessment; and creating a bold new future for Kentucky’s schools through collaboration with our communities.”[1]

Kentucky’s current efforts are rooted in the legislature’s establishment of Districts of Innovation in 2012. The program allowed the state board to waive certain regulations and statutory provisions so approved districts could design learning experiences to better motivate students, close achievement gaps, and increase postsecondary readiness.[2] While not all requests were granted—the department could not waive federal accountability requirements, for instance—others were, such as a request to waive subject-matter graduation requirements to allow for greater alignment with student learning plans.

The department selected four districts for the first year. Approaches varied. In Danville Independent Schools, more than half of whose students are economically disadvantaged, local leaders developed secondary-school courses that would help sixth-grade students reach college- and career-ready benchmarks by tenth grade. The Danville proposal also let students pursue a personalized course of study through Advanced Placement courses, work-based learning, or early-college opportunities.

More initiatives centering competency-based learning and local innovation followed. In 2017, the state launched the Kentucky Competency Education and Assessment Consortium, a cohort of districts that led the design of a statewide system for competency-based education and assessment. The districts defined competencies that informed the development of Kentucky’s Portrait of a Learner.

The consortium’s work led the department, state board, and the Center for Innovation in Education to launch the Local Laboratories of Learning (L3) grant in 2021. The agencies recruited three cohorts of community-based partners to lead the design of local accountability and assessment systems to better reflect the expectations and diversity of the students, families, and communities they represent.

One L3 participant is Jefferson County Public Schools, whose commitment to competency-based learning is exemplified in the academies model in place at several local high schools. Beginning in grade 8, students explore careers and industries, and then, during grades 9–12, they may choose among several academies at the schools. Each academy offers such opportunities as internships, dual enrollment courses, and job shadowing in distinct career pathways.

Next Steps

In March, the state board voted on revisions to the assessment and accountability framework to clarify its language and increase local flexibility around social studies and writing assessment. Such changes would give districts more leeway in introducing performance assessments, for example.

When these changes are made, the state board and other education leaders will begin advocating with legislators for the funding to implement changes, beginning with a pilot phase, perhaps as early as fall 2026, Fletcher said.

For the time being, Kentucky is not changing graduation requirements. “We did actually briefly consider incorporating the Portrait of a Learner in the graduation requirements for the state, but we decided that that was a top-down regulatory step that we wouldn’t need if we get local accountability right,” Young said.

Recommendations

Other states that aspire to make the high school experience more meaningful and relevant will do well to invest time in hearing from communities what they want for their schools, Young advised. For the state board, she said, “the real magic has been in the listening tours …. We’ve really committed as a state and as a state board to listening to the field, to communities, about the innovation that is happening around the state.”

She also advises a light touch when it comes to state mandates. “The seeds of our new competency systems are growing in our local communities,” Young said. She described the new assessment and accountability framework as flipping the script. “In the past, [there was] an inverted pyramid, with whatever the feds wanted at the top, they told states what states could do, and then we told the locals what the locals could do,” she said. But in the new system, the driver will be “local decision making around what success measures look like and a very limited state-level involvement and just rendering unto the feds that which is theirs.”

“Our role [as a state board] will soon be to ask questions around how we support the technical quality of local assessments and local accountability,” Young said. “How do we ensure that it’s scientifically rigorous as a system? Again, I think that’s a very light touch.”

She also advises states to begin with networks of schools and districts that are ready and willing to innovate and learn from them about the state supports that would enable more districts to reimagine high school and deliver vibrant learning.

Rethinking assessment is critical to the state’s vision. “There are a lot of people who think that the only way to assess learning is through traditional tests,” Cook said. “But it’s really difficult to give a student credit for their learning outside the traditional Carnegie Unit—or seat time—structure if we don’t have other ways to assess and demonstrate that learning.”

“Providing students with engaging experiences that support a range of competencies need not come at the expense of academic rigor,” Young said. “New assessments are critical to establishing new systems that eschew seat time in favor of competency-based learning.”

Notes

[1] Kentucky Department of Education, “United We Learn,” web page (2023).

[2] KRS 156.108, Districts of Innovation (2012); KRS 160.107, Application and Implementation Requirements for Districts of Innovation (2012).