KSA. ACT. SAT. NEAP.
The list of standardized tests students may take through their lives goes on and on.
Although they’re often a source of anxiety for students, standardized tests have their benefits. Ideally, they offer a predictable, fair way to measure academic performance, regardless of differences in students’ lives. Yet many districts and even the Kentucky Department of Education itself are beginning to question if schools rely too heavily on standardized measures, fearing both the particularities of local communities and the joys of genuine intellectual engagement could become subsumed by the endless drive for more data.
“I need to see something to understand it,” said Mia Day, who will be a senior in Boone County Schools during the 2025-26 school year, when asked what makes a good teaching style.
At least when it came to her own teaching preferences, Day said it was better for the learning to be “more hands-on.… Show me something, and then make, like, a relation towards it. That helps me personally a lot better than just someone telling me something.”
“We are boring kids to death, and we are not making it real for them,” said Brian Crasman, superintendent of Fleming County Schools, about 25 miles south of Maysville. “They want to be able to make the connections” with what they’re learning.
Creasman and others are proponents of what is coming to be known as local accountability for school districts. Although they’re not always called that exactly, local accountability indicators are meant to counterbalance the “cookie-cutter,” as Creasman put it, state and federal indicators in a way that grants districts greater freedom in how they teach their curricula at the local level.
Multiple districts, including at least two in Northern Kentucky, have already begun to experiment with creating local and community-based accountability frameworks, and legislation for a statewide framework is set to go before the General Assembly in 2026.
Latitude and longitude
Kentucky’s testing and accountability requirements have changed several times over the years. The most recent occurred in the 2023-24 school year with the implementation of district Overall Performance Ratings, themselves split into two subcategories: “status,” a combined indicator of performances measures for a current year, and “change,” which compares performance with the previous academic year.
Kentucky Summative Assessments, or KSAs, which students begin taking in third grade, serve as the state’s standard measure for tracking academic progress. They provide a snapshot of student performance in a particular grade at a particular time. Most standardized tests function this way: The third grade assessment results of 2023-24 measure the performance of a different set of students than the third grade results from 2022-23 and so on.
Statistical researchers refer to this kind of measurement, in which each measure examines a discrete cohort at a set time interval, as a latitudinal measure. The problem is that latitudinal measures are considered inferior for measuring change over time compared to what’s called a longitudinal measure, which makes comparisons across time for a single cohort.
A longitudinal measure would take a single set of (ideally representative) students from a district and measure their progress at set intervals. That way, the measure can correct for any confounding variables that might affect scoring, which is harder to do when examining multiple groups of people.
As the authors of a 2007 study on measuring student performance put it in the Electronic Journal of Statistics: Differences between sets of students can be so great that measures can become skewed and unhelpful. By restricting analysis to one set of students over time, researchers can predictably account for variables that might weigh the data, making it easier for them to measure how students actually are improving or deteriorating. Educational circles often refer to longitudinal analysis of this kind as a growth measure.
Some states, most notably Tennessee, have instituted statewide growth assessments in hopes of burnishing their data analysis. Growth analysis also makes it easier to see if teaching or curriculum changes are effective, because researchers can observe changes in student performance before and after a policy change takes place (again, in a way that cuts out confounding variables). Districts frequently rely on internal testing measures – over and above state-mandated assessments – to measure student growth.
Teaching to the test
Still, there are limitations to this form of analysis, at least how it’s implemented in Kentucky. Districts can choose among varying testing platforms to measure internal progress, some of which don’t even have growth measures built-in. Well-known companies that provide these tools include Pearson, Iready, NWEA MAP, Star and Renaissance. Some districts use multiple platforms.
The problem: Each test is unique, and so, even if a platform has internal growth measures, comparisons among districts become problematic. This is especially true if students have a high rate of transience; it’s hard to effectively track the progress of a student who’s constantly moving around and constantly changing testing platforms.
Further, even with longitudinal measures, there’s still a risk that an overemphasis on testing could overtake other aspects of education and even make it difficult to track student progress. One 2002 academic critique of Tennessee’s system describes this educational quandary.
“The use of ‘scoring high’ materials closely tailored to particular standardized tests is designed to raise scores,” the study’s authors write. Higher test scores, though, don’t mean students are performing better – except on the test. The result is that it’s impossible to determine if students are simply being taught to the test or actually learning broader skills and knowledge.
Using real-life scenarios
Fleming County began implementing local accountability programs in 2021 with an eye on identifying how student performance in the district could be better assessed.
Kenton County Schools began implementing similar changes, which would become the district Community Based Accountability System, around the same time.
Superintendent Creasman told LINK nky that his district began this process by interviewing about 300 students in different grade levels through the district to see what they thought mattered the most in school. Student responses, said Michelle Hunt, the district’s chief academic officer, “ranged from they don’t like one-ply toilet paper to they don’t want to be known as a test score.”
Although Creasman said that, though he and the district aren’t against testing as such, he worried that federal and state requirements were sometimes “arbitrary” and “cookie cutter.” He also worried that teaching for the test could lead to a situation where engagement with the material becomes shallow and irrelevant outside of an assessment scenario, “like trying to teach kids to play the piano by just showing them sheet music,” he said, without ever asking them actually to play the instrument.
To that end, the state has pitched what it’s describing as vibrant learning experiences, essentially scenarios in which students are asked to employ what they’ve learned in a classroom in a real-life situation. Creasman gave several examples from his district.
The first was a sixth grade math teacher who partnered with a local supermarket. Students were given a set of problems that could be solved using skills they’d learned in the classroom and information they had to seek out in the supermarket. The students had to find data within the market to solve a set of problems, exposing them to real-world scenarios where they’d need to use math.
Another example involved several high school teachers across various subjects taking students on a field trip to an archaeological dig, where the students heard talks from historians on artifacts and were then tasked with performing carbon dating on objects discovered at the dig. Fold in a requirement to write a brief scientific report on the work they did that day, and the students just successfully applied the history, science, math and writing skills they learned in the classroom to a deep, real-world task, rather than simply regurgitating information onto an answer booklet.
In short, the goal of local accountability is to grant districts the freedom to design how they teach their materials based on what’s important to the local community while still keeping up with state-mandated standards.
‘A holistic approach’
Kenton County Superintendent Henry Webb said his district’s accountability system is split into six pillars, each of which sets out to address a priority in the school community.
“We have six action teams with over 100 people represented: students, parents, community members, teachers, principals, and they look at what we’re doing, and they signal that three times a year,” Webb said, in addition to a final annual report.
“The Community Based Accountability is just setting metrics, an action plan,” Webb said. “Everybody on the same page about a holistic approach to the district.”
Webb said one of the key measures included in the local system that isn’t included in state metrics is transition readiness. That is, how prepared is each student when they transition from elementary to middle school and then from middle to high school?
Webb pointed to the district’s work-based learning and internship programs, from which students garnered over 160,000 hours of experience in the 2024-25 school year, as well as the fact that the district has hired about 30 students to work as technology, teaching and nursing aides in the district as examples of vibrant learning in Kenton County.
Local Laboratories of Learning
The state meanwhile has several initiatives to help districts furnish their own localized accountability systems, one of which is the Local Laboratories of Learning, or L3, initiative. Fleming County was among one of the first districts to take part in the initiative when it launched in 2021. Member districts engage in a similar investigation to Fleming County’s, wherein students and community members’ input is sought about what’s important. From there, the districts can experiment with vibrant learning and other specific programs germane to the communities in which they’re located. Member districts then share their results with other member districts.
Boone County Schools joined the L3 initiative in 2022. In Boone County, the initiative has focused on the district’s core student competencies, the first of which is communication. Krista Decker, the district’s director of assessment support, described how the students demonstrate their communication competency, namely through public defenses of learning, a tool that Webb said Kenton County hopes to implement in the future, too.
“Students shared with the panel members in their defenses how [they are] great communicators, and what evidence they have through their schoolwork and also what their experiences are outside in the community,” Decker said. “So, if they volunteer and work in a soup kitchen or something, or if they are leaders in their sports team or if they’re leaders in their church community. How is what they’re learning in school impacting how they interact with others out in the community?”
Student defenses are one example of vibrant learning, Decker said. Other examples include capstone projects, student-led conferences and service learning.
Much of the work around this subject, at least in Boone County, was in a very early phase; a representative from the district told LINK nky in June that its L3 council hadn’t met in more than a year.
‘Here’s your Chromebook…’
Leslie Chambers, Day’s mother and a member of Florence city council, was critical of Boone County Schools’ teaching methods when she spoke with LINK nky. Day, for instance, struggled to reintegrate herself back into school life after the end of pandemic lockdowns, and the district wasn’t helping, she said. Chambers said this came down to changes to the district’s disciplinary policies, changing teaching habits and what she characterized as an overreliance on technology among some of the teachers.
“We found out very quickly that she [Day] does better with the older teachers,” Chambers said. “And the reason is because the younger teachers aren’t teaching. They’re like, ‘Here’s your Chromebook. Let’s just do this thing,’” essentially relying on busywork, rather than real intellectual challenge or engagement.
Day, whose favorite subject is English, reflected this in her comments by comparing two different English assignments, one she found engaging and another she didn’t.
“I think it was sophomore year,” Day said. “We had to listen to this podcast and then write a paper on our ideas and thoughts and stuff, and I thought that was helpful, hearing something and then having to write about it.”
In contrast, an assignment she found less engaging was a “prompt on the computer saying, like, write an argumentative essay about this and that,” Day said. “Stuff like that, where it’s not the teacher directly explaining and giving us an example and telling us or having something to correlate it with.”
There are broader systemic and economic issues that influence schools, as well, Chambers said. Salary competition and tax burdens between different jurisdictions within Boone County can have the effect of making teachers move around between schools, which makes it hard for them to develop long-lasting relationships with the kids. Chambers has advocated for tax exemptions for teachers in Florence in an effort to incentivize them staying in the city.
Creasman said the work to implement local accountability measures throughout the commonwealth is just beginning but touted it as a way of getting out of the rut that an over-emphasis on testing can create.
“What we’re trying to do is reprogram something that’s been programmed for 40 years, and it’s just going to take time,” Creasman said.