From Trust to Transformation: Kentucky’s Enduring Accountability Reform

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It was the end of a long Monday in October 2024, and the room was running out of gas. Nearly 50 students, caregivers, policy makers, educators, and community leaders from across Kentucky were pursuing a moonshot to “launch an accountability system that is meaningful and useful to all of our learners.” That day, the group had debated the heady question of whether and how local measures of school success should “count” in the state accountability system. But after many hours of discussion, the weary group needed a spark to propel them into day two.

As the day wound to a close, members of the Kentucky Department of Education could have easily said: “Thanks everyone, the Department will take it from here,” and dismissed everyone back to their respective corners of the Commonwealth. Or KDE staff could have used closing comments to reinforce departmental prerogatives, leaving the stakeholders to wonder if their participation had mattered at all.

But instead, it was clear that department staff came in with one perspective and were leaving with a different view of the challenge ahead.

What changed from the perspective of the department that evening was nothing short of a transformation in the future shape of Kentucky’s state accountability system. But before we go there, we need to understand how the Commissioner, his staff, and the four-dozen stakeholders got here.

It was the summer of 2021 and future Commissioner Fletcher was serving as superintendent of Lawrence County Schools. The state Commissioner of Education at the time, Jason Glass, just announced an initiative to create a new vision for education in the state, one which would be built from the ground-up. Believing that complex systems move by changing not only structural components but also relational dynamics, Glass said that the process should be informed by diverse voices and perspectives, especially the “not-so-usual suspects” including those least served by the current system.

With support from the Center for Innovation in Education (CIE), Glass recruited an intentionally diverse group of more than 60 education leaders and stakeholders, including Fletcher, to join the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education (KCAE), which he launched to co-create the new vision. During the course of six meetings and eight weeks, the KCAE conducted empathy interviews with a broad range of stakeholders about what they wanted from Kentucky’s schools, and they collaboratively analyzed reams of interview data to distill key themes.

In a personal interview, Glass recounted how “deceptively difficult” it was to create a single, actionable vision from diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives. But by practicing habits of inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocitythat CIE embedded into each KCAE engagement, the group was able to work across lines of difference to develop a common understanding of the problems faced by impacted students, families, and communities; and to collectively embrace a better future. At the Kentucky Education Summit later that fall, the KCAE unanimously released its culminating report, United We Learn: Hearing Kentucky’s Voices on the Future of Education Report.

Admittedly, many vision-setting initiatives end here. Suppose the KY Department of Education had mailed glossy copies of the United We Learn report to each district, patted themselves on the back for a job well done, and moved on. Little might have changed. There certainly wouldn’t have been 50 stakeholders in a room, working with a new Commissioner on an ambitious Moonshot to enact the vision three years later.

Instead, alongside the release of the report, Glass and his team created reinforcing structures and wove new interdependencies between people in ways that sustained the vision and brought it to life.

First, Glass and his team invited local districts to participate in a community of practice as Local Laboratories of Learning (L3s). The L3s were tasked with building on the themes of the report by convening their own local coalitions—modeled after the KCAE in their habits of inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocity—in order to prototype better ways to assess student outcomes and hold themselves accountable to achieving collective goals. Glass did this because he recognized the need “to build upon expertise of local districts and regional cooperatives, recognizing that a lot of the change we wanted to bring about was already happening in pockets out in the field” (Interview, December 2024).

Under Fletcher’s leadership, Lawrence County signed up for the inaugural cohort of L3s. They were joined by another 17 districts over three cohorts—now representing one in every four students in Kentucky. The community of practice, co-facilitated by the UK Center for Next Generation Leadership (Next Gen), ElevateED, and members of the KDE Innovation team, meets monthly to share learning and insights form their emerging local accountability models.

Then in 2022, with support from CIE and several other national partners, Glass and the Department of Education won a $3 million federal grant to translate what had begun under the KCAE into a new state system of assessment and accountability. The award supported the creation of a new, inclusive coalition called the Kentucky United We Learn (KUWL) Council, to be facilitated by the Department of Education, UK Next Gen, and several national partners; and comprised of more than 60 members including students, family and community members, educators, school and district leaders, business and community organizations, advocacy groups, and higher education. Initially organized into three technical committees, the Council was tasked with learning from the L3 innovations to design a new, technically sound and locally relevant model for state assessment and accountability, and to create a legislative roadmap for making it real.

As Glass noted in a personal interview, the evolution from KCAE to the KUWL Council was an important and vulnerable moment. The hand-off was a critical step toward the longevity of the work, but communicating continuity—that it wasn’t just the end of one thing and the start of something else – was equally important. To do so, he leaned on the original vision of the United We Learn report to remind both old and new participants of the charge that was given to them by the people of Kentucky. Since then, the Council has continued to use the report as an anchor agreement, repeatedly invoking it to gut-check their direction.

The other important gut-check on the Council’s recommendations is its intentional interactions with the L3s. Leaders from the L3 districts regularly attended Council meetings to share their emerging assessment and accountability models. This provides opportunity for reciprocal feedback between the Council’s development of a state model and the actual innovations emerging in the field.

Ultimately, the habits of inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocity are what have legitimized the work. For example, at one Council meeting, then Board Chair Lu Young proposed mandating districts to develop Portraits of a Learner as a way to bring the United We Learn vision to scale. Council Vice Chair and parent representative Penny Christian responded by questioning what appeared to be a unilateral decision on the part of the Board and Department. In response, Young modeled empathy and reciprocity by listening to Christian’s concerns and adjusting the proposal based on feedback from her and other representatives. This singular moment of a strong reciprocal conversation between two members of the Council —and in particular, two individuals who otherwise would not have equal influence over state policy decisions outside the Council—helped build trust and set the tone for the work going forward.

One year after launching, the resiliency of the structures and relationships created through the KUWL Council and L3s was tested in an unanticipated way. In September 2023, political strife strained the relationship between Glass and the KY General Assembly, and Glass resigned as Commissioner.

Had United We Learn been Glass’s personal prerogative or pet initiative, the vision likely would have vanished with the crowning of his successor. But because diverse Kentucky stakeholders co-created and therefore co-owned the vision; and because the vision was vested in the governing body of the KUWL Council; and because the L3s were already advancing its tenets, United We Learn held an enduring legitimacy that the Kentucky Board of Education could not overlook as it selected a new Commissioner.

In September 2023, the Board appointed Robin Kinney as Interim Commissioner, a seasoned Associate Commissioner with 15 years of experience at the Department. Kinney immediately recognized the importance of reassuring Council members and partners of the Department’s unwavering commitment to United We Learn. Among her first moves were to deepen institutional engagement and support by bringing more Department staff into the fold, and to keep United We Learn front and center in her conversations with state legislators.

Then in the spring of 2024, the Board hired Fletcher—who, as noted, has been a leader in this work since the beginning—as the new Commissioner of Education. The appointment of someone with deep knowledge and commitment to the work gave many people great assurance that United We Learn would endure.

Fast-forwarding six months, we catch up to that Monday in October 2024. The group in the room is the KUWL Council, and while their membership and specific tasks have evolved over the years, their purpose has remained consistent: to support the Department in creating an accountability system that is meaningful and useful to all of Kentucky’s learners.

Over the course of that Monday, leaders from the L3 districts presented their emerging local models of assessment and accountability. One after another, they described how they had engaged in meaningful conversations with their communities about what was working, what wasn’t, and what needed to change. Their models emphasized student readiness beyond standardized test scores, incorporating measures like career pathway enrollment, dual credit participation, industry certifications, and exhibitions of learning to assess whether students are prepared for life after graduation. Student wellbeing and community and family engagement also played more prominent roles in how school quality was defined and measured. Districts like Fleming County, Logan County, and Shelby County demonstrated how local accountability dashboards can communicate a richer, more holistic picture of student learning—leveraging performance tasks, exhibitions of learning, and community partnerships as meaningful indicators.

Strikingly, the presentations embodied what was possible when local leaders are given real agency over accountability. The superintendents didn’t try to hide their areas for growth or game their scores a state accountability index. Instead, they worked with their communities to build living systems that reflected the true aspirations and needs of their students, families, and educators.

And in doing so, they provided something even more powerful than a well-designed model: they established the credibility of authentic local measures as a viable cornerstone for Kentucky’s future accountability model.

And that, in the end, sparked a collective epiphany.

Many had entered Monday’s meeting believing that although local measures of school success were valuable, their role in the formal accountability system should be limited. In this mind, local measures would require strict oversight—weighted lightly, subjected to rigorous annual validation by the state, and closely monitored by technical experts to ensure consistency. Local measures simply could not carry the same weight as state-driven metrics.

But by Monday afternoon, something fundamental had shifted. Through hours of deep listening, reflection, and collective problem-solving in partnership with many stakeholders over months, the people in the room began to imagine local measures not as supplemental to the consistently unsatisfying measures in use since No Child Left Behind, but as central to a more dynamic and responsive system. They began to think in new ways about how to empower districts to take ownership of meaningful, locally driven assessments; to network districts pursuing similar goals; and to create a structure of mutual accountability that relied on shared learning rather than rigid external control. They began to recast the state’s role as one of periodic validation and calibration rather than policing. The details of such a system will take time to hammer out, but the group awakened to a new set of possibilities—a new horizon for their moonshot.

As Council members dispersed Monday evening, there was a buzz of renewed optimism and a sense that their roles had real meaning, thanks to the responsiveness of leaders and their openness to new thinking.

Importantly, this epiphany did not happen by luck. The deep co-creation of the United We Learn report served as a covenant with Kentucky students, families, communities, and educators that endured over years of change and shifting political winds. The establishment of the KUWL Council as a body that both guarded and operationalized the vision, and the group’s aspiration to habits of inclusion, empathy, co-creation, and reciprocity brought legitimacy to their work. The intentional connection with, and networking of, pioneer L3 districts anchored the work in local relevance.

We have shared Kentucky’s story to highlight that system change is possible, but not through edicts from above. Any leader can move their systems by increasing the breadth and diversity of voices in the room, listening intently for the root causes of the problems they face, and creating spaces in which better systems can be co-created together with constant feedback and iteration.