5 Big Questions on Deeper Learning Implementation in Kentucky 5 Big Questions on Deeper Learning Implementation in Kentucky

Kentucky is approaching the next big national leadership moment in public education. Thirty years ago, Kentuckians grew intolerant of low educational performance and took bold action resulting in the Rose lawsuit and the Kentucky Education Reform Act. Even today, global education experts still point to that moment in our history. But, it has been 30 years. An entire generation has passed since those efforts put Kentucky on the global education map. 

We are approaching a similar moment again. Over the last decade, educators across Kentucky have been engaging in the hard work of learning, piloting, and scaling educational innovations that are taking the bold steps beyond the era of standardization and testing. Collectively, these innovations are part of a broader global movement that has been termed Deeper Learning. This term speaks to educational approaches that allow students to engage in more complex thinking and skill development. These efforts are more intentionally linked to durable skills that we consistently hope our children develop such as problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, communication, citizenship, and a host of other locally defined skills. In our digital, global, complex world our children must have those skills. 

In this work, for a variety of reasons, Kentucky finds itself ahead of most other states in the implementation of these ideas into the core of our public education system. School districts all over Kentucky have engaged in implementing components of deeper learning at classroom, school, and system levels. While this expertise is developing, it is not widely distributed yet or coherent across schools and systems. Now, coming out of the pandemic, the Kentucky State Board of Education and Commissioner Jason Glass have prioritized this work further by elevating the United We Learn roadmap. Leading educational organizations like the Prichard Committee are creating a Groundswell of public support for schools. Nationally, the most tightly connected educational leaders are beginning to notice. 

To deliver on the promise of this moment and translate our learnings into sustainable upgrades to schools, we will need to answer 5 big questions.

1. How do we agree on common anchor practices and principles? 

Deeper learning encompasses many different ideas and practices and different regions and districts in the state have each implemented their own versions of this concept. From project-based learning to student agency to internships to growth mindsets there are many, many different subcomponents of this work. Right now, the local nature of implementation has been functioning more as “random acts of improvement” that are each useful to individual learners but as they are uncoordinated they are of limited long-term value. Thus, in the near term, Kentucky must coalesce around a shared set of anchor practices and principles that serve as a foundation for deeper learning implementation all over Kentucky. There will continue to be local priorities and variations but to help the public understand the changes broadly there must be some consistency from district to district.

2. Should there be new minimum teaching deliverables? 

Any change is best implemented through the active agency and willingness of all those impacted. So it has largely been in the implementation of deeper learning over the last decade. The innovators and early adopters have embraced the challenge and willingly implemented substantial changes to their practices in the classroom. As Kentucky enters this new phase of broader implementation, however, we may need to set minimal expectations for the implementation of practices that we value. For instance, if we believe that a key task of elementary school is to get learners to take ownership of their own learning, might we make it a minimum expectation of late elementary teachers to hold at least once per year a student-led parent-teacher conference where the student is expected to be able to articulate their own work and growth to their family? 

If such minimal teaching deliverables are to exist, though, where is the best place to establish those expectations? We suggest that a central component of KERA, School-Based Decision Making Councils (SBDM), is the perfect mechanism for teachers and school communities to democratically agree to those new minimum expectations. Thus, we must prioritize SBDMs as a critical implementation layer for Deeper Learning practices and expect them to report to districts and state officials the meaningful conversations and adopted expectations for teachers in the buildings. 

3. What should we prioritize in measuring success and how should we be held accountable to those outcomes? 

Despite the many negatives, the great achievement of No Child Left Behind was in being able to distinguish the learning gaps between privileged and marginalized students broadly and to individually measure any one student against similar-aged peers. The testing regimes utilized to underpin those measurements have caused widespread damage to our schools and communities but the need to identify gaps both individually and at scale is necessary. As we transition toward deeper learning priorities that are more student-centered and community-led in an attempt to heal, we must, though, have mechanisms to assess and account for student and school performance. 

We see a need for 3 distinct layers of assessment and accountability. 

1. Student assessment & individual accountability is largely implemented through individual projects, assessments, and summative grading leading to a transcript. Thus, we will need more intelligent assessments, report cards, and transcripts to tell more meaningful and holistic stories of learning and progress. Standards-based report cards and mastery transcripts provide useful models for communicating individual student data. Some known discriminatory practices such as the use of percentage grades that include zero points for missing work will need to be abandoned. 
2. Democratic accountability is largely the purview of locally elected bodies such as SBDMs and school boards. As with most boards, either corporate or public, the values and measures that are the priority are determined locally by the board itself rather than by external agencies. The Benefits-Based Accountability models promoted by the work of John Tanner re-centers those values and measures to the locally elected Board. Models such as Kenton County’s Community Based Accountability system and Fleming County’s Measures of Quality are showing how accountability can be prioritized in our local democratic structures. 
3. State accountability, currently federally mandated, must continue to be a priority as well but should be implemented with a different mindset. Political distractions such as “school report cards” with labels such as Stars that largely served to demean educators and communities should be abandoned in favor of straightforward data reporting. Within Kentucky, we only need to look at the Council for Postsecondary Education as a guide. CPE maintains a rich “Interactive Data Center” that reports on a variety of critical metrics such as graduation rates but does so without labels. Critical data such as funding allocations, teacher data, student discipline rates, course enrollments, technology utilization, and more should be included. Further, existing outcome measures such as graduation rates and even limited standardized testing should remain (although the primacy of known discriminatory tests such as the ACT should be dramatically reduced as a tool for decision-making). This data should continue to be disaggregated by race, socio-economic status, language minority status, and disability. In fact, more data should be added that provides a similar whole-school picture of the learning environment. With this data, the Kentucky State Board of Education should continue to closely monitor the whole system and, when necessary, identify particular school communities for further inquiry and potential remedial action.  

4. How can we rapidly digitize the support structures of schools? 

Coming out of the pandemic, many have a distaste for digital tools linked to learning. That is understandable and we have clearly learned that a computer is not even remotely close to being a viable replacement for a teacher. But, at the same time, we also cannot let our digital distaste keep us from leveraging modern tools as support structures for teachers and students. In part, we lack the data that we need for a modern accountability system because we lack digital tools that transition us from data scarcity to data abundance. 

While leaders at KDE’s Office of Education Technology and teacher efforts like KentuckyGoDigital have done outstanding work, our overall approach to digital tools in public education has never been serious. While we watched with horror as the public unemployment systems' out-of-date digital infrastructure collapsed during the pandemic, we barely noticed that public schooling went into the pandemic with near-zero capable digital infrastructure. Universities adapted and learning continued because there were minimal tools such as learning management systems in place. Public schools scrambled to use free tools such as Google Classroom with limited success and now back in classrooms many teachers have already stopped doing even that. There is just simply no possible way to have a modern school system without having a robust digital infrastructure at the classroom level that students and families can rely on consistently. This will cost money and funding mechanisms should be adapted. We spend tens of millions on physical infrastructure each year for schools. We should expect to spend a proportionate amount on digital infrastructure as well. There is just no other way to stay relevant in the modern world.  

5. How do we shift structures from exclusivity to inclusivity to minimize oppression? 

Public education in Kentucky has roots in structural racism and was developed in part to exclude. We should not be afraid to say that out loud and own our history. Many educational leaders know well Section 183 of the 1891 Kentucky Constitution that provides for an “efficient system of Common Schools.” The entire effort of Rose leading to KERA in 1990 was based on it. While that effort was underway, though, only 4 paragraphs down was Section 187 which said  “separate schools for white and colored children shall be maintained.” This Constitutional requirement for segregated schools was only removed in 1996. 

Many structures of public education are sorting mechanisms. We have a variety of rationales we utilize to employ those structures and make those decisions but too many of us still accept as part of the justification to rake a few geniuses from the rubbish and dismiss the reside, as Governor Thomas Jefferson said of the purpose of school while Kentucky was still part of Virginia. Because these notions are so foundationally embedded in the structures of school, we must question everything through a critical lens and seek to dismantle structures such as discipline practices and differentiated diplomas that segregate and exclude. We must take on this task directly and openly as part of the implementation of deeper learning upgrades.   

In Kentucky, there are countless educational leaders that have positioned us to lead the nation again in this moment. Smiles filled with love and pride beam from our faces when we think of all the people who have built the momentum, started a movement, and made this opportunity possible. As KERA showed, it takes a generation of leaders working in a sustained, coordinated way to implement lasting reforms to our education system. 

We are now in the midst of a moment of generational leadership once again and we cannot shirk the hard questions to provide a positive near-term upgrade to our public schools. To do this, unfortunately, we will need to be willing to compromise the perfect in the interest of the good. As painful as it will be over the next several years, we must consolidate the gains and bring them to full and sustained implementation. Important ideas such as transdisciplinary teaching are worth pursuing, but the pursuit of these distant ideas must not distract us from the widespread implementation of the more achievable and scalable ideas in the near term. No one wants the burden of choosing a less desirable path with the knowledge that better paths are available, but now is the time to be focused on actually taking a new path for the whole system even if it is not the glorious one. 

Right now, Kentucky, an upgrade to public education is possible. We must not miss it.