KSDE: At‑risk accountability pilot moves into implementation year as districts flag cohort, assessment problems

Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) staff told the Special Education and Related Services Funding Task Force that the state’s two‑year at‑risk accountability pilot has completed a planning year and will enter implementation in 2025–26 with 12 participating districts.

The pilot stems from provisions in 2024 legislation and requires each participating district to identify two cohorts of at‑risk students, set four‑year quantitative goals for academic improvement and post an annual, public plan tying interventions to expenditures. KSDE’s public update focused on practical problems pilot districts have already identified and on changes staff will recommend to the Legislature.

KSDE program lead Dr. Harwood said the pilot’s first year (2024–25) was mainly planning and that ‘‘the idea being is we want to find out what the problems are so that we can fix them before everybody else is going on.’’ He told the task force one district has withdrawn because of leadership turnover and the remaining pilot districts will submit plans this fall.

Why it matters

The pilot is intended to make at‑risk spending more transparent and measurable by requiring districts to link specific interventions to outcomes and to report the financial portion of their plans. KSDE and pilot districts told the task force they view the exercise as both a test of procedures and an opportunity to surface practical barriers before statewide implementation.

Major implementation issues raised

- Cohort selection and minimum sizes: State guidance requires cohorts of at least 10 students; KSDE staff warned small districts may not be able to assemble reportable cohorts and will use an ‘‘attrition calculator’’ to estimate how many students a district needs initially to reasonably expect 11 remaining at the end of four years. Dr. Harwood said the smallest pilot district enrolled about 127 students and the largest about 21,000.

- Third‑grade cohort timing and assessments: The law requires one cohort to begin in third grade, but pilot districts told KSDE they lack a baseline if the cohort is defined at third grade because state assessments are first administered at the end of third grade. Dr. Harwood said pilot districts recommended moving the cohort start to fourth grade to avoid setting a four‑year goal without a baseline assessment.

- ‘‘Free lunch’’ cohort confidentiality: The statute currently requires one cohort to be based on eligibility for free lunch under the National School Lunch Act. KSDE staff and several legislators told the task force that federal privacy rules restrict schools from disclosing a student’s free‑lunch status to classroom teachers unless they have a business need to know, which ‘‘inhibits the teachers’ work with the students.’’ KSDE advised pilot schools not to use the free‑lunch cohort in the pilot and recommended legislators remove that requirement to avoid hampering instruction.

- Progress monitoring and permitted assessments: The law and guidance constrain which assessments can be used for final evaluation (state assessment or ACT for courses where those are the accountability measures). Pilot districts favor using interim tests based on the state assessment for progress monitoring, but KSDE cautioned against relying on skill‑based growth measures (for example, FastBridge) to predict state assessment outcomes. Dr. Harwood said growth on skills‑based tests does not always translate to gains on the state assessment and that the pilot will track what works for progress monitoring.

- Goal setting and the ‘‘four‑year plus’’ sanction: Districts must set a four‑year quantitative improvement goal for each cohort. The statute provides that groups failing to meet the goal are evaluated for a fifth year and, if still not meeting it, districts lose eligibility for the full at‑risk funding multiplier increase. KSDE staff said they are developing guidance to help districts pick ‘‘reasonably attainable’’ but meaningful goals and to justify the stated targets.

- Mobility and closed cohorts: The pilot uses closed cohorts. KSDE explained students who move away or who do not take required assessments are removed from a cohort because missing pre‑ or post‑assessment data make evaluation impossible. KSDE staff acknowledged districts will need to decide how long to wait before removing transient students and warned that high‑mobility sites (for example, military communities such as Fort Leavenworth) may not be able to sustain small cohorts.

KSDE reporting and financial transparency

Dr. Harwood said the pilot requires districts to post plans and annual reports publicly; the financial portion must tie expenditures to named interventions (KSDE will ask districts to link entries in Fund 13, the at‑risk fund, to interventions). Staff said this will allow KSDE to track which interventions are commonly used and which appear to produce better outcomes in different contexts.

What task force members pressed staff to provide

Members asked KSDE to provide: (1) the current cut scores and an explanation of how cut scores translate into performance categories, (2) the attrition calculator methodology, and (3) clarifications about the definition of ‘‘at‑risk’’ categories used to identify pre‑K students. KSDE said cut scores for the new 2025 assessment will be approved by the State Board of Education in August and that data will be distributed to districts afterward.

Caveats and next steps

Dr. Harwood said the pilot is intended to expose problems so they can be fixed before full implementation in 2026–27. He recommended the Legislature remove the required free‑lunch cohort and asked for patience while technical issues around cohort formation, assessment comparability and reporting are resolved. ‘‘The purpose of the pilot is less about evaluating results and more about making sure we have a workable system to get going,’’ he said.

Ending

KSDE will collect pilot plans this fall and continue convening districts through the 2025–26 year. Staff told the task force they will present suggested statutory or guidance changes to legislative committees this year to address the issues surfaced in the pilot.