Kentucky’s academic standards have been undergoing a rigorous revision process that began two years ago. Standards for health education, physical education, reading and writing, and mathematics have now been adopted into law. New computer science standards were also developed into law.
The newly adopted standards will be implemented in Kentucky classrooms beginning in the 2019-2020 school year and can be accessed on the Content Area Standards webpage.
Daviess County Public Schools’ Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Jana Beth Francis said that the revised standards are comparable to the previous standards.
“It’s just wordsmithing,” Francis said, referencing the little change.
Francis said that it was so minuscule a change that the only area where the district sees revision is high school math and which has already been an area of concentration this year.
“We work every year with the standards, so this is nothing dramatic,” Francis said, adding that she was excited however to see the new computer science standards that were developed.
Matthew Constant, Chief Academic Officer for Owensboro Public Schools said that the new standards provide an opportunity for the district and all of the schools to refresh knowledge, update thinking and implement changes.
“We will be putting together a plan for the rollout of the standards in the coming weeks and will spend significant time this summer in professional learning around the revised standards,” Constant said.
Constant said that the newly-developed computer science standards will be broken down to see what digital literacy standards will be necessary for students to know and those will be embedded throughout content-area courses.
“For the portion of the standards that deal with specific computer language, programming, etc., we will provide new opportunities for students at Owensboro High School in 2019-20,” Constant said, referring to the recently announced OPS partnership with Amazon. “The Edhesive curriculum will be offered to provide for unique computer science opportunities for students.”
Kentucky educators, community members and a review by the Kentucky Board of Education worked on the revisions prior to final legislative review and adoption.
Senate Bill 1 (2017) called for the Kentucky Department of Education to implement a process for reviewing all academic standards and aligned assessments beginning in the 2017-2018 school year.
The current schedule calls for one or two content areas to be reviewed each year and every six years thereafter on a rotating basis. The rotation schedule began in summer 2017 by soliciting feedback on English and language arts, mathematics and health and physical education standards.
For more information regarding the standards revision process, please visit the Kentucky Academic Standards Revision Process webpage.
