2025 Assessment Results: A Deeper Dive

The annual release of the Kentucky School Report Card always brings a swirl of information: subjects, grade levels, student groups, and school/district/state results. This post pulls five points out of that swirl, expanding just a little on the Prichard Committee’s statement issued Wednesday.

Here’s a super-quick look at our statewide results by subject and level. We are not half-way to where we want to take our students. That’s simple to see here, because we aren’t at 50% proficiency in any subject. We need to own that and change that.

Here’s a matching look at this year’s progress. This chart and the ones that follow use dark green for improvement of two or more points, lighter green for single-point growth, and orange for losses. It’s good to see only one loss: we’ve seen many years without this level of improvement. The Kentucky Department of Education reports that “Science scores reported for 2025 are based on revised standards, a redesigned assessment and newly established performance levels. As these changes may affect comparability with prior years, science trends should be interpreted with care.” Honoring that, the science changes are shown in purple.

The changes for African American students all moved in the right direction. That group is the only group we examined with this kind of consistent improvement. Since African American students have long been underserved by our schools, this is worth an extra moment of celebration, even while knowing that Kentucky has plenty of work ahead to create schools that fully empower these learners and all others.

Instead, Kentucky lost ground or stalled in multiple subjects for these groups. We must find and commit to the efforts needed to serve these students much better.

Scroll back up through the charts above, and you’ll see the issue. Looking at all students, we showed no progress in combined writing, which includes data on on-demand writing and on editing and mechanics. For some student groups, we slid backward. Communication skills are essential for our future economy and communities, and taking losses on writing is not okay.

If you want to see more about the patterns of improvement, you can download this Even Deeper Dive document to see the changes for a wider array of student groups.

You can also see 2025 results for any school or district at kyschoolreportcard.com.

Finally, if you want to see lots of subjects or groups or schools at once, there’s a link there for datasets. What I’ve reported here comes a huge dataset named “Accountability Assessment Performance” available in the Accountability section.