Statement from the Prichard Committee on the APA Report on the Kentucky Department of Education

The Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts (APA) conducted a special examination of the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE), which was required under 2024’s House Bill 825.

The Auditor of Public Accounts’ review paints a clear picture: if we want all Kentucky students to succeed, we must invest more wisely and work more closely together. The report highlights three urgent needs that mirror the Prichard Committee’s long-standing priorities: more meaningful involvement of families and communities in local education; focused, sustained work to close learning gaps for underserved student groups; and stronger state investment in educators and high-quality learning tools.

These are not new challenges—but the APA’s findings bring renewed urgency and provide a roadmap for how we can respond. Here are five key takeaways from the audit that reinforce these calls to action:

1. Reading and math staffing and High-Quality Instructional Resource (HQIR) needs are not being fully met. The Auditor suggests that key state learning initiatives may be under-resourced, with findings like:

• • “The current number of Early Literacy coaches (23) is not sufficient to meet the stated literacy goals.”
  • “Mathematics education is not resourced at an adequate level to meet stated numeracy goals.”
  • “Districts must budget locally for the adoption of HQIRs [high-quality instructional resources, including textbooks] because state funds are not provided for implementation.”

We have long been concerned that Kentucky is not making targeted investments in these areas: it’s been more than a decade since dollars for professional development and instructional materials disappeared from state budgets. The Auditor urges the Department to identify the amounts needed to support these important elements of effective learning. We support that call and stand ready to support the needed appropriations in the 2026 legislative session.

2. The Auditor reports that “Kentucky still has significant work to do related to closing achievement gaps and ensuring all students are prepared for future success,” and uses recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to demonstrate how Kentucky is underserving English learners, student with disabilities, African American students, and Latino students.

We fully agree that this work is crucial to ensuring every Kentucky student has the opportunity to succeed. These efforts must include transparent reporting to the public and robust opportunities for communities to join in the work of changing these outcomes. Closing learning gaps is essential for the future of Kentucky’s economy and the well-being of its communities. The disparities continue, so the work must continue.

3. Kentucky’s early childhood system appropriately focuses on socio-emotional readiness as foundational to early learning and should similarly strengthen support for cognitive development. While KDE is meeting its kindergarten readiness targets, our targets lag behind other comparable states and should be more rigorous to accelerate positive outcomes for our youngest learners. High-quality early learning should be prioritized over compliance in preschool monitoring processes.

Data shows a disconnect between All STARS quality ratings (quality rating and improvement system for early care and education programs in Kentucky that receive public funding); kindergarten readiness results; and LRE (least restrictive environment) rates. LRE rates are the degree to which special education preschool students are included in the regular classroom setting. The disconnect between these three measures should be examined to improve alignment.

4. The report highlighted the need for greater stakeholder engagement and reform to the way advisory groups operate. We believe that meaningful, sustained community engagement in education at the local level is a key lever in driving better education outcomes.

To fully realize its potential, we need a clearly defined approach for engaging collaborative leadership teams—both locally and at the state level—that ensures these groups are not only inclusive and representative, but also well-equipped to interpret school data, understand context, and actively contribute to identifying, implementing, and evaluating solutions. This kind of capacity-building transforms advisory groups from passive participants into strategic partners, strengthening alignment between community voice and system-level decision-making.

5. The Department is expected to meet competing demands that often conflict with one another. The Department must balance compliance with laws and regulations with providing strong customer service to students and families and holding districts to high expectations.

The audit reveals a tension long felt by those inside and outside the Department: KDE is asked to do more monitoring and more supporting, to be both gentler and firmer, to provide more specific guidance while also keeping things brief. These          contradictory demands—often made simultaneously—have become an ongoing source of instability, pulling the Department in competing directions without the tools or clarity to reconcile them. This is not a critique of the audit itself, which surfaces these tensions with rigor and integrity, but a recognition that the underlying instability stems from long-standing, often conflicting demands placed on the Department by the broader system.

We call for a clearly defined, multi-year framework that outlines KDE’s role in today’s education landscape: advancing deeper learning, supporting transition readiness, and enabling real community partnership. But that framework won’t come from KDE alone. It will take shared work from all of us—legislators, community leaders, parents, educators, and residents of the Commonwealth—to name what we want from our state education agency and how we will support it to succeed.

The full Auditor’s report can be found here.