The question: This one comes from a school-based leader who preferred to remain anonymous. This leader wants to know “What are the federal guidelines for ‘testing transparency?’ Schools are mandated to get 95 percent participation, but how is that possible is we tell parents of their opt out rights?”
The answer: ESSA is actually really confusing when it comes to test participation. The law says that states and schools must test all of their students, just like under No Child Left Behind, the law ESSA replaced. Under NCLB, though, schools that didn’t meet the 95 percent participation requirement—both for the student population as a whole and subgroups of students, such as English-language learners—were considered automatic failures.
Now, under ESSA, states must figure low testing participation into school ratings, but just how to do that is totally up to them. And states can continue to have laws affirming parents’ right to opt their students out of tests (as Oregon does). ESSA also requires states to mark non-test-takers as not proficient.
State plans—44 of which have been approved by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team—are all over the map when it comes to dealing with this requirement…
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New Mexico’s Public Education Department is working on a plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, and held the last of a series of regional meetings Tuesday in Las Cruces to get input from various stakeholders.
New Mexico First helped facilitate regional meetings for New Mexico’s Public Education Department. Pamela Blackwell, Economic Policy Director for New Mexico First says town halls are important to hear from stakeholders.
“They are meant to solicit input from the public,” Blackwell said. “Teachers, administrators, parents, families, business leaders, on how to best implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, and what we can do to implement that for each community.”
David Morales, a Las Cruces Teacher and New Mexico’s 2016 Teacher of the Year everyone in the community should have a voice.
“I think this is an important first step,” Morales said. “I think if the Public Education Department takes this and back and listens to all the contributors, I think they can see a good swath of who their stakeholders are.”
As a teacher, Morales wants to see more time spent finding innovative ways to educate.
“I’d like to see teachers have a little bit more autonomy,” Morales said. “And also have a little more time to plan and collaborate with their peers, so that we can develop fuller more richer lessons for our kids.”
Teresa Tenorio says she’d like to see better communication with parents, and had trouble finding information for this meeting.
“I feel like the information isn’t mainstreamed,” Tenorio said. “It’s difficult to access, they wanted us to register, and when I did it didn’t show up. I think that’s very intimidating to parents.”
Tenorio says she’s also concerned about the amount of testing her young daughter has to take.
“As the parent of a first grader,” Tenorio said. “They’re already starting testing in grades K-3, and that a lot of parents don’t even know how often that it, and that it’s become a culture that probably turns the kids off to what they’re real interests are.”
Pamela Blackwell with New Mexico First says they’ve heard many similar concerns across the state.
“There are a lot of similar concerns,” Blackwell said. “As far as teacher evaluations, and how those are communicated, and how to best use those to inform instruction. That’s a huge piece. Also, parents and student support, how to help further engage parents in the education process and how to help guide their students. Also coursework, there has been more of an emphasis in these meeting on vocational education, as a key to student success.”
Blackwell says in addition to concerns they also heard innovative solutions.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a big cheerleader for school choice. And way before she came into office, states around the country were adopting tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, and more.
So has all that translated into a big bonanza for school choice in states’ Every Student Succeeds Act plans? Not really.
To be sure, ESSA isn’t a school choice law. School choice fans in Congress weren’t able to persuade their colleagues to include Title I portability in the law, which would have allowed federal funding to follow students to the public school of their choice.
However, the law does has some limited avenues for states to champion various types of school choice options. But only a handful of states are taking advantage of those opportunities, according to reviews of the plans by Education Week and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
School Improvement: At least 12 states say they want schools that are perennially low-performing to consider reopening as charter schools to boost student achievement. Those states are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
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The Every Student Succeeds Act is supposed to bring about a big change in school improvement. The law says states and districts can use any kind of interventions they want in low-performing schools, as long as they have evidence to back them up.
But the provision has some experts worried. They’re concerned that there just aren’t enough strategies with a big research base behind them for schools to choose from. These experts also worried that district officials may not have the capacity or expertise to figure out which interventions will actually work.
Districts, they’ve said, may end up doing the same things they have before, and may end up getting the same results.
“My guess is, you’ll see a lot of people doing the things they were already doing,” said Terra Wallin, who worked as a career staffer at the federal Education Department on school turnaround issues and is now a consultant with Education First, a policy organization that is working with states on ESSA implementation. “You’ll see a lot of providers approaching schools or districts to say, ‘Look, we meet the evidence standard,'” Wallin said…
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The Every Student Succeeds Act allows states and districts to come up with their own interventions for struggling schools, with the caveat that improvement strategies have to some sort of evidence to back them up.
The good: Almost every state, 46 out of the 51, including the District of Columbia, included at least some one “promising practice” for building and using evidence in their plans. Eleven states were stand-outs in this area: Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.
Nine states, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Tennessee, pledged to distribute federal school improvement dollars at least in part on the strength of school and districts’ plans to use evidence-based interventions…
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Do state plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act do enough to shine a spotlight on historically disadvantaged groups of students—and do they give schools the tools they need to improve outcomes for those children?
“What we are seeing so far is not encouraging,” concludes a report from The Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that advocates for low-income and minority students. “For all the talk about equity surrounding ESSA, too many state leaders have taken a pass on clearly naming and acting on schools’ underperformance for low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, and English learners.”
Education Trust, whose executive director, John B. King Jr., served as President Barack Obama’s last secretary of education, reviewed the 17 ESSA plans submitted to the department so far, as well as the 34 that have been submitted. It found that:
In general, states picked indicators that get at whether students are learning, including chronic absenteeism, college and career readiness, and on-track graduation. But some states picked so many indicators that it will be that there’s a “real risk” schools won’t have the incentive to improve on any of them, the advocacy group said. Example: Connecticut and Arkansas each have more than 10 indicators. Plus, some states, including Louisiana, have proposed indicators that aren’t ready for rollout yet…
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Back during the Obama administration, many states were working to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores, in part to get a piece of the $4 billion Race to the Top fund, or to get flexibility from the No Child Left Behind Act.
Then Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the feds were totally barred from monkeying around with teacher evaluation. So have a ton of states dropped these performance reviews? And what has happened in the ones that didn’t?
So far, six states, Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, have dropped teacher evaluations through student outcomes, according to the National Council of Teacher Quality. And other states have kept performance reviews, but made some modifications. Florida, for instance, has kept the student-growth measures, but allows districts to decide how they are calculated. More in this story from Liana Loewus…
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…on to our next question, which deals with ESSA funding. It comes from Sarah Boder, the director of policy & affiliate relations at the North American Association of Environmental Education.
Boder wants to know: “What’s the latest timeline for distribution of Title IVA funds to states? Are they able to receive funds as soon as their plans are approved? Do you have any sense of how many states will opt to administer those grants competitively, given the smaller appropriation?”
First off, what exactly is Title IV? And what does Boder mean by a “smaller appropriation”?
ESSA cut dozens of programs in the U.S. Department of Education and combined them into one giant block grant districts can use for everything from safety and health programs to arts education to Advanced Placement course fees. The program was supposed to get about $1.6 million annually, but Congress only provided $400 million for fiscal 2017. To help districts get more bang for their buck, lawmakers gave states the option to compete out the funds. They could also choose to dole them out by formula, with the goal of giving each district at least $10,000…
The New Mexico Legislative Education Study Commission (LESC) is meeting in Santa Fe this week, and much of the agenda is dedicated to learning about high quality systems of career and technical education (CTE), both abroad and in the United States.
This Wednesday, members of the New Mexico LESC had the opportunity to learn about one state’s innovative approach to implementing a modern youth-apprenticeship system: Colorado’s CareerWise. CareerWise is a nongovernmental, nonprofit intermediary that is rooted in a strong partnership between business, community, government and education.
CareerWise high school apprentices spend three days a week at school and two days a week at their apprenticeship sites, where they earn at least minimum wage. More than 40 Colorado employers have hired student apprentices to work in four different career paths including advanced manufacturing, information technology, financial services and business operations. Only about 100 students are participating in CareerWise’s first cohort, but the organization has an expansion strategy to reach 10 percent of all Colorado high school students within its 10th year…
Most states are not planning to do enough to prevent low-income students and students of color from being disproportionately taught by ineffective or inexperienced teachers, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
The Every Student Succeed Acts requires that states define “ineffective” and “inexperienced” teachers in their federally required plans, and describe ways they’ll ensure that low-income and nonwhite students aren’t being taught by these teachers at higher rates than their peers.
NCTQ, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, today released new analyses of 34 states’ plans, following its analyses of 16 states and the District of Columbia, which was released in June. In that earlier round, the group found a few bright spots, including New Mexico and Tennessee.
NCTQ looked at these metrics in its analyses:
How do states define inexperienced and ineffective teachers? NCTQ recommends that states define an inexperienced teacher as someone with two or fewer years of experience. An ineffective teacher should be defined by using “objective measures of student learning and growth” (like student test scores).
What data are states using? NCTQ advises states to report student-level data, and consider whether there are additional student subgroups that might have educator equity gaps.
When will states eliminate identified educator equity gaps? NCTQ calls for states to make publicly available timelines and interim targets for eliminating the gaps.
What are states’ strategies to target identified equity gaps? NCTQ says that specific strategies should be developed with stakeholder input and be evaluated over time.
(It’s important to note that these are not specified by the federal law; they are NCTQ’s interpretation of what states should be doing under ESSA.)…
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The question: This one comes from a school-based leader who preferred to remain anonymous. This leader wants to know “What are the federal guidelines for ‘testing transparency?’ Schools are mandated to get 95 percent participation, but how is that possible is we tell parents of their opt out rights?”
