September 27, 2017 – Georgia’s high school graduation rate has increased for the fifth straight year, from 79.4 percent in 2016 to 80.6 percent in 2017.
This is the first year Georgia’s graduation rate has risen above 80 percent using the adjusted cohort calculation now required by federal law. Fifty Georgia school districts recorded 2017 graduation rates at or above 90 percent.
The graduation rate continues to rise as Georgia’s schools and districts increase students’ access to unique, personalized learning opportunities that keep students engaged – including Career Pathways, dual enrollment, AP and IB programs, work-based learning, and internships. Local districts and schools are utilizing data more effectively to identify students’ individual learning needs; there is increased emphasis on a balanced curriculum that supports the whole child and a positive school climate that allows students to learn in a safe, supportive environment.
“It’s wonderful to see Georgia’s graduation rate continue to rise – and rise above 80 percent this year – because we’re not just talking about data points,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said. “We’re talking about individual students who are moving on, ready and prepared, to their next phase of life. Georgia’s teachers, districts, and schools are personalizing education for each individual student, making sure those students are motivated and encouraged to stay in the classroom because they’re engaged in their learning, because they see how their education connects with their future goals. I’m thrilled to see 80.6 percent of our students graduating, but we can’t stay here at 80.6 – we need to ensure opportunity for every single student in the state of Georgia. I’m confident we’re on our way and will reach that goal.”
Georgia calculates an adjusted cohort graduation rate as required by federal law. This is the first time Georgia’s state graduation rate has risen above 80 percent using the adjusted cohort calculation.
The four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate is the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma divided by the number of students who form the adjusted cohort for the graduating class. From the beginning of ninth grade, students who are entering that grade for the first time form a cohort that is subsequently “adjusted” by adding any students who transfer into the cohort during the next three years, and subtracting any students who transfer out.
While all states use the same calculation, each state sets its own requirements for students to earn a regular high school diploma. Georgia has some of the highest requirements in the nation for students to graduate with a regular diploma.
It had been three years since the Supreme Court had declared “separate but equal” in America’s public schools unconstitutional, but the decision was met with bitter resistance across the South. It would take more than a decade before the last vestiges of Jim Crow fell away from classrooms. Even the brave sacrifice of the “Little Rock Nine” felt short-lived—rather than allow more black students and further integration, the district’s high schools closed the following school year.
The watershed moment was “a physical manifestation for all to see of what that massive resistance looked like,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
“The imagery of these perfectly dressed, lovely, serious young people seeking to enter a high school … to see them met with ugliness and rage and hate and violence was incredibly powerful,” Ifill said.
Six decades later, the sacrifice of those black students stands as a symbol of the turbulence of the era, but also as a testament to an intractable problem: Though legal segregation has long ended, few white and minority students share a classroom today.
The lack of progress is clear and remains frustrating in the school district that includes Central High. The Little Rock School District, which is about two-thirds black, has been under state control since 2015 over the academic performance of some of its schools. The district has seen a proliferation of charter schools in recent years that opponents say contributes to self-segregation.
Ernest Green still remembers the promise of the era that put him and the eight other students on the front line. After reading about the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education decision in the local newspaper, he recalled: “I thought to myself, ‘Good, because I think the face of the South ought to change.’… ”
The grinding, two-year process of drafting accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act has upended states’ K-12 political landscape and laid bare long-simmering factions among power brokers charged with putting the new federal education law into effect this school year.
The details tucked into dozens of plans being turned in to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos this week were hammered out by a hodgepodge of elected and appointed officials—from governors and legislators to state school board members and local superintendents—during sometimes sparsely attended meetings, caucuses, and task force sessions.
Further complicating matters, 12 governors, half the nation’s state superintendents, and half of legislatures’ education committee chairpersons are new to office since the passing of ESSA in December 2015, when significant policy leeway was handed back to the states from the federal government.
“The problem with devolution and decentralization is that, by definition, you’re going to get a lot of variation … in terms of effort, political will, and the effectiveness of those efforts,” said Patrick McGuinn, a political scientist at Drew University in New Jersey who has studied state and federal policy and followed the implementation of ESSA.
In many cases, politicians, lobbyists, and membership organizations used their political prowess, technical expertise, and longevity to successfully push their agendas in the crafting of 51 state-level ESSA accountability plans.
Friction Points
Hammering out plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act has been a source of tension for rival policymakers in many states.
Governors
Governors in Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin rejected their states’ ESSA plans after the required 30-day review process. The plans can be submitted without governor approval—indeed, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos approved Louisiana’s plan—but such a thumbs-down indicates to the federal Education Department that there’s not political consensus over details.
State Boards of Education
In states such as Delaware, North Carolina, Washington, and West Virginia, legislatures attempted to strip the powers of their state boards of education over key education policy areas even as the states readied their approaches to ESSA implementation. In North Carolina, the state board sued the legislature over an education law passed during a special session that board members said violated the state’s constitution.
Legislatures
Lawmakers in states such as Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, and West Virginia passed bills that dictated components of states’ ESSA plans regarding school accountability and testing. That left local superintendents and state board members frustrated.
State Chiefs
State superintendents in Alabama, Colorado, and New Mexico resigned in the middle of the ESSA-planning process after high-profile debates over key policies, leaving practitioners in the lurch and states in some instances making last-minute changes.
But the nature of state politics left out other groups, some of which will spend the coming months restructuring their spending and staffing priorities to more effectively lobby in the inevitable battles to come over the new law.
“The politics of federalism is going to dramatically change going forward,” said Sandra Vergari, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied federal education policy. Following all 50 states “is going to be a lot more work for us scholars, policy analyst, and advocates.”
Unlike prior federal versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESSA required “meaningful stakeholder engagement” in crafting state plans—without defining who a stakeholder is or how much or what type of engagement needs to be conducted.
Many state superintendents said shortly after ESSA was passed that they had a natural incentive to put an end to years of polarizing debates over standards, accountability, and testing. But as the ESSA planning process unfolded, power grabs ensued in a number of states. Those traditionally in charge of education policy sparred with each other and with lawmakers eager to take on a share of the new responsibility.
In North Carolina, for example, the Republican-controlled legislature—just days before Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper took office this winter—decided during a special session that the state board should no longer oversee key accountability and school turnaround decisions, and that those decisions should be left up to the state’s recently appointed Republican state superintendent.
The board sued, and a judge decided last week to delay the law, which has held up the state’s ESSA planning process.
Delaware’s legislature stripped its state board of several powers, and a pending bill in Washington would scrap that state’s board of the ability to oversee portions of its accountability system.
And after years of infighting, Indiana’s legislature decided this year that the state’s elected superintendent should instead be appointed by the governor.
Hot-Button Issues
In other states, crucial policy decisions over testing, state goals, and how to define an ineffective teacher fanned flames between advocacy groups and politicians.
The governors in Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin all refused to sign off on their states’ plans before sending them to Secretary DeVos. (A plan still can be turned in without the governor’s signature.)
And Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley asked DeVos to send the plan back (something his office is not allowed to do) after he took issue with portions that dealt with special education students. That state’s board-appointed superintendent involved more than 300 people in the development of the plan, a process the lieutenant governor said still left the state’s special education community without a voice.
“What we have in our system is all these interest groups across the political spectrum that have a lot of power and say,” said Calley, who has a child with special needs. “There’s no organized group with PACS and electoral power in our system that represents the parents.”
State superintendents, many with their own political agendas, were left walking a political tightrope in some states. Several didn’t survive.
In a political snub, Hawaii’s since-replaced state Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi wasn’t invited by Democratic Gov. David Ige to sit on the state’s ESSA task force.
New Mexico’s secretary of education, Hanna Skandera, resigned in June shortly after turning in her state’s controversial plan, which upset the state’s teaching force. And just last week, Alabama Superintendent Michael Sentance resigned after a bruising evaluation by the state’s district superintendents who took issue with his leadership style and the ESSA development process.
Advocates Weigh In
National, state, and local advocacy organizations all scrambled throughout ESSA planning to adjust to the fluid situation. A board meeting in California in July, for example, fielded dozens of comments protesting the state’s proposed accountability system.
In other states, advocates skipped state board meetings and went straight to their legislature.
Maryland’s Democratically-controlled legislature, pressured by the state’s teachers’ union, effectively wrote the state’s accountability system into a law called “Protect Our Schools Act.” The bill survived Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto and inflamed state board of education members who accused politicians of trapping students in failing schools.
Ohio’s teachers’ union and parent groups managed to convince the state’s superintendent in the spring to stall the turning in of that state’s plan after they convinced enough people that the plan would ramp up school testing.
And Kentucky’s legislature passed as part of its new ESSA-aligned accountability system a sweeping education bill that mostly scrapped a historic school governance model that had elevated parent voices in the form of school-based-decision-making councils.
The battle pitted Kentucky’s politically weak parent groups against the state’s well-financed superintendents’ association and teachers’ union. It flew in the face of a working relationship the three parties had forged over the years in fighting for more school funding from the legislature as the coal industry collapsed.
“We’ve been together for so long and through so much together,” said a disappointed Lynne Slone, the attorney for the Kentucky Association of School Councils.
In Florida, Rosa Castro-Feinberg, a civil rights activist for minority and English-language-learner students, said she will shift her efforts to the local level if the state’s ESSA plan passes federal muster. Castro-Feinberg launched a petition and letter-writing and media campaign to stop several waiver requests from being attached to that state’s plan, an effort that ultimately failed.
Others, however, see an opportunity for advocates and policymakers to forge ties across state lines in the wake of the sometimes-tense ESSA planning, especially on common issues such as the achievement gap, the effects poverty has on schools, and stagnant student performance.
“For some states that are diving into this more deeply, doing the soul-searching, you’re seeing a lot less partisanship,” said Michelle Exstrom, the Education Program Director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Education shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I think when you have a sense of urgency, you figure out that it’s in everyone’s best interest to improve outcomes, and leaders get motivated to go to the table to fix it.”
SALT LAKE CITY – Scores on annual end-of-level Student Assessment of Growth and Excellence (SAGE) tests in language arts, mathematics and science dipped slightly in 2017 for the first time in four years, the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) reported today.
The Board reported declining scores among most student groups with the notable exceptions of increases in:
All subjects from students with limited-English proficiency and students with disabilities.
Language arts testing for students who are Hispanic and of multiple races.
Mathematics scores among students who identify with multiple races.
Overall, language arts proficiency rates decreased from 44.1 percent in 2016 to 43.6 percent in 2017; mathematics proficiency rates decreased from 46.5 percent to 45.7 percent; and science proficiency rates decreased from 48.7 percent to 47.5 percent.
Utah students have been taking state SAGE since 2014. Despite the decrease between 2016 and 2017, overall scores are still higher than in 2014.
“We will be looking deeper into the numbers to understand reasons behind the slight decline,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson. “One year of decrease does not annul three years of growth, particularly when we also have 2017 data from ACT that shows an increase in Utah high school student scores. The Utah State Board of Education will continue to focus on improving academic achievement for each student.”
Utah students take SAGE in language arts in grades 3 – 11, in math in grades 3 – 8 plus students who take Secondary Math I, II, and III, and in science in grades 4 – 8 and in Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Utah law allows parents to opt their students out of tests. In 2017, 5.9 percent of tests (69,685 tests in all) were opted out compared to 2 percent (or 22,077 tests) in 2014.
USBE will use data from student scores to calculate school grading reports in accordance with Utah law. School grading information will be released later this month.
Student data from 2017 SAGE, and all previous years, are available on the Utah State Board of Education website.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WDTV) — The West Virginia Department of Education has submitted its plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA, the department announced Monday evening.
The letter was submitted to the U.S. Department of Education Monday, two weeks prior to the deadline.
In a statement Monday, the department said the plan “details the foundational pieces of its public education system including content standards, the statewide assessment, the school accountability system and support for struggling schools.” It also describes how federal funding will be distributed to counties.
Officials say the final version of the plan contains numerous changes due to stakeholder input.
“I am extremely proud of the extraordinary amount of work put into developing this plan and for the valuable input we received from various stakeholders including teachers, parents, administrators, community members and elected officials,” stated state Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Paine. “I feel confident that West Virginia’s plan outlines a foundation that is best for all Mountain State students and know we will ultimately see results surrounding student achievement.”
The U.S. Department of Education now has 120 days to review the plan and provide feedback. The plan can be viewed at http://wvde.state.wv.us/essa/review/.
NY AMSTERDAM NEWS — In the months since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, activists and scholars have converged, condemning his violent and divisive racial rhetoric. In response to Trump’s rhetoric, leaders are working to build a resistance against an agenda that not only divides the country but also sets precedence for violent and discriminatory policies and actions.
The New School, known for its innovative work in areas of social change, has launched “Race in the U.S.,” a free and public lecture series on race relations in America. It features a dynamic lineup of conversations with community activists, scholars and policy changers.
As if it were planned for such a tense moment in our country, the lecture series was originally inspired by New School students’ desires to connect on the topic of race.
Michelle DePass, dean of the Milano School of International Affairs and one of the course organizers, said students were inspired by the work of the Black Lives Matter movement years ago and started galvanizing around race politics then. Now, with the launch of the lecture series, there is an opportunity to build a new program that integrates both an academic class of advocates and activists in the area of race.
“As we follow and work with our student body, we find that our students are very intersectional, and we realized that after this election, we cannot be in our silos anymore,” DePass said. “What this course is really doing is intersecting race with so many different aspects and elements of our society and lifting up the cover and saying that you really think you exist in this safe zone or this zone where the issues of the system have not touched you, but they actually have.”
What do we do in the toxic climate we have today? That is the question for which the lecture series hopes to stir up an answer. The New School social justice masterminds and scholars DePass, Maya Wiley and Darrick Hamilton joined forces to create this platform for impactful conversations with activists, organizers and scholars such as Shanelle Matthews of Black Lives Matter and Linda Saursour, a Muslim rights advocate and Women’s March organizer.
Wiley, fairly new to the New School staff, serves as the VP for social justice at the university. She previously served as a counsel to New York Mayor de Blasio, advising on legal matters. Now she is
working with the school to integrate social justice actions from the school community level to engaging students on social justice matters through curriculum.
This course, she says, is about engaging various groups within the community of social change both in academia and on the grass roots level.
“One of the things that we’ve always had at the New School is academics who are not just researching areas of injustice and inequalities, but are also thinking about how they get solved,” Wiley said. “So part of the ‘new’ in the New School is forms of pedagogy that work on and engage in real world solutions.”
Hamilton, who oversees the Ph.D. students within the Milano School and is an associate professor of economics and urban policy, is anticipating that the course will be a training ground for an “army of social justice warriors.”
Through public lectures like those offered in “Race in the U.S.,” students will be challenged by ideas and equipped with the tools they need to enact social change in strategic ways.
The organizers of the course believe that without properly understanding how to read and interpret data, activists cannot serve their causes, and it is in this way the worlds of academia and grass roots organizing converge.
“This course would have existed whether or not Donald Trump was president because we were talking about it well before the election was concluded,” Wiley stated. “But I do think it’s elevated the critical nature of the time we are in, that the discourse of what happened during the campaign has become the national discourse. I think about our students that are both active and horrified at the world they are inheriting and having some space not only about what it means, but how they can do something.”
The course will be held Mondays through Dec. 11, 2017 at the New School. It will also be available on Livestream. It is free and available to the public. For more information, visit https://courses.newschool.edu/courses/UTNS2000?sec=7497.
NY AMSTERDAM NEWS — In the months since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, activists and scholars have converged, condemning his violent and divisive racial rhetoric. In response to Trump’s rhetoric, leaders are working to build a resistance against an agenda that not only divides the country but also sets precedence for violent and discriminatory policies and actions.