The two-year-old Every Student Succeeds Act was supposed to free states up to go off in bold, new directions on K-12 policy. So did state plans, all of which have been turned into the U.S. Department of Education, live up to that promise?
Not so much, according Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington consulting firm that reviewed the plans as part of a partnership with the Collaborative for Student Success, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
“With few exceptions, we found state ESSA plans to be mostly uncreative, unambitious, unclear, or unfinished,” wrote Bellwether in an executive summary of the review. That was true even though the set of states that submitted their plans in September had more time to refine their blueprints than the 17 states, including the District of Columbia, that turned in their plans in the spring.
It’s unclear, though, if critiques like Bellwether’s resonate with the Education Department, or states. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has already approved sixteen of the seveteen ESSA plan that were submitted in the spring, including some that got low marks from Bellwether and the Collaborative’s review of the first batch of plans.
Bellwether said some of the weakest areas of state plans included goals, which Bellwether didn’t think were grounded in evidence; confusing school ratings systems; and states’ failure to incorporate student subgroup performance into school ratings. (Minnesota was an exception on subgroups.) States also weren’t specific about how they would address the needs of English-language learners and students in special education, according to Bellwether.
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Source: Education Week Politics K-12