EDUCATION WEEK — Minnesota, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
All four states, who were among the 34 that turned in their plans this fall, were flagged for issues with accountability, helping low-performing schools improve, and other areas. So far, ten other states that turned in their plans this fall — Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming—have received feedback from the feds. Puerto Rico has also gotten a response on its plan. (Check out our summaries of their feedback here and here.)
Plus, sixteen states and the District of Columbia, all of which submitted plans in the spring, have gotten the all-clear from U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Colorado, which asked for extra time on its application, is the only spring state still waiting for approval.
So what problems did the department find in this latest round of states? Here’s a quick look. Click on the state’s name for a link to the feds’ letter…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming are the latest states to receive feedback on their plans for implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The U.S. Department of Education staffers seem to be burning the midnight oil on feedback letters lately. Four other states—Georgia, Maryland, Puerto Rico, and Utah—got responses last week. Every state has submitted a plan to implement ESSA. And 16 states and the District of Columbia have had their plans approved.
So what do the latest letters say? They are extensive and almost all of them ask for a lot more detail on testing, school turnarounds, accountability, goals, teacher distribution, and more.
Here’s a quick look at some highlights. Click on the state name to read the full letter.
Alabama: The department wants to state to make its student achievement goals clearer, and better explain how student growth on state tests would be used to calculate a school’s academic score. And the feds aren’t clear on how Alabama will calculate English-language proficiency and incorporate it into school ratings—an ESSA must. The state also needs to make it clear that it will flag schools that don’t get federal Title I money for extra supports with subgroups of students…
Read the full story here: May require an Education Week subscription.
By Je’Don Holloway Talley, For the Birmingham Times
For educators at the Black Star Academy Home School Co-Op in Forestdale, there is the holistic and then there is the “Whole”-listic. Their goal is to offer both.
“We believe in ‘Whole’-listic education, meaning we focus on the whole child—mind, body, and spirit,” said Tremon Muhammad, creator and founder of the Black Star Academy (BSA), believed to be one of the first culturally centered home schooling collectives in the state. “Our educational program deals with the whole human being. We are big on academics, but we also deal with character and moral development.”
Part of the holistic curriculum means students participate in morning exercises, which can include yoga and meditation.
“On Monday mornings, we start our day with Kemetic Yoga and meditate on African proverbs … because you never know,” said April Muhammad, Tremon’s wife, who is director of the BSA. “Sometimes people have crazy weekends, or the children may come in with attitudes, so you want to make sure you check their spirits so that they can decompress before going into the classroom.”
More African-American families have embraced home schooling and are choosing it as an alternative for their children. An estimated 220,000 African-American children are currently being home schooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in home schooling, with their children making up an estimated 10 percent of the home schooling population, according to a 2015 article in The Atlantic magazine.
“A lot of people are having trouble with many of the changes in the public-school system,” Tremon Muhammad said.
Foreign Languages
Tremon and April Muhammad founded Birmingham’s BSA in 2015 to “give parents an alternative outside of the current educational system.”
The academy’s broad curriculum includes “cultural heritage, which incorporates geography, world history, and U.S. history,” said Tremon Muhammad. “… We also have foreign language. Our students have been learning Swahili for two years, and we are definitely looking into other foreign languages, such as Spanish, and French, because as we’ve networked with the African continent, we noticed these languages to be prominent in those countries.”
The goal is for students to master theses languages, so they are able to interact and participate in worldwide trade and commerce, the Muhammads said.
Beekeeping and More
Another part of the curriculum is beekeeping, a key part of the BSA’s Agriculture-Science program. This is the second year the course is being offered.
“Our teen students attend this class once a week,” said April Muhammad. “We have bees that produce honey, which will produce money for the school. We will be selling lip balm made from our bee hive during Kwanzaa, and we plan to have honey for sale in the spring.”
Other courses include Intro to Auto Care and Home Construction.
“We don’t see those as electives,” she said. “We see them as necessities because if you can’t feed or house yourself, what is your purpose on the planet? We want our children to have those things as they’re growing toward becoming productive, global citizens.”
Expanding the Curriculum
The BSA is open Monday through Wednesday, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. It is on a semester system that follows the traditional school calendar. And it averages 35 enrolled students, from kindergarten through 12th grade, per semester.
“We are quickly approaching a school-based level,” the Muhammads said. “Parents are showing demand for a full-time school-based curriculum, but right now we are functioning very well as a home schooling collective.”
April Muhammad, former director of the local and home schooling branch of the Muhammad University of Islam (MUI), said the initial success led the BSA to expand beyond the walls of a “faith-based” institution.
“We were attracting so many non-Muslim children to our program, and [parents] were kind of put off by the religious connotation [behind the institution], so my husband and I started a nonprofit [to expand the mission and curriculum],” she said.
Tremon Muhammad added, “Our initial mission was to be a relief source for people that were supplementing their child’s public-school education with home schooling.”
Shared Vision
Reverend James Ephraim of First United Presbyterian Church in Forestdale has opened up his church for a home school Co-op. Students enrolled in Black Star Academy use space in the church 3 days a week. (Frank Couch Photography)
Others in the community felt the same way.
In November 2014, the Muhammads were invited to an “interest meeting” at Forestdale’s First United Presbyterian Church, where its pastor, the Rev. James Ephraim, shared a desire to see children in his community educated independently of the public-school system.
“My husband and I went to the interest meeting to see what their home schooling idea was about,” April Muhammad recalled. “When I looked at the curriculum they submitted to us, it was almost the exact curriculum we had already been working with for 10 years.”
The Muhammads learned that Ephraim and community activists Thomas “Divine Mind” Davis and Bennie Holmes were in the early phases of creating a similar alternative-education program, called a Freedom School.
Tremon Muhammad said that once the group saw the similarities in vision and curriculum, they decided to collaborate. April Muhammad remembers that parents and educators at the interest meeting all agreed to support the BSA.
“We started off strong,” April Muhammad said. “Immediately, we had 25 students in our physical home five days a week, with the parents coming in to help and to learn, as well. But I have to say, it’s been the best experience because my husband pushed it. He pushed me and his vision for a community-based institution, and we’re a success.”
‘Laying the Foundation’
Reverend James Ephraim of First United Presbyterian Church in Forestdale has opened up his church for a home school Co-op. Students enrolled in Black Star Academy use space in the church 3 days a week. (Frank Couch Photography)
By the fall of 2016, the BSA was offered use of the First United Presbyterian Church.
“We realized that we needed a place where kids, parents, and the community could come and learn as a collective,” Ephraim said. “We are laying the foundation for building communities and working with the African concept that it takes a village to raise a child, and we realized we don’t have the village. In order to create the village, the parents and the community need to be involved.”
Parental Involvement
Erycka Birchfield with her family (from left) Edyn Moss, 6; Essix Jones, 14; and Essac Jones 12. (Ariel Worthy/The Birmingham Times)
Many parents were willing to assist, April Muhammad said: “We differ because we have the autonomy to bring the parents into the child’s curriculum. [The BSA] has heavy parent involvement and is able to give more individual attention to students and cater to different learning styles.”
Erycka Birchfield, the BSA’s first parent volunteer educator, said home schooling is ideal for the black community because it teaches everyone involved a greater awareness and sense of self.
“Unity is severely lacking among my people,” she said. “I wanted to have a full-time, all-inclusive role in my children’s education. When I first called [April Muhammad] and inquired about her program, our hour-long conversation included discussions about the current curriculum and the school-to-prison pipeline for our [African-American] boys.”
Giving students that sense of self is what makes the BSA distinctive.
“We equip [students] with knowledge of themselves and equip them with the elements they need not just to survive but to thrive in the elements of life, and to be builders of their own communities,” April Muhammad said.
Another quality that sets BSA apart: “Everyone does not learn the same way, so there shouldn’t be a cookie-cutter approach to education,” she said. “Most importantly, we teach [our students] that they are math, they are science, they are history. Subjects are easier to grasp when they are learned from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”
Shown above at the Eutaw City Park L to R: Mt. Hebron Coalition Members Severe Strode, and Johnni Morning, Eutaw Mayor Raymond Steele, Extension Secretary Mary Beck, Extension Coordinator Lovie Parks and Expanded Food and Nutrition Educational Program Director Mary Henley.
GREEN COUNTY DEMOCRAT — The Eutaw City Park on Lock 7 Road now has state-of-the-art playground equipment, secured with an AlProHealth grant through Auburn University Extension Program coordinated by Greene County Extension Coordinator Mrs. Lovie Parks. The grant also provides fencing around the park grounds. “The total investment in the park by Auburn Extension exceeds $40,000,” stated Ms. Parks.
According to Eutaw Mayor Raymond Steele, this project has been in the works for some time.
“We are also committed to adding a concession stand and a large pavilion with restrooms to make the park comparable to other state-of-the art parks in the state,” he said.
The playground unit will be available to children, ages 12 and under, from 7:00 a.m. until sundown. He noted that the park is also available to the community for special events such as reunions, birthday parties and more, by contacting the city for reservations.
Other benefits to Greene County by the Auburn Extension Program include providing the benches on the old courthouse square in Eutaw.
The Mt. Hebron Coalition has also benefited from an ALProHealth grant. The SCORE Center, originally organized by Betsy and Reola Bizzell, received funds for exercise equipment and other related live well programs. The SCORE Center is open to the community, serving seniors as well as youth. Johnni Morning, a Mt. Hebron Coalition Member, stated that along with the exercise equipment, internet service is also available at the Score Center. She noted that the public is invited to join the exercise program on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at the SCORE Center (old Mt. Hebron Pre-School) from 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. ages 18 and older. Marvin Childs serves a president of the Mt. Hebron Coalition.
Mrs. Parks emphasized that a big component of the Auburn Extension program is building unity, bringing families and the community together. “The goal of ALProHealth includes increasing physical activity, improving nutrition, reducing obesity, and preventing and controlling diabetes, heart disease, and stroke by promoting community wellness,” she stated.
The Extension Program also sponsors after school programs, community gardens and various live well programs, partnering with churches and community groups.
By Rushern Baker (County Executive, Prince Georges County, Md.)
On November 4, 1952, Dr. Helen Kenyon addressed the Women’s Society of Riverside Church in New York City and opined that, “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often paraphrased the quote.
Today, sadly, our public schools best reflect Dr. Kenyon’s and Dr. King’s sentiment as the most segregated place in America.
The rampant re-segregation of American public schools poses a greater threat to the trajectory of America’s progress than terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and Russian meddling in our elections. Sixty-two years after Brown v. Board, the GAO (Government Accountability Office) reported that from the years 2000-2014, both the percentage of K-12 public schools in high-poverty and the percentage of African American and Hispanic students enrolled in public schools more than doubled, and the percentage of all schools with so-called racial or socioeconomic isolation grew from 9 percent to 16 percent.
Research shows that racial and socioeconomic diversity in our classrooms leads to higher than average test scores, greater college enrollment rates, and the narrowing of achievement gaps. These gains don’t just apply to poor and minority children either—every student benefits from learning and engaging with peers from different backgrounds. Despite the evidence, today our public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago.
As an advocate for children and families, and as a public servant, who has fought for more resources for students, I believe we must act boldly to save free, high-quality public education for all.
Some of the very leaders tasked with solving the negative effects from school re-segregation offer shortsighted policies that exacerbate racial and economic divisions. The ripple-effect, consequences of their misguided thinking remains the greatest policy foible of the modern era. Lazy logic behind bad policy feeds a perception that that the achievement gap exists simply, because poor and minority students learn differently than their wealthier, White peers. Rather, it is directly tied to declining enrollment, lower property values, and the dwindling resources available to tackle mounting challenges in the communities that surround underperforming public schools.
The greatest irony remains that those promoting harmful education policies use the same language of “giving every child a chance at a high-quality education” to pitch their tax-dollar-poaching and resource-pilfering experiments to desperate parents.
Rather than making public education a number one priority, a Hunger-Games-like competition for vouchers and charter schools leaves parents and students fending for themselves. The families that lose the education lottery end up at schools with increased needs and declining resources. In Maryland, our Governor’s BOOST voucher program set aside $5 million dollars of public money to help 2,400 families pay for their child’s education. Yet, 80 percent of the families receiving these grants had children who were already enrolled in private schools.
Vouchers, whose American roots can be traced back to some Southern states’ attempts to avoid integration, perpetuate segregated education and are nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to cut off funds to public schools. It gets even worse. Some communities have simply seceded from the larger school district, as we’ve seen in Alabama and Tennessee, to keep from integrating their schools. Since 2000, the U.S. Justice Department has released 250 communities from their desegregation orders and consequently facilitated their financial and administrative secession from their school districts.
After all those factors lead to a dip in school performance, students and their communities are stigmatized as “failing.” Schools close. Quality of life drops; economic prospects dwindle; public safety decreases; and the cycle repeats, so that higher needs populations receive even fewer resources.
I know. I’ve lived through it. It’s time to back up the big talk of “opportunity for all” with policies that don’t ask parents to compete for a few spots, but instead, make public dollars work for every child.
We’ve embraced this mission in my home of Prince George’s County, Maryland where I serve as County Executive. Though we know our best days are to come, we’ve seen incredible progress: increased enrollment; higher graduation rates; an increase in innovative academic programs; and more students receiving college scholarships.
The debate over how we improve public education can’t begin with state-funded segregation, which harms communities and students, especially our most vulnerable. Let’s secure our children’s futures and the future of America by making a meaningful investment in quality public schools for all.
Rushern Baker, a graduate of Howard University, is the county executive in Prince George’s County, Maryland. You can follow him on Twitter at @CountyExecBaker.
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.”
Alabama’s state superintendent Michael Sentance very much wants to keep his job so he can see the results of months of planning a new course for Alabama’s public education system.
Sentance, whose lack of experience in the classroom made him an unlikely choice for state superintendent last year, recently received low marks on evaluations from members of the state board of education.
He will present his plan to address board members’ concerns at the Aug. 10 board meeting.
Admitting he is not a good communicator in large groups, Sentance sat down with AL.com on Thursday afternoon to talk about the challenges he’s faced in Alabama and, though he lacks confidence he will be able to get his message across, he hopes to stick around and see plans made during the past 11 months come to fruition.
WASHINGTON—The National Governors Association (NGA) today released a statement following the release of the revised state plan template under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA):
“Governors’ review of ESSA state plans reflects necessary checks and balances at the state level to ensure educational equity and local control of education. Today the U.S. Department of Education ultimately:
Reaffirmed the role of governors in ESSA;
Included governors and NGA in the process to marry existing state plans with the revised template;
Guaranteed governors’ continued participation throughout the peer and secretarial review process; and
Ensured governors have ample time to review each state plan and make certain it is a reflection of the state’s vision for education.
Governors are concerned that the Department’s revised template fails to prioritize proper stakeholder engagement, even though it is a core requirement within the law. NGA has led national efforts to encourage significant input from classroom teachers, parents, superintendents, principals and school boards. We will not waver as a result of this development.
Across the country, governors like Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards will continue to provide a forum for stakeholders’ voices so states can sufficiently develop their plans and determine the future of the collective education system.”
By Rep. Bradley Byrne,who is in his second full term representing Alabama’s First Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. A Fairhope resident, he serves on the House Education and the Workforce, Armed Services, and Rules committees.
Much has been made recently about the new Secretary of Education, Besty DeVos, and the future of our nation’s education system. As a lifelong education reform advocate, I welcome the focus on education and the conversation about ways to improve educational opportunities for our students.
Education reform has been a key component of my career in public service. I served on the Alabama State School Board for eight years and later served as chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system. In Congress, I am the only member from Alabama on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
In each of these roles, I have had opportunities to visit with the teachers, support staff, and administrators that keep our schools running. I always leave these visits with a greater appreciation for the work our teachers do and the challenges they face day in and day out.
As such, I have concerns with the perception that the focus on education in America is moving away from public schools. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of students in Alabama and across the United States are in public schools. That fact is very unlikely to change.
To be clear, I support school choice efforts and remain open to finding ways to give students greater opportunities to escape failing schools. That said, we cannot lose sight of the most important responsibility when it comes to education in America: supporting public education.
My top priority when it comes to public education is to get the federal government out of the way so our teachers, administrators, and school board members can do their jobs. The heavy hand of the federal government only seems to complicate matters and takes the focus away from educating students.
For example, only about 10 percent of the funding for K-12 education is from the federal government. Yet, the Government Accountability Office found that 41 percent of the paperwork comes from the federal level. These numbers highlight the fact that Washington does more harm than good when it comes to education.
Time spent filling out paperwork and complying with federal mandates is time a teacher cannot spend working with at-risk students or planning future lessons. Sadly, many times a large chunk of the federal money is also caught up in bureaucracy and never even reaches the classroom.
In December of 2015, Congress passed, and the President signed, the Every Student Succeeds Act. This bill replaced No Child Left Behind and paved the way toward greater state and local control over education. The Wall Street Journal called this bill “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century.”
The Every Student Succeeds Act is an example of how Washington should work. After numerous hearings and debates, we arrived at a truly bipartisan bill that brought Republicans and Democrats together around a bill designed to get Washington bureaucrats out of our classrooms.
The focus now turns to the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Congress must work closely with the Department of Education to ensure the law is working and the burden is being lifted off our local public schools. Teachers deserve and need the flexibility to innovate and try new methods instead of being stuck in the failed, Washington-knows-best system.
So, as the public debate over school choice and charter schools continues, I want to ensure you that my top focus remains on improving public education in our country.
Ultimately, a strong, vibrant public education system is vital to our economic success and the health of our democracy.
EDUCATION WEEK — Minnesota, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
By Je’Don Holloway Talley, For the Birmingham Times
By Rushern Baker (County Executive, Prince Georges County, Md.)
WASHINGTON—The National Governors Association (NGA) today released a statement following the release of the revised state plan template under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA):