The Every Student Succeeds Act may have kept annual testing as a federal requirement. But it also aims to help states cut down on the number of assessments their students must take by giving districts the chance to use a nationally-recognized college entrance exam, instead of the regular state test, for accountability purposes.
When the law passed back in 2015, some superintendents hailed the change, saying it would mean one less test for many 11th graders, who would already be preparing for the SAT or ACT. Assessment experts, on the other hand, worried the change would make student progress a lot harder to track.
Now, more than two years after the law passed, it appears that only two states—North Dakota and Oklahoma—have immediate plans to offer their districts a choice of tests. Policymakers in at least two other states—Georgia and Florida—are thinking through the issue. Arizona and Oregon could also be in the mix.
That’s not exactly a mad dash to take advantage of the flexibility.
Offering a choice of tests can be a tall order for state education officials, said Julie Woods, a senior policy analyst at the Education Commission of the States. They have to figure out how to pay for the college entrance exams, design a process for districts to apply for the flexibility, and find a way to compare student scores on the state test to scores on the SAT, ACT, or another test.
That’s “potentially a lot more work than states are currently doing,” Woods said. “States have to decide what the payoff is for them…”
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Public education in America needs reform—and badly. There is an abundance of data showing the underperformance of our nation’s public schools. For example, the results of a major cross-national test, the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment, placed American students 30th in math and 19th in science out of all 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of the largest advanced economies. And the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress administered by the U.S. Department of Education found that a mere 40 percent of 4th graders, 33 percent of 8th graders, and 25 percent of 12th graders were “proficient” or “advanced” in math.
That’s not to say that all public schools are bad—quite the contrary. However, ineffective education tends to center in large, urban areas. When was the last time you heard someone say they wished they could move to Detroit to send their kids to that city’s public schools? It’s a pointed question—but the answer would be just the same if you said Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia. This is not a single state or a single school’s problem—it is a systematic problem for the entire country.
Consider this sad reality: Our nation produces technology so advanced that I could use the phone in my pocket—which is already three generations old—to take a video of you and email it to someone in London, but at the same time we can’t seem to teach a 4th grader to read in Detroit. Does this make sense? Why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?
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Gary Wolfram is the William Simon Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Schools are under growing pressure to make sure that students are ready for work or job training, as well as college, when they graduate from high school. But employers say their young hires haven’t learned the reading, writing, and verbal-communication skills that are most important to a successful working life.
That gap between reality and expectations begs a boxful of questions about whether there’s a preparation problem and, if so, how to solve it.
Should K-12 schools add workplace-oriented literacy skills to their already-heavy lineup of classics like the five-paragraph essay? Who should teach young people how to write an environmental-impact report or explain quarterly business results to investors: High schools? Colleges? Or are such skills better learned at work or in job-training programs?
Surveys of employers paint a picture of discontent. Executives and hiring managers report that they have trouble finding candidates who communicate well. Good oral-communication skills, in particular, rank especially high on employers’ wish lists, alongside critical thinking and working in teams.
But do companies’ hiring struggles mean that K-12 schools, colleges, and job-training programs are doing a poor job of preparing students for work?
Some labor economists argue that the much-ballyhooed “skills gap” is caused not by inadequate career preparation but by companies’ refusal to provide the pay and training necessary to get the workers they need. And many educators argue that the primary purpose of schooling isn’t to create a jobs pipeline but to prepare young people to be informed, active citizens.
Education Week‘s new special report on literacy and the workplace won’t be able to resolve these arguments for you. But it can give you a glimpse of how some schools and employers are grappling with the workplace-literacy demands that young people face. Relatively few K-12 schools, it seems, are seriously exploring this kind of work…
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With the 2018-19 school year in full swing, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has finished approving nearly every state’s plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. But in some ways, the federal government’s work on ESSA is just beginning.
The federal K-12 law’s hallmark may be state and local control, yet the Education Department still has the responsibility to oversee the more than $21 billion in federal funding pumped out to states and districts under ESSA. That will often take the form of monitoring—in which federal officials take a deep look at state and local implementation of the law.
And the department has other oversight powers, including issuing guidance on the law’s implementation, writing reports on ESSA, and deciding when and how states can revise their plans.
Even though ESSA includes a host of prohibitions on the education secretary’s role, DeVos and her team have broad leeway to decide what those processes should look like, said Reg Leichty, a co-founder of Foresight Law + Policy, a law firm in Washington.
Given the Trump team’s emphasis on local control, “I think they’ll try for a lighter touch” than past administrations, Leichty said. But there are still requirements in the law the department must fill, he added.
“States and districts shouldn’t expect the system to be fundamentally different [from under previous versions of the law.] They are still going to have to file a lot of data,” Leitchy said.
But advocates for traditionally overlooked groups of students aren’t holding their breath for a robust monitoring process, in part because they think the department has already approved state plans that skirt ESSA’s requirements…
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This year featured a new president, a new education secretary, and the first year schools began shifting to the Every Student Succeeds Act. It’s been a busy year for us, and to cap it off, we’re highlighting the 10 blog posts we wrote that got the most readership in 2017. Here we go, from the post with the 10th-most views to the post with the most views:
President Donald Trump repeatedly said on the campaign trail in 2016 that he wanted to end the Common Core State Standards. So when U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said this to a TV news anchor in April, she was channeling Trump’s stated desire. But DeVos’ statement wasn’t accurate, since more than three dozen states still use the content standards. The Every Student Succeeds Act also prohibits DeVos from getting involved in states’ decisions about standards.
Along with promoting school choice, one of DeVos’ big goals this year has been to restrain the federal government’s role in education when it comes to regulations, as well as the size and scope of the U.S. Department of Education. It doesn’t look like her push to significantly slash the department’s budget has the support of Congress, but DeVos has been trying to trim the department’s staffing levels recently.
Carmen Fariña, the chancellor of New York City Schools, announced Thursday that she would be resigning in 2018, leaving behind a school system fundamentally changed from where it stood when her tenure began four years ago.
Fariña, 74, plans to leave her job as head of the 1.1 million-student school system, the largest in the country, prior to the end of the school year.
“I took the job with a firm belief in excellence for every student, in the dignity and joyfulness of the teaching profession, and in the importance of trusting relationships where collaboration is the driving force,” Fariña wrote in a letter to staff Thursday. “These are the beliefs that I have built over five decades as a New York City educator, and they have been at the heart of the work we have done together for the past four years.”
A nationwide search for her successor is already underway, with plans to hire a successor within months, said Mayor Bill de Blasio. Under state law, the city’s mayor controls the schools.
Who de Blasio has in mind for his next chancellor isn’t yet clear, but school leadership experts say the job requires a hard-to-find combination of someone with credibility as an educator and the acumen to navigate the rough-and-tumble politics of New York City…
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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…
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Washington — A charter network that puts a premium on social-emotional learning. Public school districts that have improved their graduation rates through a focus on personalized learning and technology. A faith-based organization that exposes students to work-based learning experiences while they earn a high school diploma.
These are all educational institutions that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos highlighted Tuesday in a wide-ranging summit about how to “Rethink K-12 Education.” Also on hand: representatives from other charter networks, home schools, religious schools, and public school districts that have tried out new models, such as museum schools.
“This is not a conversation about school choice,” DeVos told reporters after the event wrapped up at U.S. Department of Education headquarters. “This is a conversation about doing what’s right for individual students. And it’s pretty clear from all of the participants today that we have innovation going on in traditional public schools. We have innovation going on in private schools and charter schools and home schools. And the focus really of the conversation is doing what’s right for students and looking for new ways to break down barriers to those opportunities for students.”
Big prevailing themes of the day included empowering children to take charge of their own learning, preparing teachers to offer students a more customized approach, and helping charters and other schools that offer a different approach to partner with traditional public schools…
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The final tax bill that Congress will soon vote on maintains the $250 tax deduction that teachers can use for classroom supplies—and yet teachers’ unions are finding little consolation in a legislative overhaul they say hurts working families.
The version put out by the congressional conference committee Friday afternoon, which still needs to be passed by both the House and Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump, offers a compromise, keeping the deduction where it is at $250.
K-12 teachers, principals, counselors, and aides have been able to claim the “educator expense deduction” for about 15 years now. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who is still in office, pushed for the deduction as a way of helping reimburse teachers who spend money of their own on supplies and professional development. According to a 2016 survey from Scholastic, teachers spend about $530 out of their own pockets each year on classroom items…
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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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Schools are under growing pressure to make sure that students are ready for work or job training, as well as college, when they graduate from high school. But employers say their young hires haven’t learned the reading, writing, and verbal-communication skills that are most important to a successful working life.
