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…
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Many years ago when I was teaching middle grade students, I had a daily activity I called ‘banned word of the day.’ I used words such as “interesting,” “like,” “nice,” and, “cool.” I would write the word on the chalkboard, draw a circle around the word, and draw a line through it. Doing that signaled to my students that they could not use that word that day. I was tired of reading book reports that described each and every book as “interesting” and wanted to push my students to expand their vocabularies. The students made a game out of the activity and listened carefully to each other, waiting for someone to slip up. Several times a day I would hear someone shout out, “Oooh, Mrs. Billings, she said ‘interesting.'” The students and I had a great time with these banned words of the day.
However, one day one of my bright students in the urban school in which I taught said, “Mrs. Billings I don’t think ‘banned word of the day’ is right.” When I asked why, he replied, “You’re teaching us U.S. history and all about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and I think ‘banned word of the day’ is a violation of my right of free speech!” His statement produced a big smile on my face. Here was a student who was actually putting school knowledge to practical use. He was right. As much as I would like for students to use more expressive and expansive vocabularies, they had a right to use any words in school, as long as they were not obscene, racist, sexist, or homophobic.
Now, we learn that the Trump administration is considering banning certain words. According to The Washington Post, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prohibited by the current administration from using a list of words in any of its official budgetary documents for the coming year. Those words are “diversity,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” “science-based,” and “entitlement.” This choice of banned words reflects, not an attempt to expand the officials’ vocabularies, but rather an attempt to choreograph the science and funding landscape to prohibit certain types of research. If you cannot say “diversity,” then how can you fund projects focused on diversity?
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Since taking office last February, the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has eliminated dozens of education directives to school officials. Now the Education Department is reconsidering a rule intended to hold states to a higher standard when determining if districts have overenrolled minority students in special education. It has also signaled an intention to pull back on considering “systemic” causes of discrimination during civil rights investigations at schools.
The unprecedented cleansing and revisions of Department of Education guidance to states, school districts, and private schools is passed off largely as a response to President Donald Trump’s simplistic Jan. 30 executive order that agencies remove two regulatory documents for every one issued. Even if, as has been reported, large swaths of the documents the department has eliminated so far have been out-of-date or superfluous, other guidance revisions have grave implications for marginalized students. The department’s headline-making withdrawal of Obama-era policy guidance permitting transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities is just one such example.LLL
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David C. Bloomfield is a professor of educational leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He is the author of American Public Education Law, 3rd Edition. Alan A. Aja is an associate professor in the department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College.
St. Louis — State education chiefs are scrambling staff duties and outsourcing tasks such as data collection and school improvement efforts as they prepare for new responsibilities under the Every Student Succeeds Act—at the same time they cope with continued funding and staffing pressures.
ESSA, which goes into effect for accountability purposes next fall, is a mixed blessing in the view of state superintendents who have long asked for more flexibility to figure out on their own how best to improve student outcomes.
One big challenge: Budget cuts in recent years have left large swaths of state education departments squeezed on the capacity to carry out the training, data collecting, and innovation necessary to fully exploit that flexibility.
That tension was top of mind this month as the Council of Chief State School Officers gathered here for its annual policy forum…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
By Deb Harding
You can’t read the news without stumbling onto an article related to the STEM skills gap.
In many schools around the country, including my own in Colorado, educators and students are opting into problem-based learning and STEM programs to help fill that gap. Yet early benchmarks indicate this approach is not yet producing the science, technology, engineering, and math workers we need.
And then there is the divide between low-income and affluent school districts. Where I teach, many of my students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and don’t have access to STEM professionals within their daily lives. They have hard-working role models, but not necessarily people who are engaged in the computer science field, the subject I teach…
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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 U.S. Department of Education has had a light touch in implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. So far, it has approved just about every ESSA plan to come down the pike—except for one: Michigan.
The big takeaway: The department appears to think that Michigan’s application is now thorough enough to review. That could be a signal that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is likely to approve her home state’s plan.
The department did flag some problems with the state’s application though. For instance, the state did not set long-term goals for achievement that say exactly what Michigan expects for different subgroups of students, including English-language learners, students in special education, and racial minorities. And it isn’t sure that Michigan’s system makes it possible to compare schools across the state…
St. Louis — State education chiefs are scrambling staff duties and outsourcing tasks such as data collection and school improvement efforts as they prepare for new responsibilities under the Every Student Succeeds Act—at the same time they cope with continued funding and staffing pressures.
ESSA, which goes into effect for accountability purposes next fall, is a mixed blessing in the view of state superintendents who have long asked for more flexibility to figure out on their own how best to improve student outcomes.
One big challenge: Budget cuts in recent years have left large swaths of state education departments squeezed on the capacity to carry out the training, data collecting, and innovation necessary to fully exploit that flexibility.
That tension was top of mind this month as the Council of Chief State School Officers gathered here for its annual policy forum.
With all their ESSA accountability plans now submitted to the U.S. Department of Education for approval, state education agencies in the coming months move into the implementation phase, which has the potential to be more arduous and politically contentious than the planning phase that took place over the previous two years…
Our first question is on a pretty key part of the law: A school-based administrator asked, “Is testing the only way a student can achieve success” under ESSA?
The short answer is: No.
The longer answer: The Every Student Succeeds Act kept in place the testing regimen from the law it replaced, the No Child Left Behind Act. That means that states still have to test students in grades three through eight and once in high school.
But ESSA allowed well actually, toldâstates they had to pick some other factor that got at school quality and student success. More than 30 states picked chronic absenteeism or attendance. And more than 35 states picked college- and career-readiness, defined as Advanced Placement participation or test scores, dual enrollment, career and technical certification, and more. Several states also included subjects other than reading and math into the mix, including science test scores. Others decided to measure school climate…
The Thursday letter to DeVos argues that the plan should be ditched because of the way it handles English learners, among other reasons.
Written by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, League of United Latin American Citizens, and others, the letter argues that the Sunshine State’s plan is a bad idea and doesn’t follow ESSA because it doesn’t offer state tests in languages other than English, including to the 200,000 students in Florida who are learning English and speak Spanish.
They also took issue with the plan for excluding English-language proficiency from the state’s proposed accountability system.
In addition, the groups say that Florida’s plan doesn’t appropriately identify schools with low performance for student subgroups. All three moves, the groups say, run counter to ESSA’s requirements…
Read the full article here. May require an Education Week subscription.
Read the full letter below. This piece has been corrected to accurately reflect the civil rights’ groups concerns with student subgroups’ performance.
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.
