Arkansas, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas need to make some big improvements to their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according to letters released publicly Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The most important letter is probably California’s. It’s a huge population center, and its plan, which relies on a dashboard to track school accountability, is either one of the most innovative and holistic in the country or one of squishiest and most confusing, depending on who you talk to.
The feds gave the Golden State a long, long list of things to fix. For one thing, the department says, it’s not at all clear from California’s plan that academic factors (like test scores) will count for more than school quality factors (like discipline data), an ESSA requirement. California wants to handle schools with low test participation by simply noting the problem on the state’s dashboard. The feds aren’t sure that meets the law’s requirements. And California told the department that it plans to finalize its method for identifying the lowest-performing schools in the state in January of 2018. The feds say they need it explained before they can greenlight California’s plan.
California also doesn’t have clear “interim” or short-term goals for English-language proficiency. It’s also unclear how the state will calculate suspension rates, which California wants to use to gauge school quality and student success. The state also needs to better spell out how it will make sure disadvantaged children get access to their fair share of effective teachers.
California has a long history of bucking the department. The state faced off with the Obama administration on student data systems, teacher evaluation, and more. So it will be interesting to see how many of these changes California makes, and whether the state will be approved even it doesn’t significantly revise its plan. A number of states that turned in their plans this spring didn’t make changes the department asked for, and got the stamp of approval anyway…
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The U.S. Department of Education is cranking out responses to state’s plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act at a fast and furious pace. The latest states to hear back are: Hawaii, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. (Scroll down to see which other states have gotten feedback and who has been approved.)
All five states, whose feedback letters were released Thursday, have work to do on the nuts-and-bolts of the accountability plans, their ideas for identifying and fixing schools, and more. Here’s a quick look at some highlights of the responses. Click on the state name to read the full letter.
Hawaii: The department wants the Aloha State to identify languages other than English spoken by a significant number of students. States must “make every effort” to offer tests in those languages, according to ESSA. And Hawaii needs to be more specific about what it will take for a school to get out of low-performing status. Right now, Hawaii says those schools need to make “significant improvement,” but it doesn’t say what that means. Hawaii also needs to make sure disadvantaged and minority students have access to their fair share of qualified teachers.
Kentucky: Kentucky needs to make sure that its English-language proficiency indicator stands alone, right now, it’s lumped in with other indicators in the state’s accountability system. The state also needs to make clear that it is targeting schools as “chronically underperforming” because of the performance of historically overlooked groups of students and not for another reason. And Kentucky cannot include writing test scores as part of a school’s overall “academic achievement” score, because those tests aren’t offered in every grade…
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Georgia and Utah, as well as hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according letters published this week by the U.S. Department of Education. Each turned in its ESSA plan back in September. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are just beginning to respond to state plans. (Maryland is the only other state that submitted this fall to receive feedback.)
Here’s a quick look at some of the issues the department sited in each plan. Click on the state name to read the full letter from the feds.
Georgia has proposed looking at whether schools are able to close achievement gaps as part of its academic achievement indicator. The department says that gap-closing can’t be used there, although it can figure in elsewhere in the state’s accountability system.
The Peach State has listed nine indicators of school quality or student success, but it hasn’t sufficiently explained how they would be measured, or how they will differentiate among schools, the department says.
Georgia needs to do a better job of explaining how much weight it is giving to different accountability indicators. ESSA says academic factors, like test scores, need to count for more than school quality indicators, like school climate. It’s not clear Georgia met that requirement, the feds say.
The state needs to provide more information to show that its plans for identifying low-performing schools and schools where certain groups of students are struggling meet ESSA’s requirements. And it needs to explain how it will ensure poor students get their fair share of effective teachers, the department says.
Where do state ESSA plans stand? Sixteen states and the District of Columbia submitted their ESSA plans this fall. So far, all but one of those states has been approved. (The exception is Colorado, which asked for more time to improve its plan.) Another 34 states submitted their plans earlier this fall. So far, Maryland is the only other state to receive feedback.
Democrats on the Senate education committee had some tough questions Tuesday for President Donald Trump’s picks to head up civil rights and special education policy at the U.S. Department of Education.
Kenneth Marcus, who is currently the head of a Jewish civil rights organization and has been tapped to lead the department’s office for civil rights, and Johnny Collett, the program director for special education at the Council of Chief State School Officers, are likely to be confirmed. But Democrats used the confirmation hearing to air deep concerns about the Trump administration’s record on both civil rights and disabilities issues.
“One of the most appalling ways that President Trump has damaged our country is when it comes to civil rights, and undermining the rights and safety of women, people of color, and people with disabilities,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the panel.
Murray said Marcus appears to “share the goal of halting discrimination on the basis of race ethnicity or religion” particularly on college campuses. But she worries about his ability to stand up to Trump and to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
And she expressed qualms about Collett’s record as head of special education in Kentucky. She noted that the state was criticized for allowing frequent use of seclusion and restraint in schools, which are used to a disproportionate degree on students with disabilities.
“Only after public outcry and work from the [state’s] protection and advocacy agency did Kentucky take steps to address this,” Murray said. “Additionally, you told my staff you support Secretary DeVos’ privatization agenda, which includes $20 billion school voucher proposal. Voucher programs do not support all of the needs of students with disabilities.”
But Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee, defended both nominees. He said Marcus “has a deep understanding of civil rights issues having founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights and having served as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for four years.” He said he had letters from 10 individuals and organizations supporting Marcus’ nomination. And he said that Collett is “widely supported by the special education community…”
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Back during the Obama administration, many states were working to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores, in part to get a piece of the $4 billion Race to the Top fund, or to get flexibility from the No Child Left Behind Act.
Then Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the feds were totally barred from monkeying around with teacher evaluation. So have a ton of states dropped these performance reviews? And what has happened in the ones that didn’t?
So far, six states, Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, have dropped teacher evaluations through student outcomes, according to the National Council of Teacher Quality. And other states have kept performance reviews, but made some modifications. Florida, for instance, has kept the student-growth measures, but allows districts to decide how they are calculated. More in this story from Liana Loewus…
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Senate education committee Democrats used the confirmation hearing of two top U.S. Department of Education nominees to make their case against the Trump administration’s favorite K-12 policy: School choice.
Both contenders have long records in pushing for charters, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and other types of school choice programs. Mick Zais, who has been tapped for deputy secretary of education, the No. 2 post at the agency, helped create a tax-credit scholarship for students in special education when he was the state chief in South Carolina.
And Jim Blew, who has been tapped as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy analysis, spent nearly a decade as the Walton Family Foundation’s director of K-12 reform, advising the foundation on how to broaden schooling options for low-income communities.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the panel, kicked off the hearing by saying that she finds it “troubling” that Zais shares Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ views on “privatization.” And she told Blew that his “record of promoting school vouchers gives me pause that you will not stand up for students and public schools.”
Senator after senator on the Democratic side of the dais echoed those concerns.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., for instance, asked Zais if he was aware that the research on the efficacy of school choice is “abysmal.” Zais said, in his experience, broadening educational options improves student outcomes. But he agreed with Franken that the evidence for that is “anecdotal…”
More than 1,000 people and organizations had some thoughts for DeVos and her team when it comes to these priorities, which the department will use to help decide who gets hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive grants.
DeVos had pitched giving applicants a leg-up in applying for the funds if they focus on school choice, innovation, citizenship, meeting the needs of children with disabilities, STEM, literacy, effective instruction, improving school climate, expanding economic opportunity, or helping military-connected students. She gave the education community thirty days to offer formal feedback.
She got nearly 1,500 comments from the education field. We read them, well, okay, fine, some of them, so you don’t have to.
“The Department should not reward states for adopting voucher programs that do not serve all students, fail to improve academic achievement, undermine public education funding, harm religious freedom and lack critical accountability for taxpayers,” the groups wrote.
Washington — U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told a roomful of CEOs here Tuesday that many students aren’t mastering the skills they need to be prepared for the careers of the future.
DeVos argued that 65 percent of today’s kindergartners will end up in jobs that haven’t even been created yet. Business people, she said, have told her that students need be able to think critically, know how to collaborate, communicate clearly, and be creative.
“My observation is a lot of students today are not having their needs met to be prepared in those areas,” DeVos said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council’s meeting. And later she noted that the U.S. education system was largely borrowed from Prussia, a country which she noted no longer exists. The system, she said, needs to be changed to offer more students and parents individualized options. “When we empower all parents, that will ultimately prepare students to be active participants in the workforce,” she said in remarks at the Four Seasons Hotel.
For the second time this year, DeVos held up school choice-friendly Florida as a model for the country. The Sunshine State, she said, offers, “the broadest range of choices and the greatest number of kids taking advantage of those choices.” (Other school choice stand-outs, according to DeVos, include Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin.)…
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…
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Read the full letter below. This piece has been corrected to accurately reflect the civil rights’ groups concerns with student subgroups’ performance.
Arkansas, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas need to make some big improvements to their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according to letters released publicly Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.
