Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, students in Delaware will be held accountable for social studies and science. Massachusetts and Vermont are also incorporating science into their systems, and Illinois is hoping to add it down the line.
Both Connecticut and Vermont also want to add physical education into their accountability systems. Educators and advocates in Vermont “felt that including the physical fitness assessment would support schools in attending to the whole child and supporting school nutrition programs and instruction that will promote a life time of healthy living,” according to the state’s ESSA plan, which hasn’t yet been approved by the feds.
Schools in the Green Mountain State won’t immediately be held accountable for how many jumping jacks their students…
Nine states and the District of Columbia had turned in their state plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act as of Monday evening, according to an Education Week survey of states. One tricky issue states have to address in those plans is how to deal with schools where less than 95 percent of all students take required state exams.
Under ESSA, states are allowed to have laws on the books affirming parents’ right to opt their children out of these tests. But ESSA also requires that states administer these tests to all students with sanctions kicking in if the participation rate falls below 95 percent and meaningfully differentiate schools based on participation rate in some fashion. Just how states address this issue if the participation rate of all students (or a subgroup of students) at a particular school falls below 95 percent is up to them.
The opt-out movement sprang up in the last several years as part of a broader resistance to testing, and has been particularly strong in states like Colorado, New Jersey, and New York…
President Donald Trump repeated a few promises related to the Common Core State Standards and education governance from his 2016 campaign, and also praised Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, at a town hall of business executives in Washington on Tuesday.
In response to a question about college- and career readiness at the event, Trump sharply criticized the academic performance of students New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, while also praising charter schools. “I don’t call it an experiment any more. It’s far beyond an experiment,” he said of charters. (More on recent academic performance of students in Chicago and L.A. here.)
He then moved on to one of his key priorities for education: shifting control from federal to state and local leaders…
The plans will now be read by different teams of peer reviewers at the department. Political appointees, including U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, are forbidden from monkeying with that process. But the secretary gets to give the plans the final thumbs or down. More on how all that will work here…
President Donald Trump has proposed getting rid of the Title II program, which has been around for more than a decade and aims to help districts and states pay for teacher and principal development, reduce class-size, craft new evaluation systems, and more.
The program, which is officially called the Supporting Effective Instruction State Grant prorgram, or Title II, Part A, is the third largest in the U.S. Department of Education’s budget that goes to K-12 education. Eliminating it would be a really big deal, state, district, and school officials say. Zeroing out Title II could hamper implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act, lead to teacher layoffs, and make it tougher for educators to reach special populations of students, or use technology in their classrooms.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said in a video interview that it should be up to states and districts to decide how frequently to test their students.
“It’s really a matter for states and locales to determine how much testing is actually necessary for measuring what students are learning,” DeVos said Friday. “I think it’s important to know and understand, however, what they are learning, and it’s important for parents to have that information, so that they can be assured that their students are in the right place. … Testing is an important part of the equation, but I think it’s really a matter for the states to wrestle with, to decide how and how frequently the testing is actually done.”
Her answer came in response to a question from WFTV Florida’s Martie Salt, who asked DeVos how much testing is enough and what should change about testing…
Along with the various cuts to the U.S. Department of Education’s budget proposed by President Donald Trump, the other part of Trump’s fiscal 2018 spending plan getting a lot of attention is the $1 billion the president wants to add to Title I in order to encourage open enrollment in public schools. There are a lot of questions about how that, along with many other parts of Trump’s education budget blueprint, would work. Let’s explore some of them.
First, it’s important to point out this increase isn’t necessarily and strictly a $1 billion bump for Title I. The budget says it’s an increase from the $14.9 billion that Title I grants technically get now. But ESSA gets rid of the Obama-era School Improvement Grants and instead shifts that money over to a portion of Title I money states can set aside for their own school improvement activities. That means that once Congress gets around to doing a regular fiscal year budget, Title I is already slated to rise to $15.4 billion.
So once (or if, for you pessimists out there) that happens, Trump’s proposed Title I funding increase would only be roughly $500 million…
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., told a roomful of state education chiefs Tuesday that he’ll push to fund the new block grant Congress created under the Every Student Succeeds Act to help districts cover the cost of health, safety, technology programs, and moer. And he said he looks forward to the kind of innovation and change the new law can bring to states.
Meanwhile, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., also an ESSA architect and the top Democrat on the House education committee, challenged states to develop plans that will look out for historically disadvantaged groups of students.
Associations representing local superintendents, teachers, state lawmakers and others have sent a clear message to chief state school officers: Work with us on the Every Student Succeeds Act.
On Tuesday, 11 groups sent a letter to the Council of Chief State School Officers expressing their disappointment that the U.S. Department of Education removed a requirement that states detail their work with stakeholder groups in their consolidated plans for ESSA. Nonetheless, they say the group has an obligation to make sure each chief “demonstrates clearly and explicitly in each state plan how stakeholders were involved in its development, and how they…
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
They’re both believers in school choice and a smaller foot-print for the federal government in K-12. They both like the idea of a slimmer bureacracy.
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.