I am pleased to advise that Pennsylvania has submitted its proposed ESSA Consolidated State Plan to the U.S. Department of Education. A copy of the plan may be viewed on the Department’s ESSA webpage. We have also posted a PowerPoint presentation in both English and Spanish to assist Pennsylvanians in understanding the plan. In addition, the Department has revised its ESSA webpage to include updated content on major elements of the plan, as well as a new section on Stakeholder Engagement. This page includes access to all stakeholder comments submitted to the Department during the formal 30-day public comment period. Please stay tuned for additional resources and updates in the weeks ahead.
Submission of Pennsylvania’s Consolidated State Plan is a significant moment for public education in Pennsylvania. The plan underscores the commonwealth’s commitment to creating more balanced and comprehensive school progress measures, reducing testing time, and supporting Pennsylvania’s educators and school leaders.
Highlights of the plan include:
A focus on providing a “well-rounded education” to students, by identifying the subjects and disciplines that should be part of every child’s education, including the arts, social sciences, health and physical education, STEM and computer science, and other areas;
Broadening the scope of the indicators used to measure school success;
A reduction of testing time on the Pennsylvania State System of Assessments (PSSAs) in English language arts and mathematics by 20 percent beginning in spring 2018;
Strategies for addressing the needs of students through school-based supports and community partnerships;
A strong focus on evidence-based professional development for educators and administrators that emphasizes equity; and
Identifying ways to prepare students to successfully enter postsecondary, career programs, apprenticeship programs, or even the workforce.
The Department is grateful to the thousands of Pennsylvanians who participated in review and comment on plan proposals since ESSA was enacted in December 2015. We look forward to continuing these conversations through the USDE plan approval process and on to implementation in our schools and for the benefit of all of our students in Pennsylvania.
The plan, which was made public at 4:59 p.m. Monday, establishes what the department describes as “ambitious yet attainable” goals of raising student performance, increasing graduation rates and having English learners move toward achieving English language proficiency.
It responds to the oft-heard complaints about too much class time spent on testing by shortening the state exams that third through eighth graders take in English language arts and math.
It also establishes a new school report card that expands the indicators used to measure performance, placing less emphasis on state test scores which educators had sought. The indicators chosen include academic progress, graduation rates, English language proficiency, chronic absenteeism, and career exploration and preparation rates of fifth-, eighth- and 11th-graders.
“Pennsylvania’s ESSA Consolidated State Plan presented the department with an opportunity to shape education in the commonwealth for years to come, a charge we did not take lightly,” said state Education Secretary Pedro Rivera in a news release.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WDTV) — The West Virginia Department of Education has submitted its plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA, the department announced Monday evening.
The letter was submitted to the U.S. Department of Education Monday, two weeks prior to the deadline.
In a statement Monday, the department said the plan “details the foundational pieces of its public education system including content standards, the statewide assessment, the school accountability system and support for struggling schools.” It also describes how federal funding will be distributed to counties.
Officials say the final version of the plan contains numerous changes due to stakeholder input.
“I am extremely proud of the extraordinary amount of work put into developing this plan and for the valuable input we received from various stakeholders including teachers, parents, administrators, community members and elected officials,” stated state Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Paine. “I feel confident that West Virginia’s plan outlines a foundation that is best for all Mountain State students and know we will ultimately see results surrounding student achievement.”
The U.S. Department of Education now has 120 days to review the plan and provide feedback. The plan can be viewed at http://wvde.state.wv.us/essa/review/.
Plan Emphasizes Fostering Equity in Education for All Students and Expands Measures for School Accountability & Student Success
Final Approval of the State’s ESSA Plan is Expected Early in 2018
September 11, 2017 — The Board of Regents today approved the New York Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan, which will be submitted to the United States Education Department (USDE) on September 18 for review and approval. It is anticipated that USDE will provide feedback to the Department in December 2017. Final approval of the state’s ESSA plan is expected early next year.
“Our ESSA plan is an action plan,” Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa said. “The Regents and I are committed to ensuring that all students, regardless of background, zip code, first language or disability, get the help they need to succeed and thrive in school. Developing this plan has been an opportunity to incorporate the voices of communities, teachers and parents as we rethink how we look at accountability, equity and serving the whole child.”
“The ESSA plan we will now submit to USDE is responsive to the needs of students,” Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said. “This plan is the culmination of more than a year of collaboration with hundreds of stakeholders and members of the public who helped shape the plan throughout the process. And we’re not done. We will continue to engage with stakeholders to ensure everyone is given the opportunity to adjust to and feel comfortable with the new system as it’s implemented.”
The plan emphasizes fostering equity in education for New York’s students; expands measures for school support and accountability and student success; and requires school-level improvement plans for the lowest performing schools overall as well as schools with the lowest performance for certain student populations. The plan also includes strategies for supporting the professional growth of educators and ensuring that all students, including English language learners/Multilingual learners, immigrant students, migratory youth, homeless youth, and neglected and delinquent youth, have access to a well-rounded, culturally responsive education that supports their academic and social-emotional development.
The Department detailed highlights of the plan to the Board of Regents at its September meeting. Further, NYSED is developing summary documents for parents and teachers to explain the final ESSA plan, which is posted in full on the Department’s ESSA webpage.
Stakeholder Engagement
For the past year, NYSED has engaged diverse groups of stakeholders to solicit recommendations on how to craft an ESSA plan that best meets the needs of the state’s students, schools and communities. In support of these efforts, NYSED established an ESSA Think Tank with representatives from more than 100 organizations, including district leaders, teachers, parents, and community members. The Department also consulted with national education experts regarding ESSA, including Linda Darling-Hammond (Learning Policy Institute) and Scott F. Marion (National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment).
In addition, NYSED held more than 120 fall and winter regional in-person meetings across the state in coordination with the state’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) and the superintendents of the state’s five largest City School Districts, which were attended by more than 4,000 students, parents, teachers, school and district leaders, school board members, and other stakeholders.
The Department received more than 800 written comments and 270 verbal comments at the meetings during public comment period. In addition to hosting 13 public hearings on the plan from May 11 through June 16, NYSED also held more than 120 stakeholder and public meetings between October 2016 and May 2017 to gather input to help inform the development of the draft plan.
Last month, NYSED released three ESSA waiver requests for public comment. The waivers, which will be submitted simultaneously with the draft ESSA plan, have been previously discussed with the Board of Regents and stakeholders. If approved these waivers will give New York additional flexibility in terms of the assessment of selected groups of middle level students who participate in Regents examinations, newly arrived ELLs/MLLs, and a small group of students with significant cognitive disabilities.
Next Steps
It is anticipated that USDE will provide feedback to the Department in December 2017. Final approval of the state’s ESSA plan is expected early next year. After the plan is approved by the USDE, the Department will work with BOCES District superintendents, superintendents, the ESSA Think Tank and other stakeholder groups to develop and provide guidance on implementing the ESSA plan.
WisconsinGov. Scott Walker refused to sign the state’s ESSA plan. In a letter Walker and his administration cited concerns with the plan: “Your bureaucratic proposal does little to challenge the status quo for the benefit of Wisconsin’s students.
The New York State Board of Regents on Monday approved a plan laying out the state’s goals for its education system, as required by the sweeping federal education law signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 known as the Every Student Succeeds Act.
The Regents’ approval means the state can now submit its plan to the federal Department of Education for review and approval.
The plan details how the Regents will implement the federal law, including how individual schools will be evaluated and identified for what the law refers to as either comprehensive or targeted support and improvement.
Under the plan, elementary and middle schools would continue to be evaluated on English and math test scores and high schools on graduation rates. But the plan would also hold schools accountable for other measures, such as performance on science and social studies exams, the number of students making progress in achieving English language proficiency, college and career readiness, chronic absenteeism and, eventually, out-of-school suspensions.
Education Week — Last year at this time then-U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. was on a back-to-school bus tour through a swath of the South, touring school districts hit by a hurricane, and dropping by a charter high school in New Orleans to talk to students about a recent turnaround effort.
Now he’s the president and CEO of the Education Trust, which looks out for poor and minority children. And he’s got a new side gig, teaching an education policy class at the University of Maryland.
I caught up with King at his offices in Washington and talked to him about some of the changes in Washington over the past year and where he sees things heading…
There is no place for shaming if we want to improve outcomes for kids. We know human beings shut down when they experience shame, making it nearly impossible to reflect, connect and grow — the very skillset that is essential to foster effective teaching and learning in classrooms, in schools and in the systems that serve public education. But promoting equity and shining a light on the achievement of all students is not mutually exclusive with that vision.
CHILDREN NOW’s Samantha Tran
The Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, has been the right direction for the state to go — shifting decision-making authority to the local level and allocating resources to more accurately match needs. But, the success of these shifts hinges on the state’s role to provide an accessible accountability system and fiscal transparency so that local stakeholders have the information that they need to actively engage in the local decision-making process.
What the state does next is critical. Is it possible to be both fundamentally transparent about where students, schools and local education agencies are struggling, while simultaneously providing real support that is not grounded in shame and blame? This is not an easy task, but there are meaningful steps we can take, including building an effective system of support and bringing it to scale across the state.
At the same time, we can’t shy away from the hard realities students face and where the system is struggling. On Wednesday, the State Board of Education is meeting to approve California’s final plan to the federal government under the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. My organization has several concerns about the draft plan, as we noted in a letter to the State Board. In particular, there are three changes to the plan that shouldn’t be hard to make from a technical standpoint and that would promote transparency. California has the ability to make the data clear now. It just requires political will.
1. Clearly identify if gaps in achievement are closing or are stagnant.
If we are going to successfully combat historic inequities, educators, students, parents and the public need to know, not just whether outcomes are improving, but if they are improving at a rate that could actually close the gap. While the state has set appropriate long-term goals, it doesn’t plan to measure or report the “interim progress” toward those goals (as required by ESSA). This information is essential to allow the public to see, in a clear way, if achievement gaps are actually closing or not.
2. Set assessment standards so that the system doesn’t mask low performance
The California School Dashboard is based on a five-color rating system that combines a school’s performance and the recent change in performance. Red indicates the lowest level of performance and improvement and blue indicates the highest. Both red and orange ratings are used in determining state and local accountability actions. Schools performing “low” and with no change (“maintained”) on the state assessments receive a yellow rating. That means a school can have its average student scoring 3 grade levels behind in math or English and is maintaining that level of performance overtime. It is imperative that these outcomes aren’t buried in the yellow category and that they are appropriately highlighted for local and state action.
3. Ensure alternative education students are counted and visible in the dashboard for Local Education Agencies.
Alternative education schools serve mostly high-risk high school students that range from students who habitually miss school or have credit deficiencies to incarcerated youth. Approximately 1 in every 5 seniors is in an alternative school. Many of these students ultimately drop out, with the statewide graduation rate for alternative schools around 37 percent. While school districts run many of these schools, those students are not currently included in the Dashboard. By not counting these students as part of the district, the district outcomes that are used to determine color ratings in the Dashboard are artificially inflated. For example, in one large district, the Dashboard reports a graduation rate of 80 percent; however, if the district’s alternative education students’ outcomes were included, the actual graduation rate for the district would only be 72 percent.
It is tempting to make our results look better than they are — by glossing over whether gaps in achievement are closing, giving schools a yellow rating instead of orange, and excluding alternative student outcomes from a district’s results — but doing so doesn’t serve the kids who need it the most and runs the serious risk of breeding distrust in our fledgling system of accountability.
It is imperative that transparency, as well as support, are core values in California’s approach and in California’s ESSA plan. It is not one or the other. It has to be both.
•••
Samantha Tran is senior managing director of education policy at Children Now.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team have been approving state plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act at a fast and furious pace: They’ve announced approvals for 13 states and the District of Columbia over the past few weeks.
For those keeping score: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, North Dakota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont have gotten the green light so far. Massachusetts is still waiting on its approval. Colorado got feedback from the Education Department, and then asked for more time to get its revised plan in.
The big ESSA onslaught is yet to come. Thirty-three states are scheduled to turn in their plans on Sept. 18, less than a week from now. (Hurricane-ravaged Texas gets extra time.)
So what did we learn from the first round of ESSA approvals? Here are some big takeaways.
1) The department’s feedback on plans may not be as influential as you’d expect.
The feds flagged certain issues with state plans. But by and large, states didn’t make big revisions in those areas—and got approved any way.
For instance, Connecticut and Vermont got their way on measuring student achievement. Both states will be able to use so-called “scale scores.” Those help capture student progress as opposed to straight up proficiency rates, which is what many people— including, at least initally, the department—said ESSA requires. Connecticut in particular did not stand down on this issue, telling the department that, “Webster’s dictionary defines proficiency not only as a state of being proficient, but also as an advancement in knowledge or skill.”
Tennessee will still get to use so-called “supersubgroups,” which combine different historically overlooked groups of students, such as minorities, English-language learners, and students in special education, for accountability purposes. That’s despite the fact that the department said this was a no-no in its initial feedback to the state.
In its revised plan, Tennessee promised to use both combined and broken-out subgroups in identifying schools for “targeted improvement” under the law. And the state provided some data to explain its reasoning behind having a combined black, Hispanic, and Native American subgroup. Tennesee argued that more schools would actually be identified as needing help using the supersubgroup approach than would be otherwise. That appeared to convince DeVos and her team, which gave Tennessee’s plan the thumbs-up in late August.
ESSA for the first time calls for states to factor into their accountability systems whether English-language learners are making progress in mastering the language. It’s supposed to be a separate component in the accountability system. But Connecticut incorporates English-language proficiency into the academic growth component of its plan. The department told the Nutmeg State to change that. Connecticut instead provided some more information to explain its thinking, and that seemed to work for the feds.
2) States worked the hardest to fix their plans in the areas where the department pushed the most.
3) Some state plans may not be as ambitious as some of ESSA’s architects hoped.
Arizona got approved to give much lower weight to the reading and math scores of students who have only been at a particular school for a short amount of time. Experts worry that it will diminish the importance of kids from transient populations—including poor and minority students.
North Dakota was told it needed to make sure that academic factors—things like test scores and graduation rates—carried “much greater weight” than other factors, such as student engagement and college-and-career readiness. So North Dakota upped the percentage from 48 percent for academic factors to 51 percent, according to an analysis by Chad Aldeman, a principal at Bellwether Education Partners, who reviewed select plans. That may not be what Congress had in mind when it used the words “much greater” weight, he said.
The department also asked North Dakota to be more specific about how it would decide which schools fall below the 67 percent graduation rate, triggering whole-school interventions. The state decided to go with schools where the six-year graduation rate falls below that threshold. That wouldn’t have flown under the Obama administration’s regulations for the law, which Congress nixed.
4) Some things in plans are still TBD, even though plans themselves are already approved.
Illinois is planning to use a mix of school quality indicators, including school climate and chronic abseneteeism. But the state is also hoping to add another unspecified measure aimed at elementary and middle schools, and a fine arts measure. The Land of Lincoln still has to figure out the details on those indicators.
And states haven’t yet had to provide lists of which schools will be flagged as needing extra help—or what kinds of strategies they’ll use to fix them. The lists of schools pinpointed for improvement won’t come out until after the 2017-18 school year.
“For the most part, [ESSA] hasn’t been a wild, crazy laboratory of reform, on how to identify and improve schools, that’s all sort of TBD,” Aldeman said.
There is no place for shaming if we want to improve outcomes for kids. We know human beings shut down when they experience shame, making it nearly impossible to reflect, connect and grow — the very skillset that is essential to foster effective teaching and learning in classrooms, in schools and in the systems that serve public education. But promoting equity and shining a light on the achievement of all students is not mutually exclusive with that vision.
