AUSTIN – Public comments regarding the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) consolidated state plan for Texas are now being accepted by the Texas Education Agency (TEA). The comment period runs through Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017.
Comments can be submitted via email at essa@tea.texas.gov. The draft plan can be viewed here.
ESSA became law in December 2015, replacing the No Child Left Behind Act. The new law increases flexibility and decision-making authority afforded states, encourages states and schools to be innovative, and holds states accountable for results. ESSA requires federal review and approval of a state consolidated plan, which provides a comprehensive overview of how each state will use federal funds to advance its own goals and visions of success for students.
Since taking office in January 2016, Commissioner of Education Mike Morath has focused on developing systems within the agency that support ESSA implementation through an established TEA Strategic Plan. All work at the agency is now centered around four strategic priorities: (1) recruiting, supporting and retaining teachers and principals; (2) building a foundation of reading and math; (3) connecting high school to career and college; and (4) improving low-performing schools. An overview of TEA’s strategic plan is available on the agency website.
The draft consolidated plan is reflective of input provided to the Commissioner and TEA staff during more than 200 stakeholder meetings statewide over the past 18 months. These meetings have focused on gathering feedback on the broad aspects of the agency’s overall strategic plan, as well as specific input on the development of key policy decisions related to ESSA implementation.
Highlights of the plan now posted online include:
Alignment of state and federal policies – specifically in the areas of accountability and school improvement.
Maximizing flexibility afforded Texas school districts to provide services needed for students.
Strengthening the state’s commitment and support for our most vulnerable populations (including migrant, foster care, homeless, and economically disadvantaged students).
Reinforcing the state’s commitment to the 60×30 plan (developed by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board) by aligning long-term academic goals to having 60 percent of students prepared to earn a certificate or degree by the year 2030.
In addition, the draft plan outlines how TEA is using school improvement interventions that align with current state requirements to avoid confusion or duplication of efforts, while also maximizing the impact of federal funds to support improvement strategies.
The ESSA consolidated state plan will be submitted by TEA to the U.S. Department of Education in September.
For more information regarding ESSA implementation in Texas, visit the TEA website.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is the primary legislation related to federal K-12 education programs. ESSA replaces many provisions contained in the previous reauthorization—the No Child Left Behind Act—to give states more authority in the design of their school accountability systems and to encourage them to use measures beyond test scores to measure school performance. States, districts, and schools also have greater autonomy to design and implement school improvement strategies for struggling schools.
The law, however, continues to require states and districts to track and respond to low performance of schools and subgroups of students within schools. They must also be able to disaggregate the data they use to determine interventions by race and ethnicity, disability status, English language learners, and income. These critical protections ensure that all students—including the most disadvantaged—cannot be ignored.
Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., submitted their ESSA plans—which cover multiple provisions of the law—to the U.S. Department of Education for review during the first submission window. The Center for American Progress reviewed these submissions for their school classification systems and school improvement plans. The summary provides critical context and methodology. The 17 individual state fact sheets break down each state’s school classification system in addition to school improvement timeline, grant structure, types of schools identified, and key improvement strategies.
Laura Jimenez is the director of standards and accountability at the Center for American Progress. Samantha Batel is a policy analyst with the K-12 Education team at the Center.
Alabama’s state superintendent Michael Sentance very much wants to keep his job so he can see the results of months of planning a new course for Alabama’s public education system.
Sentance, whose lack of experience in the classroom made him an unlikely choice for state superintendent last year, recently received low marks on evaluations from members of the state board of education.
He will present his plan to address board members’ concerns at the Aug. 10 board meeting.
Admitting he is not a good communicator in large groups, Sentance sat down with AL.com on Thursday afternoon to talk about the challenges he’s faced in Alabama and, though he lacks confidence he will be able to get his message across, he hopes to stick around and see plans made during the past 11 months come to fruition.
A national coalition of civil rights groups want U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to reject Florida’s soon-to-arrive waiver request that will ask to be relieved from key pieces of the Every Student Succeeds Act dealing with the nation’s most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged students.
Approving Florida’s request, activists say, will set a disturbing precedent for other states.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re playing three-card monteor a game of cat and mouse,” said Liz King the Director of Education Policy for The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She said approving the waiver request will effectively make ESSA toothless. “Everytime we make progress, someone finds a way to cut it back.”
The waiver, still in draft form, asks for the state to be allowed to forego using minority student subgroups and the results of English-learners’ language proficiency exams in its statewide accountability system. And because Florida education officials say English is the state’s official language, it doesn’t want to conduct standardized tests in recently-arrived immigrant students’ native languages.
Those provisions were the biggest victories for national civil rights activists when ESSA was passed in 2015 and they fear that if Secretary DeVos approves the waiver this fall, other states, eager to break free from decades of federal badgering over the nation’s stagnant achievement gap, would follow suit.
The Florida education agency gathered feedback on the request over several weeks and it’s expected to soon be considered by Republican Gov. Rick Scott. It has broad support from the state’s district superintendents who want to keep the state’s politically volatile accountability system mostly intact.
This week, the Leadership Conference, made up of 23 minority rights groups, sent a tersely worded letter to all 51 state superintendents urging them to follow the law as written rather than follow in Florida’s footsteps.
“Low-income children, children of color, children with disabilities, English-learners, and Native children have been left behind for far too long and deserve no less than robust and thorough state policy to ensure an excellent and equitable education,” the letter said.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) also sent a letter to congressional leaders and Secretary DeVos that more specifically urges her to reject the waiver request outright since, they say, the request flies in the face of ESSA’s civil rights legacy and circumvents the state’s legal obligations to English-language learners.
And a group of local civil rights activists in Florida will ask next week for a sit-down meeting with Florida department officials.
The department said in an e-mailed statement that they welcome any feedback to its plans.
“We appreciate everyone who took the time to submit input on Florida’s ESSA draft state plan,” said Meghan Collins, a spokeswoman for the department.
In its waiver request, the department said their accountability system is meant to improve the outcomes of all students, rather than students with a particular ethnicity, special need or language requirement. Instead of English proficiency exams, the state wants to use its English Language Arts test to measure ELL students’ langauge acquisition.
But the civil rights groups say that flies in the face of decades of research regarding how to close achievement gaps between minority students and their peers. Because the state for so many decades segregated its schools and denied a litany of basic education services to minority students and students with special needs, the state is obligated to provide tailored remedies to those groups’ unique needs.
“If this waiver is approved, there will be no accountability whatsover for ELL students’ progress in English Language acquisition,” said Rosa Castro-Feinberg, a civil rights activist, education consultant and former school board member in the Miami-Dade district. “I think the department has been misadvised by folks who are not up on the research related to ELL issues and subgroup accountability issues.”
One out of every 10 students in the state qualifies for ELL services.
The waiver request will create a political dilemma for Secretary DeVos who has been criticized both for her theories on the department’s role in upholding civil rights and her department’s feedback to states’ submitted plans.
“One thing we’re learning through the ESSA implementation process is that too often the decision makers at the federal, state and local level are disconnected from children who aren’t getting a fair shakeout from policy decisions,” King said.
RALEIGH — Since No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, state and local educators have tried to square the figurative circle: letting students learn at their own pace while also making sure they meet rigorous standards.
The debate over NCLB’s replacement, 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, ramped up again Wednesday at the monthly meeting of the State Board of Education.
To receive federal education funding, states must create their own ESSA plans addressing challenges with the education system.
Board members discussed the fifth draft of the ESSA plan at the meeting, with a PowerPoint presentation explaining key concepts.Essentially the ESSA draft plan details student performance goals and how the state education agencies and the local education agencies plan to improve those efforts.
“We continue to note that student ownership of their own learning is critically important to the whole concept of personalized learning,” Dr. Maria Pitre-Martin, deputy state superintendent for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction explained.
Personalized learning was a major focus of the discussion, and concerns were raised over how to tailor student assessment to the idea.
Board Vice Chairman A.L. “Buddy” Collins said he saw no difference between personalized learning and what successful teachers were already doing in the classroom.
“It does seem to run contrary to assessment protocols that we have,” Collins said. “Our assessment protocols seem to be premised on everyone reaching a certain point at the same time with the same degree of success.”
Lisa Godwin, the state Teacher of the Year adviser board member, also called for revamping the education system.
“We have to get away from cookie-cutter assessments because our students are individuals,” Godwin said. “Until we start realizing that, we are still going to be in the same shape every year. This is our chance to have a voice.”
Godwin claimed teachers weren’t heard in discussions over ESSA, a belief shared by Bobbie Cavnar, the 2016 Teacher of the Year. Cavnar explained how the board sat down with district superintendents from across the state and heard their proposals on improving student performance. Teachers, principals, business leaders, and parent groups weighed in on their ideas.
“All of that was silenced,” Cavnar said. “I wish Superintendent [Mark] Johnson was here because he keeps saying we need innovation urgently, instead what we are getting is more of the same…This is our chance to be innovative. This is our chance to do something big.”
Johnson didn’t attend Wednesday’s board meeting but was scheduled to be there at a subsequent meeting.
Terry Stoops, vice president of research and director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation, is skeptical of how some board members view the ESSA plan as a means of radically changing the system.
“It is not as if [the federal government] is going to take what is in our ESSA plan and completely change the way we conduct public education in North Carolina,” Stoops argued. “They are going to change the way they report some data and they are going to possibly change the standards by which they administer and report assessments.”
The game hasn’t changed, according to Stoops. The state will tell federal officials what they want to hear in order to collect the check.
“It is sort of the deal the federal government makes where they set forth a bunch of rules and requirements and a condition of getting federal funds is meeting those requirements,” Stoops said. “The federal government is in the business of leveraging money in exchange for certain things. In this case it’s accountability measures.”
The state board has until Sept.18 to submit the ESSA draft plan to the U.S. Department of Education for review.
PDE Announces ESSA Consolidated State Plan Draft Now Available for Public Comment
Harrisburg, PA – State Education Secretary Pedro A. Rivera today announced the commonwealth’s proposed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Consolidated State Plan is on the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s (PDE) website and is available for public comment. The plan builds on an 18-month collaboration between PDE and a diverse group of stakeholders from around the state.
“The Wolf Administration, through its Schools That Teach initiative, has been focused on ensuring that all students, regardless of their age, socioeconomic status, or zip code, have access to high-quality educators and schools,” said Secretary Rivera. “Pennsylvania’s ESSA Consolidated State Plan accelerates state-level priorities in these same areas, and helps the state transition from the prescriptive policies and unintended consequences of NCLB to a more student-centered approach.”
To develop the ESSA Consolidated State Plan, PDE:
Assembled four work groups – comprised of teachers, charter school and district level administrators, advocates, civil rights leaders, former policymakers from both parties, and others – to study key aspects of the law and develop framework recommendations;
Commissioned an independent study to examine work group recommendations in the context of academic literature and other evidence;
Testified before the House and Senate Education committees and worked with lawmakers to address plan components;
Held six dedicated town halls in every region of the commonwealth to gather additional stakeholder feedback;
Participated in approximately 30 statewide conferences, professional association meetings, and other forums to reach more than 2,000 Pennsylvanians and present on the state’s ESSA planning and early implementation; and
Consulted with national nonpartisan policy and technical experts (American Institutes for Research, Council of Chief State School Officers, Education Commission of the States) to solicit additional insight, feedback, and suggestions for specific plan components.
Rivera noted that the plan also presents new opportunities for the commonwealth to develop, recruit, and retain a talented and diverse pool of educators, bolsters college and career readiness and effective transition strategies throughout the pre-K to postsecondary continuum, and focuses on student and school equity.
Additionally, the development of the Future Ready PA Index, a new, public-facing school report card that expands the indicators used to measure performance, extends the comprehensive approach to ensuring student and school success. The Index will place additional emphasis on academic growth, evaluation of school climate through a robust chronic absenteeism measure, attention to both four-year and extended-year graduation rates, and assessments of postsecondary readiness.
“The plan represents a collaborative, evidence-based approach to help every student, in every Pennsylvania public school, access a high-quality, well-rounded education,” said Secretary Rivera. “That collaboration continues as we invite stakeholders and members of the public to provide feedback on Pennsylvania’s Consolidated State Plan.”
Rivera added that public comment will close on September 2, and the Department will submit its Consolidated State Plan to the U.S. Department of Education on September 18. Initial implementation of the plan will begin in the 2017-18 school year, with full rollout by 2018-19.
For more information about Pennsylvania’s education policies and programs, or to read the ESSA Consolidated State Plan, visit the Department of Education’s website at www.education.pa.gov or follow PDE on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education will unveil a new school quality metric in 2018 — dubbed the Future Ready PA Index — that it believes will foster a more holistic student experience, one less narrowly focused on state standardized tests.
The change was announced Wednesday as part of PDE’s plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). That is the flagship federal education law, updated under President Obama in 2015.
Under that law, states were given more leeway in how to set education policy and spend federal public school dollars.
“It’s provided Pennsylvania with a once in a decade opportunity to revisit our assessment, accountability, and student support systems, and make changes with greater autonomy than we’ve been able to do in the past,” said department deputy secretary Matthew Stem. “It’s really given us an opportunity to focus on more holistic supports and holistic instructional strategies.”
Pennsylvania will still have a strong, federally required commitment to standardized testing with scores broken down by subgroup, but Stem says the new plan will push schools to foster better critical thinking and collaboration skills.
ESSA Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 Making Learning Personal for both students and educators
Are you looking for ways to use federal funding to make the transformation to personalized learning for students and teachers? Learning how to modernize your schools with technology as tools to drive better instruction and learning? The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) returns a lot of control and directives from the federal government back to states and school districts where local administrative and instructional leaders know how to best support their teachers and students with their federal funding. It creates opportunities for applying funding to improve teaching practices, using technology as a tool for personalized learning, and advancing competency based learning.
We will discuss how Title I, Title II, Title III, Title IV, and more signal opportunities to fund personalized learning. Additionally, the US Department of Education released letters of guidance on ESEA that we will review that will also help you make your transformation decisions.
Suggested Audience: School Administrators, Instructional Leaders
Presenters:
Cory Linton, Senior Vice President, School Improvement Network
Christina Erland Culver, President, EdNexus Advisors, Washington, DC
Will parents be able to understand their child’s school’s performance under the Every Student Succeeds Act? And will schools with students from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds get a fair shake?
Those are two key questions that folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to find answers for in a new report. In an analysis of the 17 plans turned in so far, Fordham President Michael Petrilli and Editorial Director Brandon Wright based their answers on three main questions:
How clear are school ratings are to parents, educators, and the general public?
Do the plans push schools to focus on all students, not just those furthest behind? and
Are schools are treated fairly, particularly those with a large share of students in poverty, and judged in part by academic growth, not just achievement?
Fordham is often identified with right-leaning education policy positions, such as support for school choice. On ESSA, the think tank has also…
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The ESSA State Plan and related materials are now available on the PDE web site at 
