ESSA, First Round Feedback.
By Adriana Jarquin
As the transition period for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) comes to an end, states are beginning to prepare for the 2017-2018 school year by submitting their new education plans to the U.S. Department of Education. All states are required to submit new accountability plans to be peer reviewed and approved before implementation can take place. Two deadlines were set by the Department of Education, the first was April 2017 followed by a September 2017. With the April deadline, 16 states and the District of Columbia submitted plans for review.
The Process:
The peer review process is being conducted by an independent third party group. The Bellwether Education Partners along with the Collaborative
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When it comes to Goals and Identifying Schools, Louisiana came out on top. They provided an ambitious goal to sustain its recent gain and increase its proficiency rate by 2.5% for all students each year from 2018-2025. When it comes to Identifying at risk schools, Louisiana’s A-F school-rating system provides a single, clear rubric for evaluating school performance. It also plans to identify 17% of its schools for comprehensive support and improvement. For “Standards and Assessments”, New Jersey’s state plan received top marks. They plan to be strongly committed to getting high school students career and college ready. New Mexico received top marks in “Indicators”, “Supporting Schools” and “Continuous Improvement”. They did a great job of including meaningful non-academic indicators to assess student success over time such as measuring growth of the lowest-performing students, extended-year graduation rates, chronic absenteeism and college readiness. When it comes to “Supporting Schools” while it felt short in providing details on how it will implement interventions in low-performing schools, it did an excellent job stating what action will be taken in schools that fail to improve in a span of 3 years after being identified as low-performing. As for “Continuous Improvement” New Mexico has outlined ways it will continue to engage stakeholders on their implementation efforts which include developing future science assessments, and an “Opportunity-to-learn” survey. In the Academic Progress category, Arizona took the lead with its plan to measure student achievement and growth by comparing students to each other and comparing them to a common grade-level benchmark. When it comes to “Exiting Improvement Status”, Nevada’s plan takes top marks, they have set a rigorous and clear exit criteria for low-performing schools to reach before