Dive Brief:
- The Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group that focuses on college and career readiness and low-income students, has looked at Every Student Succeeds Act plan in Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia, reports Education Week.
- In observing these states, the group put together "equity dashboards" made available online to educators and policymakers, so they can compare how each of these different plans measure in long-term goals in academics and graduation retention, support for disadvantaged students, and intervention mechanisms for struggling schools. With this measurement tool, users can see whether the components of the plan range from green light if its seen to be successful, to yellow if its a mixed bag, and red if there are concerns that ought to be addressed.
- Though the group has only uploaded five state plans now, it plans to release 12 more in Mid-July, as well as other states once they submit their ESSA plans to the State Department in September.
Dive Insight:
With transition to the Trump administration and the repeal of certain accountability provisions, educators were unsure as to how the new Department of Education would affect their compliance with the Every Student Succeeds Act and its implementation process. Under the Obama Department of Education passed some regulations that had the enforcement of law. But those regulations were eliminated in Congressional Review Act, which means Department of Education has limited say in how states will be required to interpret the ambiguous aspects of the law, though early feedback from the department has suggested officials won't be as hands-off as some Republican lawmakers had hoped.
In first look at ESSA plans, The Alliance for Excellent Education's vice president for policy development, Phillip Lowell, said that he was mostly pleased with how states dealt with their school quality indicator, reports Education Week. Though states did receive low marks in some areas. Louisiana received two "yellow" ratings for how it has planned to consider underperforming subgroups of students and how it measure English-language proficiency. Nex Mexico got a red for not considering student subgroup performance in the school rating system. Colorado was marked down for ineffectively handling academic proficiency and graduation rates. The alliance hopes that the equity indicators will offer states that are constructing their plans an objective way of measuring what others states are doing for students, so they can do a better job of considering needs across the board.