Dive Brief:
- Now that the U.S. Department of Education has appointed committee members to create regulation proposals for the Every Student Succeeds Act, states are working to create their own unique plans for school accountability.
- States like Arizona, Florida, California and Kentucky are said to be working on legislation that conflicts with ESSA guidelines, while Connecticut's new plan seems to be in line with the law.
- Education Week reports that some experts are encouraging states to move slowly instead of rushing toward quick accountability solutions, since the actual ESSA guidance has not yet been written or released.
Dive Insight:
Since ESSA doesn't go into effect until the 2017-18 school year, and because no hard guidelines exist, it's certainly premature for states to jump into new legislative solutions around accountability. Instead, districts and schools may be better served by reviewing and evaluating what existing accountability measures have been piloted in states like California, where Gov. Jerry Brown formally supports dropping the use of numerical Academic Performance Index (API) scores to rank schools. Brown has instead proposed using "a concise set of performance measures," according to his new 2016-17 budget plan, although these exact measures have not yet been revealed.
A few components of ESSA can already be considered, such as the requirement that mandates every single state to identify and track their lowest-performing 5% of schools. That, potentially, is where California could run into problems in dropping API rankings. No alternative has been presented, and it's unclear how struggling schools will be identified. Overall, some experts have highlighted a growing national preference for formative assessments as opposed to summative as a trend. Critics warn that any interim results used for accountability could be inaccurate since interim tests aren’t designed to give summative results.