By Lee Posey
Quipping that it was a "Christmas miracle," President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), legislation reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act last week.
This important federal law governing federal K-12 education funding and programs was last reauthorized in 2002 as No Child Left Behind. Read a comprehensive summary of ESSA compiled by NCSL staff.
The Every Student Succeeds Act takes states out from under many of the most problematic requirements of No Child Left Behind.
Those requirements included using a specific federally imposed metric—Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP—to measure student and school performance, and specific federally required interventions if schools did not meet a certain performance level. All students were supposed to be performing at 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014, something many states found an unrealistic goal. The provisions of No Child Left Behind were so unworkable that most states sought waivers offered by the U.S. Department of Education—waivers that came with their own requirements.
Under ESSA, states will be able to establish their own accountability systems.
These systems will use indicators of academic achievement, including but not limited to, results from statewide assessments, but will also include a state-chosen indicator of school quality and student success and the progress of English Language learners.
Using the indicators, states will identify schools that need interventions to help them raise student achievement. They will have to identify schools performing in the bottom 5 percent (based on the indicators), high schools that fail to graduate a third or more of their students, and any school in which a subgroup of students is consistently underperforming. Districts, with state support, however, will be able to decide what interventions will work best for a particular school.
States will continue to conduct a statewide yearly assessment in math and reading/language arts in grades three through eight, and once in grades nine through 12. Science must be assessed at least once in grades three through five, grades six through nine, and grades 10 through 12. However, states will decide how to weigh the assessments in their accountability systems. There is also flexibility in ESSA for states to develop innovative assessments and for districts to use nationally recognized tests for high school assessments. States can choose to use federal funds to audit all assessments given—including all state and district assessments—to see where tests are duplicative or unnecessary with the goal of ensuring that assessments do not take too much time from instruction.
ESSA requires that state legislators be consulted with by the state educational agency on the Title I plan for their state. That is a critical provision given that the underlying law effectively defines “state” as the state education agency, yet state legislators are key to ensuring that all parts of the education system—early education, K-12, career and technical education, and post-secondary education—work smoothly together.
The legislation includes a number of limitations on the authority of the federal government and the secretary of education in particular. These include a prohibition on the secretary mandating or exercising any control over a state’s standards or adding new requirements and criteria not specified in ESSA as a requirement for approving a state plan or waiver.
Overall, the Every Student Achieves Act provides states with new flexibility while continuing a positive feature of No Child Left Behind—collecting data on the academic performance of economically disadvantaged students, students in major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities and English language learners. States can now move forward on their education reform efforts without many of the constraints of No Child Left Behind.
Lee Posey is senior committee director for the NCSL Education Committee in the Washington, D.C. office.
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