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ESSA/ESEA 101: What K–12 Leaders Need to Know About Standards & Assessments

By ASBO USA posted 01-06-2016 08:03

  

Now that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has been signed into law, K–12 state and district leaders will have to develop plans to implement the law’s new provisions by the 2017–2018 school year (SY). Last month, we discussed what education leaders must know about ESSA’s accountability requirements as the Department of Education (ED) shifts more responsibilities to states and districts. Let’s see what the education law says about academic standards and assessments, as well as opting students out of testing.


Academic Standards & Assessments
State and local education agencies (SEAs and LEAs) must have high academic standards, but they get to decide what those standards are. ED can no longer mandate a specific set of academic standards or incentivize states or districts to use certain standards in exchange for federal funding. If states wish to continue using Common Core standards, they may, but it isn’t required.

ESSA’s annual assessment provisions are essentially unchanged from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That is, students in grades 3–8 will be tested in reading and math once each year (and in high school once for each subject). Also, they will only be tested in science once per grade span (elementary, middle, and high school). Alternative assessments for students with special needs are capped at 1%, meaning that more special education students will have to take the same annual assessments as other students.


Student Opt-Outs
Under ESSA, states must continue to test at least 95% of their students. Student test participation must also be incorporated into the state’s accountability plan (which states must submit to ED this year if they haven’t already). ESSA provides states much more discretion regarding which tests to administer, how to use and count test scores, and determining which ineffective/duplicative tests to discontinue. Such flexibility is intended to help educators address over testing.

Additionally, states are free to craft their own opt-out laws, but they must have an action plan if participation rates fall below 95%. (For example, here is Oregon's opt-out law, implemented last June.) If a school fails to reach the 95% threshold, SEAs and LEAs will determine how to intervene and address the issue instead of the federal government (as was the case under NCLB).


Transitioning from NCLB to ESSA Requirements in 2016
SY2016–2017 will serve as a transition year for states to shift from NCLB provisions and waiver plans to the new ESSA law. NCLB waivers will officially be null and void August 1, 2016 and new waiver requests are no longer being accepted at this time. (For more information, see this Dear Colleague letter from ED.) In the meantime, districts and schools should be on the lookout for ED guidance to navigate the hybrid NCLB/ESSA framework for the remainder of this school year and for SY2016–2017.

EdWeek says that ED will focus on holding states accountable for the academic standards and assessment provisions in their NCLB waiver plans, since these factors will still be relevant when ESSA takes effect in SY2017–2018. However, ED will move away from enforcing teacher evaluation requirements for “high-risk” NCLB waiver states, since ESSA prohibits the federal government from mandating teacher evaluation requirements. (Under ESSA, states will define what high-quality teachers are, determine how much student test scores affect teacher evaluations, and have the flexibility to innovate their own educator evaluation systems.)

There is already an assessment pilot program that allows states and districts to experiment using local or national assessments in place of state tests (e.g., PARCC and Smarter Balanced) to measure student achievement; they just need to obtain ED’s approval. Seven states have already “won permission from the U.S. Department of Education to use SAT or ACT” assessments for students to measure achievement and ensure college readiness. “Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire won approval to use the SAT for federal accountability, and Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming got the nod to use the ACT that way.” Read more here.

In another Dear Colleague letter, ED officials recently warned K–12 leaders about student assessment requirements for SY2016–2017, particularly emphasizing low test participation issues. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Illinois, and Wisconsin all received letters since their schools struggled to meet the 95% participation mark last year. ED warns that if these states fail to meet the 95% participation mark again this spring, ED will 1) withhold a portion of Title I funds, 2) place Title I funds on “high-risk” and require the state to use its own funding to address low participation, or 3) withhold or redirect Title VI federal dollars for state assessments. While ED won’t be able to dictate specific assessments for states, Title I funds are dispersed to states based on the condition that all students are assessed: “ESEA sections 1111(b)(3)(C)(i) and (ix)(I) require State assessments to ‘be the same academic assessments used to measure the achievement of all children’ and ‘provide for the participation in such assessments of all students.’”


More Regulations to Come
EdWeek notes that ESSA’s academic standards, assessments, and “supplement-not-supplant” funding provisions will still have to go through a “negotiated rulemaking” process, which means many regulations are still forthcoming. During this process, education advocates and ED officials will meet and hash out agreements on what regulations to implement and how. The rulemaking process “could take months, years, depending on how thorough the department is.” If the negotiated rulemaking process fails, though, the regulations in question will be open to congressional review. That means Congressional officials can examine a regulation, and if they don’t like it, they can introduce a new bill or policy rider to change it. This “new and unusual procedure” intends to provide a way for elected officials to curb the federal government’s regulatory role in ESSA implementation. Because of this process, policy analysts suggest that school leaders wait until SY2016–2017 to enact any major ESSA-related changes, only after ED has made clear which federal rules schools need to enforce.

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01-07-2016 12:41

Good resource - like links to additional information