Education Week - March 16, 2016 - 16

Emboldened by ESSA's Leeway,
States Take Aim at Accountability
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

have indicated they won't come up
with an overall ranking of their
schools. Such a move would likely
fly in the face of the ESSA requirement that states identify their
worst-performing schools as a first
step toward improving them. Local
advocates are working to block the
state's prospective changes.
Lawmakers in Arizona, Florida,
and Kentucky have proposed legislation that appears to conflict with
ESSA guidelines regarding school
report cards and testing.
But Connecticut's state board
of education this month approved
an accountability system that includes factors such as students'
physical fitness and three ways to
measure graduation rates. State officials think it'll pass the muster of
federal oversight.
At the same time, U.S. Sen. Lamar
Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of
the Senate education committee and
a key architect of ESSA, has urged
states to chart their own path on
K-12 policy.
"The federal government has defined power under this law," he said
during a spine-stiffening pep talk at
a National Governors Association
meeting in February. "States have
numerous and infinite power. We
should adhere to the principles of
federalism here."
The Education Department didn't
return requests for comment last
week on whether some of the looming state changes would conflict with
ESSA requirements.

Pushing the Envelope
Rushing to craft new accountability systems could be hazardous, said
Michael Hansen, a research fellow
at the Brookings Institution and
the deputy director of the Brown
Center for Education Policy, who
has monitored the burst of activity.
"There's a bit of a risk staking a
claim, pushing it through, and then
having it potentially run afoul of
the federal regulations," Hansen
said. "It's ... a bit of a political calculation."
The changes being considered in
some states appear to focus most
intently on assessments and the
improvement of low-performing
schools, both of which were handled in what states considered an
overly prescriptive manner under
ESSA's predecessor, the No Child
Left Behind Act.
Under ESSA, which was signed
into law in December, graduation
rates and student achievement on
state tests will still dominate accountability systems, but states
are allowed to incorporate several
more factors into determining how
well schools are performing. They
also are given more flexibility in
deciding how to intervene in their
worst-performing schools.
The Education Department is in
the process of coming up with the
specific regulations to implement

those provisions, however, the first
of which may not be ready until
later this year. (See related story,
Page 14.)
In the meantime, as state education agencies and legislators start
to revamp state-level accountability systems, they're finding that
it may be harder than it looks. In
order to avoid the same pitfalls the
federal department made with the
NCLB law, state officials are working to build consensus, collect the
right data, and intervene in the
most appropriate way.
"This is critical because it's our
check that says we've made good
on the promises we've made to the
kids and families in our state," said
Connecticut schools Superintendent Dianna Wentzell.
At least eight states without
waivers from provisions of the
NCLB law have been itching to get
out of the prescribed penalties for
schools whose students fall short
on standardized tests.
While the majority of states got
waivers from the NCLB law, many

There's a bit of a risk
... pushing it through,
and then having it
potentially run afoul
of federal
regulations."
MICHAEL HANSEN
Brown Center for Education Policy

politicians feel they were bullied
by the federal department to adopt
some measures and now want to
retool.
And other states will likely have
to make changes to their existing
accountability systems simply because they don't meet all ESSA requirements. All states, for example,
will have to figure out a way to incorporate English-language learners' proficiency rates into their
accountability systems, something
that wasn't required under the previous law.

Long-Planned Changes
In some cases, the process of rewriting accountability systems
predated the passage of ESSA.
Connecticut officials began meeting
two years ago with teachers' unions,
local superintendents, and parent
groups in order to draft their application for their waiver from No
Child Left Behind.
In light of Democratic Gov. Dannel
Malloy's charge to not require any
more data collection than necessary,
they weighed the implications of several different indicators in coming
up with an accountability system.

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 16, 2016 | www.edweek.org

Measuring discipline, the department decided, would give schools
an incentive to underreport suspensions and expulsions.
And while officials wanted to incorporate students' civic engagement into their system, measuring
student-participation rates in Advanced Placement civics or government courses or requiring community service didn't really get at the
question of whether students were
so engaged.
The accountability system they
came up with-incorporating 12
data points to place schools in three
separate categories-is one that
state chief Wentzell said received
accolades from the federal department last summer.
State board members spent the
past few months making minor
changes based on their interpretation of the ESSA law before voting
in early March to put it in place
permanently. To the best of their
knowledge, it abides by the federal
requirements, said Wentzell.
"We look forward to refining the
system if necessary and will certainly do that in collaboration with
the Department of Education," she
said.

California's Overhaul
Like Connecticut, California
state board members have spent
the past two months figuring out
how to mesh the accountability
system they have created with new
federal requirements.
The state for the past several
years has clashed with the federal
department over school accountability, leading to California being denied a waiver under the NCLB law.
While the state says several components of its accountability system
match well with ESSA, such as identifying underserved student populations, it doesn't plan to provide an
index or rank its schools. That's
despite the fact that ESSA requires
states to identify their bottom 5 percent of schools. Instead, California
plans to provide parents with a list
of how well schools are doing in particular areas.
Requiring states to give more
weight to some factors over others implies that some factors are
more important than others, said
California state board President
Michael Kirst.
"If you're smart enough to look
at five things on the dashboard of
a car and still drive, you should
be able to understand a school,"
Kirst said. "For the people who
say parents can't understand multiple measures, then these parents
shouldn't be driving."
That's a sentiment that rankles
Ryan Smith, the executive director of Education Trust-West, an
Oakland-based advocacy group
that strongly supports incorporating data in accountability systems.
"When parents are driving cars,
they really want to know, 'Where
am I going?' " Smith said. "When

RETOOLING
While federal officials ponder the ground rules for school accountability
under the Every Student Succeeds Act, some states already are deep into
the process of overhauling their own systems.

ALASKA: After the state put its accountability
system on pause two summers ago for a variety
of reasons, the state school board is crafting
a new one, welcoming new flexibility to do
so under ESSA. Ideas include measuring
student engagement and students' access
to and completion of advanced courses. But
the legislature has slashed the state education
department's budget and limited the type and
amount of information the department can collect.
CALIFORNIA: Two years ago, the state put on hold
its decades-old Academic Performance Index system. The
board plans to approve a new system by this fall, and it could
include factors such as the student absentee rate and
college- and career-readiness opportunities. But Gov. Jerry
Brown and the state school board have indicated the
changes won't provide an index or ranking of schools.
If that's the only system California adopts, it would
fly in the face of ESSA's requirement that states
identify the bottom 5 percent of schools.
CONNECTICUT: A new system approved by the state board weighs
12 measures of school quality, including test scores, three ways of
measuring graduation rates, post-graduation career preparedness, the
percentage of chronically absent students, physical fitness, and access
to the arts. While the state education department has already begun
to rank schools, officials say minor changes may need
to be made once the federal department gives
additional ESSA guidance. The system is similar
to the one the federal department approved with
its waiver from No Child Left Behind in August
last year.
SOURCE: Education Week

you're not helping them get a good
glimpse of how well a school is
performing, it's less like driving a
car and more like flying a plane.
If they don't have the capability of
doing that, they're going to crash."
Smith said he is pushing legislators to block the system. The state
is modeling its new accountability system on its school funding
formula, which distributes funds
based on specific school performance factors.

Forging New Paths
There are other examples of states
looking to strike out on their own.
For instance, while ESSA requires states to administer the
same state exam in grades 3-8,
Florida and Arizona are considering bills that would give schools
the option of two exams.
And Kentucky lawmakers are
debating a bill that would seem to
conflict with several provisions of the
law, including what the state's education department lists on school report
cards, and which schools the state
deems failures. It's a point Susan
Perkins Weston of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, a
Kentucky citizens' advocacy group,
brought up on the group's blog.
For some states, ESSA leaves several questions unanswered.
In Alaska, the state education
department last month began convening parents, teachers, administrators, and superintendents across

the state to start designing an accountability system that would
replace the Alaska School Performance Index-a system the state
put on hold two years ago because
of technical problems.
Already, questions of particular
significance to Alaska are starting to arise: How do you break out
subgroups of students without violating data-privacy laws when, for
many schools, subgroups amount to
no more than five students? How do
you effectively intervene in isolated,
one-room schoolhouses that dot the
state, far from any paved roads?
And, most importantly, what data
can a department that has been
slashed back as a result of statewide
budget cuts feasibly collect?
"We're hoping that the regulatory
process fleshes the law out a little
bit more," said Brian Laurent, the
state department's data-management supervisor. "If there's something that the federal department
feels strongly about, then they need
to tell us. We are seeing this as our
opportunity to have local stakeholder input and create a plan that
works for us."
Assistant Editor Andrew Ujifusa
contributed to this report.
Coverage of policy, government and
politics, and systems leadership is
supported in part by a grant from by
the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

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Education Week - March 16, 2016

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