Education Week - April 4, 2018 - 9

Districts Aim to Wield Evidence-Based Tools
In Satisfying ESSA on School Turnarounds
by Alyson Klein

cDermitt Combined Schools
in the rural, northeastern corner of Nevada has
been stuck in the academic
doldrums for years. The
school, which serves a high
proportion of low-income
Native American students,
w a s flag ge d u nde r t he
now-defunct No Child Left
Behind Act and got nearly
$140,000 in extra federal
resources under the School
Improvement Grant program.
But the school continued to founder, said David Jensen, the superintendent of the 3,400-student Humboldt
school district.
Now, the district is taking advantage of flexibility in
the Every Student Succeeds Act that allows superintendents like Jensen, with an assist from their states, to
come up with their own school improvement strategies,
backed by evidence, to help schools like McDermitt.
Nevada, which is one of the first states to embrace
this new approach, helped hook Jensen and his team up
with nationally recognized school improvement experts
who are providing McDermitt with coaching, helping it
to analyze student data, and more. It's a significant-
and, Jensen says, welcome-departure from the list of
federally prescribed interventions of the past.
But big questions loom as persistently struggling
schools around the country prepare to embark on a
new school kind of school improvement journey. Will
districts and schools use the new leeway in ESSA to
find new solutions? Or will they keep doing the same
things that they always have, with the same results?
How seriously will states and districts take ESSA's
evidence-based requirement, if there isn't a ton of
federal oversight?
Experts see some promise in the new approach-and
plenty to worry about.
"I'm concerned that people in the field will forget
about the need to choose really good, evidence-based
strategies and implement them really well," said Caitlin Scott, the manager for research and evaluation at
Education Northwest, a nonprofit that works on school

improvement. "I think that is a danger. ... It's easy to
latch onto the next new, shiny, impressive thing without really doing the background-information gathering to see what the evidence is that something is going
to be successful."

LACK OF CAPACITY
The biggest potential challenge: capacity.
ESSA, the latest version of the main federal K-12 law,
got rid of the NCLB law's controversial School Improvement Grant program, last funded at $450 million in fiscal 2016. But ESSA continued an Obama administration
requirement that states identify schools performing in
the bottom 5 percent. ESSA directs states to set aside at
least 7 percent of their Title I money, which is geared toward disadvantaged students, for school improvement,
up from an allowable 4 percent under the old law.
Low-performing districts that get a piece of the federal cash must choose an intervention that's backed by
what the law defines as either "strong," "moderate,"
or "promising" evidence. And districts that don't get
federal funding to fix their lowest-performing schools
must pick a plan that has a rationale behind it and then
study it carefully to see if it's working.
But district leaders may not have the time-or knowhow-to take a hard look at the wide universe of potential solutions for low-performing schools and figure out
which will really help the students they serve, experts
say. And studying the impact of interventions could also
prove tricky.
"The ask here is actually a really big ask for states and
districts," said Carlas McCauley, who ran the School
Improvement Grant program as a career official at the
U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration and is now the director of WestEd's Center
on School Turnaround in Sacramento, Calif., a research
and consulting organization. "It's going to take time to
completely move" in this new direction, McCauley said.
Outside the 50 largest urban districts, the person
who handles school improvement may be the same
staffer who deals with other federal programs centered on factors like teacher quality and school safety.
That means districts may be tempted to take outside
consultants and providers at their word when they say
a strategy meets ESSA's evidence requirements, said

ESSA On the Runway

Education Week - April 4, 2018

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