Education Week - September 20, 2017 - 25

Fierce Internal Policy Battles Mark States' ESSA Process

GOVERNORS
Governors in Louisiana, Maryland,
North Carolina, and Wisconsin
rejected their states' ESSA
plans after the required 30-day
review process. The plans can
be submitted without governor
approval-indeed, U.S. Secretary
of Education Betsy DeVos
approved Louisiana's plan-but
such a thumbs-down indicates to
the federal Education Department
that there's not political
consensus over details.

STATE BOARDS
OF EDUCATION
In states such as Delaware,
North Carolina, Washington,
and West Virginia, legislatures
attempted to strip the powers
of their state boards of
education over key education
policy areas even as the states
readied their approaches to
ESSA implementation. In North
Carolina, the state board
sued the legislature over an
education law passed during
a special session that board
members said violated the
state's constitution.

LEGISLATURES
Lawmakers in states such as
Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, and
West Virginia passed bills that
dictated components of states'
ESSA plans regarding school
accountability and testing. That
left local superintendents and
state board members frustrated.

STATE CHIEFS
State superintendents in
Alabama, Colorado, and New
Mexico resigned in the middle of
the ESSA-planning process after
high-profile debates over key
policies, leaving practitioners
in the lurch and states in some
instances making last-minute
changes.
SOURCE: Education Week
Image by Getty

Advocates Weigh In
National, state, and local advocacy organizations all scrambled
throughout ESSA planning to adjust to the fluid situation. A board
meeting in California in July, for
example, fielded dozens of comments protesting the state's proposed accountability system.
In other states, advocates

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In other states, crucial policy decisions over testing, state goals, and
how to define an ineffective teacher
fanned flames between advocacy
groups and politicians.
The governors in Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, and Wisconsin all refused to sign off on their
states' plans before sending them
to Secretary DeVos. (A plan still can
be turned in without the governor's
signature.)
And Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley asked DeVos to send the plan
back (something his office is not allowed to do) after he took issue with
portions that dealt with special education students. That state's boardappointed superintendent involved
more than 300 people in the development of the plan, a process the
lieutenant governor said still left
the state's special education community without a voice.
"What we have in our system is

Hammering out plans
for the Every Student
Succeeds Act has been a
source of tension for rival
policymakers in many
states.

"We've been together for so long
and through so much together,"
said a disappointed Lynne Slone,
the attorney for the Kentucky Association of School Councils.
In Florida, Rosa Castro-Feinberg,
a civil rights activist for minority
and English-language-learner
students, said she will shift her efforts to the local level if the state's
ESSA plan passes federal muster.
Castro-Feinberg launched a petition and letter-writing and media
campaign to stop several waiver
requests from being attached to
that state's plan, an effort that ultimately failed.
Others, however, see an opportunity for advocates and policymakers to forge ties across state lines
in the wake of the sometimes-tense
ESSA planning, especially on common issues such as the achievement gap, the effects poverty has
on schools, and stagnant student
performance.
"For some states that are diving
into this more deeply, doing the
soul-searching, you're seeing a lot
less partisanship," said Michelle
Exstrom, the Education Program
Director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Education shouldn't be a partisan issue.
I think when you have a sense of
urgency, you figure out that it's in
everyone's best interest to improve
outcomes, and leaders get motivated to go to the table to fix it."

Joe Buglewicz

Hot-Button Issues

FRICTION POINTS

skipped state board meetings and
went straight to their legislature.
Maryland's Democraticallycontrolled legislature, pressured
by the state's teachers' union, effectively wrote the state's accountability system into a law called
"Protect Our Schools Act." The bill
survived Republican Gov. Larry
Hogan's veto and inflamed state
board of education members who
accused politicians of trapping students in failing schools.
Ohio's teachers' union and parent groups managed to convince
the state's superintendent in the
spring to stall the turning in of
that state's plan after they convinced enough people that the plan
would ramp up school testing.
And Kentucky's legislature
passed as part of its new ESSAaligned accountability system
a sweeping education bill that
mostly scrapped a historic school
governance model that had elevated parent voices in the form
of school-based-decision-making
councils.
The battle pitted Kentucky's
politically weak parent groups
against the state's well-financed
superintendents' association and
teachers' union. It flew in the face
of a working relationship the three
parties had forged over the years
in fighting for more school funding
from the legislature as the coal industry collapsed.

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change going forward," said Sandra
Vergari, a political scientist at the
State University of New York at Albany who has studied federal education policy. Following all 50 states
"is going to be a lot more work for
us scholars, policy analyst, and advocates."
Unlike prior federal versions of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESSA required "meaningful stakeholder engagement" in
crafting state plans-without defining who a stakeholder is or how
much or what type of engagement
needs to be conducted.
Many state superintendents said
shortly after ESSA was passed that
they had a natural incentive to put
an end to years of polarizing debates
over standards, accountability, and
testing. But as the ESSA planning
process unfolded, power grabs ensued in a number of states. Those
traditionally in charge of education
policy sparred with each other and
with lawmakers eager to take on a
share of the new responsibility.
In North Carolina, for example,
the Republican-controlled legislature-just days before Democratic
Gov. Roy Cooper took office this
winter-decided during a special
session that the state board should
no longer oversee key accountability and school turnaround decisions, and that those decisions
should be left up to the state's recently appointed Republican state
superintendent.
The board sued, and a judge decided last week to delay the law,
which has held up the state's ESSA
planning process.
Delaware's legislature stripped its
state board of several powers, and
a pending bill in Washington would
scrap that state's board of the ability to oversee portions of its accountability system.
And after years of infighting, Indiana's legislature decided this year
that the state's elected superintendent should instead be appointed by
the governor.

all these interest groups across the
political spectrum that have a lot of
power and say," said Calley, who has
a child with special needs. "There's
no organized group with PACS and
electoral power in our system that
represents the parents."
State superintendents, many with
their own political agendas, were
left walking a political tightrope in
some states. Several didn't survive.
In a political snub, Hawaii's sincereplaced state Superintendent
Kathryn Matayoshi wasn't invited
by Democratic Gov. David Ige to sit
on the state's ESSA task force.
New Mexico's secretary of education, Hanna Skandera, resigned in
June shortly after turning in her
state's controversial plan, which
upset the state's teaching force. And
just last week, Alabama Superintendent Michael Sentance resigned
after a bruising evaluation by the
state's district superintendents who
took issue with his leadership style
and the ESSA development process.

for Education
Erich Schlegel

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Houston

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Education Week - September 20, 2017

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