The U.S. Department of Education has issued new requirements for how school improvement strategies under the Every Student Succeeds Act must rely on various levels of evidence.
As our colleague Sarah D. Sparks reported Sunday, the department and other activities under ESSA. Among other key provisions, the rules would require evidence linked to various strategies to be 鈥渞elevant鈥� to the students or groups of students identified for additional support鈥攊n other words, that the strategy has been shown to help them.
In addition, a state or district would need to show that the strategy it鈥檚 using to improve a school matches the parameters of a study showing that strategy鈥檚 benefits.
You might recall that there are three different standards of evidence for school improvement strategies under ESSA:
- Strong (relied on experimental trials)鈥�
- Moderate (relied on quasi-experimental trials);
- Promising (lower bar for research standards, but still differentiated between a control group of students and those who had access to the improvement strategy).
The department is until the start of next month.
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