It鈥檚 been more than three years since President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law, and roughly half a year since the last approval of a state accountability plan by Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Despite that procedural progress, the myriad of state plans and the painstaking nature of their rollout make it difficult for those in the education policy world to paint a comprehensive picture of how states and district leaders are鈥攐r are not鈥攈olding schools accountable for how well they serve students.
Although many have emphasized the newfound flexibility states and school districts would enjoy under ESSA, advocates and observers of different stripes haven鈥檛 set aside their concerns about how the law is playing out.
For example, some continue to sound the alarm over what they say is the danger that one school might receive a higher overall rating, even as that strong score masks its failure to do well by subsets of students like those who are economically disadvantaged or have disabilities. Others are worried by what they say are fuzzy and uninformative state accountability systems that sometimes don鈥檛 provide ratings at all.
And the center of gravity for school improvement strategies has shifted dramatically in favor of individual schools and districts鈥攎aking it harder for national observers to paint a cohesive picture across state boundaries.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, people became accustomed to focusing, happily or not, on proficiency rates and what that law termed 鈥渁dequate yearly progress鈥� to judge how schools were performing, said Paige Kowalski, the vice president of policy and advocacy at the Data Quality Campaign, which works on how education data can be used to serve students. But under ESSA, there鈥檚 simply a much bigger range of factors that states are using to judge schools, factors that are still largely unfamiliar to the public at large, such as chronic absenteeism.
ESSA is legally authorized only through the middle of 2020, but there鈥檚 virtually no expectation that Capitol Hill will revisit the law any time soon.
鈥淎ccountability is still very much in its infancy, and data is still very much in its infancy,鈥� Kowalski said. 鈥淲e need to let some of these measures bake and marinate and simmer a little bit, so we can better understand how we know if kids are learning.鈥�
At the same time, she said, as attention has drifted away from how states and schools are handling ESSA, much of the education community is 鈥渒ind of dropping the ball.鈥� That inattention could hurt efforts to figure out what鈥檚 worked and what hasn鈥檛 whenever Washington lawmakers start looking at how to revamp ESSA, she noted.
Tough to Pin Down
Just finding out what states are doing on major accountability issues, many months after DeVos approved the last outstanding state plan, isn鈥檛 easy even for experts.
When Elizabeth Ross, the director of K-12 state policy at the consulting firm HCM Strategists, was working on a report published in November on school improvement work under ESSA and checked what state education department websites said about their school improvement practices, some of the sites hadn鈥檛 been updated since before ESSA passed.
HCM鈥檚 report, one of the more recent surveys covering ESSA implementation, found that at the time, just 17 states had enough public information about the topic for the group鈥檚 report to consider.
鈥淲ith some states, we got the sense that they were still hiding the data,鈥� Ross said.
Among positive trends, Ross and her team identified Louisiana鈥檚 efforts to create a statewide school improvement strategy focused on curriculum and teachers; Colorado鈥檚 鈥渟treamlined鈥� application to help districts get services and funding for improvement work; and Tennessee鈥檚 soup-to-nuts approach in helping districts conduct a needs assessment, create priorities, and set goals.
鈥淲e鈥檙e trusting that things are going well. But we know that a lot of things are happening behind the scenes,鈥� Ross said.
From his position as the chairman of the Wisconsin Senate鈥檚 education committee, Sen. Luther Olsen, a Republican, said he virtually never hears from educators about ESSA. That鈥檚 not necessarily a bad thing in Olsen鈥檚 book: His overriding concern is how, or whether, Wisconsin is going to meet its ESSA goal of cutting in half the achievement gap between groups of students such as white students and their black and Latino peers over five years.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 really want to get into telling schools how to run their business,鈥� Olsen said. 鈥淲e just want to hold them accountable for the outcomes.鈥�
At the same time, he鈥檚 worried that if his state and others eventually can鈥檛 prove that they鈥檙e meeting the expectations they鈥檝e laid out under ESSA, 鈥渢he temptation from the feds is going to be [to say]: 鈥榃ell, we gave you a chance. Now we have to put the hammer to you again.鈥� 鈥�
Lynn Jennings, the senior director of national and state partnerships at the Education Trust, which advocates for civil rights in education, said early returns for accountability under ESSA when it comes to actual outcomes aren鈥檛 necessarily encouraging.
According to a preliminary analysis Jennings conducted of the first year of North Carolina鈥檚 school grades under ESSA, 24 percent of schools receiving an A also had at least one group of students receiving an F.
Further down the list, the vast majority of North Carolina schools receiving a B grade鈥�86 percent鈥攈ad at least one subgroup getting a D or F rating, according to Jennings鈥� early study of the numbers. She said those kinds of statistics reinforce her concerns that much of the public might get a misleading impression of school performance.
鈥淗ow do we make sure that those students, those children, are not forgotten?鈥� Jennings said. 鈥淭here are groups, coalitions, that have made equity a focus. ... There are definitely some states where groups have come together and said: We definitely want to work together on these issues.鈥�
The lack of clarity on accountability can extend beyond measures such as school ratings into the realm of financial transparency. As of last month, for example, just five states had complied with the law鈥檚 requirements to publish detailed spending figures on a school-by-school basis, including such information as the amount of various funding sources, according to a Data Quality Campaign analysis.
California Battle
California has become one of the more heated battlegrounds for what kind of information is shared with the public and what鈥檚 done with it.
The state has adopted a color-coded 鈥渄ashboard鈥� system, which assigns ratings to different factors of a school鈥檚 performance but not an overall score. In February, the state released for the first time a list of hundreds of public schools identified as needing improvement under ESSA鈥檚 categories.
The state鈥檚 system represents the progression of an ongoing debate between fans of a hands-off approach to school improvement and those who believe the Golden State鈥檚 strategy will simply let districts off the hook. For years, the state has often disdained what officials have said is top-down and narrow accountability directed at least in part by officials in Washington.
It鈥檚 important to remember that the environment for key decisions about accountability can vary dramatically from state to state, said Dale Chu, an independent education consultant who鈥檚 previously worked at the Florida and Indiana education departments. Whatever their priorities, states need to articulate clear principles and actively engage with their districts, even if it means districts don鈥檛 always like what the state lays out: 鈥淭ension is good in these circumstances.鈥�
At the same time, Chu said he was skeptical of what he called the 鈥渏ust trust us鈥� model for accountability.
鈥淭here are still a lot of questions,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e a California parent and you want to compare how your school is doing to other schools, there鈥檚 no way to do it.鈥�
Yet the public鈥檚 attitudes toward these accountability systems isn鈥檛 easy to predict and may not fit neatly with some advocates鈥� concerns.
In a poll of Californians conducted by the University of Southern California鈥檚 Rossier School of Education and the research group Policy Analysis for California Education, 65 percent of voters who saw the state鈥檚 dashboard had a positive impression, while just 19 percent had a negative impression. Among parents, the gap was even larger: 81 percent reported a positive impression, while 11 percent said they had a negative impression.
It鈥檚 also fair to question how engaged the public is on the topic: The same poll found that just 17 percent of voters and 38 percent of parents had visited the dashboard at least once or twice.
Jennings of Education Trust said the issue of getting people who haven鈥檛 gotten involved with ESSA to work on such issues as school grades is still one of her biggest priorities.
鈥淣ow we鈥檙e getting more of the data, it鈥檚 becoming real. Implementation is becoming real,鈥� Jennings said. 鈥淭he rubber is really meeting the road now.鈥�
