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NCLB -  Major overhaul last week of No Child Left Behind - Please see below.

ESSA Reauthorization: The Every Student Succeeds Act

Every Student Succeeds Act

·         President Obama on Thursday, December 10, signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, just one day after the bill passed the Senate on a vote of 85-12 in a rare display of bipartisanship.

·         The President’s signature ends eight years of partisan wrangling over No Child Left Behind, the centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s education policy, which expired in 2007 and has been up for renewal each year since.

·         Democrats and civil rights groups fought to retain annual testing and the focus on ethnic and demographic subgroups of students to ensure continued progress on eliminating achievement gaps, while Republicans succeeded in returning testing, accountability and teacher preparation/evaluation to the states.

State and Local Control

·         ESSA returns significant authority to the states and to local communities following the unprecedented federal control of No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top legislation that followed in the early days of the Obama administration.

·         ESSA restores the states’ discretion in setting academic goals, accountability measures and interventions in schools performing in the bottom 5 percent.

·         Standardized tests remain a key part of state accountability systems, but states must also incorporate other factors that affect students' opportunity to learn, like student engagement, teacher engagement, and success in advanced coursework.

Testing

·         Students will still be tested in math and reading in third through eighth grades and once in high school, with results disaggregated to reflect the performance of specific demographic and ethnic groups within districts.

·         As in No Child Left Behind, the new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires 95 percent participation in these standardized tests, but parental waivers and other factors can be included in accountability measures that are determined individually at the state level.

·         States and districts will be required to adopt locally-developed, evidence-based interventions to improve student performance in the bottom 5 percent of schools and in schools where less than two-thirds of students graduate.

·         States must also develop accountability measures for districts schools where subgroup students are chronically struggling.

Teachers

·         Unlike the NCLB waiver requirements, states will no longer have to tie teacher evaluation to student outcomes, and NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirement would be officially a thing of the past.

·         Instead of mandating teacher evaluation on student performance, ESSA provides incentive grants to districts that want to try out performance pay and other teacher-quality improvement measures in a program called the Teacher and School Leader Innovation Program. There also are resources for helping train teachers on literacy and STEM.

Phasing out of NCLB and Into ESSA

·         Like most other states, Michigan is operating under a waiver to the No Child Left Behind requirement of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading.  It will transition from the waiver in 2016-17 and must submit a new accountability plan to the US Education Department. These new ESSA plans would start in the 2017-18 school year.

·         Michigan’s plan will need to incorporate at least four indicators into its accountability system which would include three academic indicators - proficiency on state tests, English-language proficiency, plus some other academic factor that can be broken out by subgroup such as growth on state tests, providing a mix of growth and achievement as in the current accountability system.

·         The state will also be required to add one additional factor into the accountability system.  Language in ESSA outlines student engagement, educator engagement and advanced coursework and college/career readiness as possibilities. This additional indicator must be disaggregated by subgroup.