Latest news with #EveryStudentSucceedsAct
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Amid Calls to Close Ed Dept., Schwinn Promises to Aid ‘Most Struggling Schools'
Despite strong opposition to her nomination from some conservative groups, Penny Schwinn faced relatively light questioning from senators Thursday as she seeks to become second in charge of the U.S. Department of Education. Though Democrats probed where she stands on President Donald Trump's plan to shutter the department, the former Tennessee education commissioner appeared to answer questions to their satisfaction. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Democratic Sen. Maggie Hasan of New Hampshire homed in on the administration's move to end grants to train and hire K-12 school mental health professionals — part of a 2022 law that passed with bipartisan support. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter 'Do you think that what the department did helps or hurts the communities that were counting on the funding that they were promised?' she asked. 'If confirmed, do you commit to reigning in the chaos and operational failures that we are seeing at the department?' Schwinn said the department will open a new competition for those grants and promised to 'have an efficient, effective and outcomes-oriented department.' Related She voiced support for Trump's ultimate goal to eliminate the department and repeatedly said states and local communities are in the best position to make decisions about education. As a charter school founder who served in the Delaware and Texas education agencies before leading Tennessee's for four years, Schwinn has a reputation for working across the aisle. She pushed for reading reforms and using pandemic relief funds to implement a statewide tutoring program. A vote on her confirmation is expected in the coming days. 'What we need to do is ensure that we've created a system that is going to drive outcomes,' she told GOP Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana. 'That is not going to happen from the federal government, whether there's a Department of Education or not.' At the same time, Schwinn implied that there is a role for the department in ensuring states intervene in their lowest-performing schools. 'There must be a commitment to ensuring that our most struggling schools improve because our students deserve that,' she said. A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office found that less than half of states are meeting those requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Schwinn's tenure in Tennessee, for example, included overseeing a state turnaround effort known as the Achievement School District. Considering it a failure, the state legislature recently shut it down and will try another approach. 'There's real tension there,' Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, told The 74. 'Will the Trump administration make a meaningful commitment to school improvement? Or will [Education Secretary Linda] McMahon and her team dodge that responsibility in the name of local control?' Some observers have called Schwinn a smart pick for her focus on improving reading achievement and her attempts to avoid some of the more divisive culture war debates of the post-pandemic era. But to others she has a troubled track record that includes contracts with vendors that gave the appearance of a conflict of interest. On Wednesday, The 74 reported that after Trump nominated her, she registered a new business in Florida with a longtime colleague. While the venture was ultimately dissolved, Schwinn's sister replaced her as a manager a few weeks before the nominee submitted her financial disclosure documents. Related Some parent groups have vehemently opposed her nomination, viewing her as more left-leaning than most Trump nominees. 'It amazes me that President Trump would consider Penny Schwinn conservative,' said Tiffany Boyd, a homeschool advocate who opposed Schwinn's plan to conduct well-being checks on students during the pandemic. Schwinn nixed the idea after strong backlash. Boyd also cited a teacher recruitment effort that focused, in part, on attracting more teachers of color — efforts that the department now says push 'illegal diversity, equity and inclusion.' But none of that surfaced during the hearing. Even Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has vowed to fight the 'left's indoctrination of students,' opted to skip direct questions to Schwinn and said he would submit them in writing. The committee interviewed Schwinn as part of a panel, along with Kimberly Richey, Trump's choice to lead the Office for Civil Rights, and two Department of Labor nominees. In that format, the senators focused on issues most important to them — for example, Chairman Bill Cassidy emphasized better serving students with dyslexia. 'As the Department of Education streamlines educational funding, how can we ensure that resources are there to identify and address an issue, specifically speaking of dyslexia?' he asked. Schwinn touted Tennessee's move to include 'characteristics of dyslexia' as a disability category in its state education funding formula and ramp up screening of students' early reading skills. The federal government, she said, could do a better job of guiding states on this issue and sharing lessons from states that have posted the greatest gains in literacy, like Mississippi and Louisiana. Related Some advocates are eager to have an educator who prioritized reading instruction at the department. 'We love her track record of improving student outcomes in Tennessee and talking a bit more technically about literacy and the science of reading — which we think having leadership on the federal level around is going to be key,' said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Foundation. But she stressed that it was federally funded research, now at risk under the Trump administration, that informed those improvements. 'The research and the funding for all these 'state miracles,' ' she said, 'come from regional and federal efforts — which I think a lot of folks are forgetting.'
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
This Long-Neglected Law Can Help Parents Get Their Kids Out of Violent Schools
On Wednesday, the Department of Education published a letter reminding states of a little-known school choice provision that allows students attending dangerous public schools to enroll in another public school or charter school in their district. The provision, called the Unsafe School Choice Option, was originally passed as part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and was continued under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. The law allows students attending a school deemed "persistently dangerous," as well as students who were victims of violent crimes at school, to transfer out and into another school in their district. However, the law has gone largely unenforced. In all, just eight states had ever designated a school as persistently dangerous, according to a 2019 analysis from education news outlet The 74. Of those eight states, only New York and Pennsylvania have made more than 100 designations. Why have so few schools received this designation? Since individual states were allowed to define persistently dangerous themselves, most have chosen criteria that are almost impossible for schools to meet. For example, in Ohio, a high school of 1,000 students could have four homicides and 19 weapons possessions without being deemed persistently dangerous. In a letter sent to state-level education officers, the Education Department encouraged states to reconsider their definitions of persistently dangerous schools and "ensure that they have clear and robust communication protocols to ensure that parents know if their child's school has been identified as persistently dangerous and understand the school choice options available to them." "The number of persistently dangerous schools reported nationwide appears low particularly given the number of violent offenses in schools reported through the Department's Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC)," reads the letter. "For example, not a single school was designated as persistently dangerous in the 2021-2022 school year, while public school districts reported through the CRDC approximately 1.2 million violent offenses in that same school year (with physical attack without a weapon and threats of physical attack without a weapon accounting for 93% of these offences)." If states develop reasonable definitions of persistently dangerous, more American parents may soon have the ability to remove their children from public schools plagued by violence—and schools with safety problems could soon face pressure to improve conditions. The post This Long-Neglected Law Can Help Parents Get Their Kids Out of Violent Schools appeared first on
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Education Plan Raises Fears Over Future of Testing and Accountability
At a recent virtual discussion on the future of state testing, Maryland education chief Carey Wright drew a line in the sand. 'Even if the feds decide that they're not going to require statewide assessments, that is not something that I'm going to buy into,' she said. 'The moment you lower standards, you do kids a disservice.' With President Donald Trump on a path to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and revert power back to the states, Wright's words gave urgency to a burning issue state leaders have been wrestling with for months. While Education Secretary Linda McMahon has declared it's 'absolutely' necessary to continue the National Assessment of Educational Progress — which allows the public to compare student performance across states — she's so far been silent on federal requirements for state testing and the need to identify low-performing schools for extra support. The lack of a plan has left some wondering if sending education 'back to the states,' as Trump is fond of saying, means abandoning what has been a mainstay of education policy for more than 20 years. 'This is one of the discussions that the department, the administration, the Senate and House need to talk through,' said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a right leaning think tank that supports Trump's agenda. A department official during the president's first term, he argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law that spells out federal requirements for testing and accountability, has had little impact on holding students to high standards. 'States that do not want to be transparent about their testing results simply aren't,' he said. 'If you don't believe me, just go and try and find the results for any state.' As the president's plan takes shape, some Republicans are trying to remove those annual testing and accountability requirements altogether. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota reintroduced a bill last week that would not only eliminate the education department, but also repeal ESSA. In exchange for a federal block grant, states would be required to submit student data to the Treasury Department, complete an annual audit and follow civil rights laws — but not conduct annual tests. The rationale is clear, said Charles Barone, senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union: Maintaining some federal authority over testing and accountability could imply there's still a role for the department. 'Sen. Rounds' bill simply has federal programs as money streams,' he said. 'No policy attached.' Since the pandemic, a handful of states, like Oklahoma, Wisconsin and New York, have rolled back expectations for passing state tests. The changes are likely to result in more students reaching grade-level targets even if they haven't learned more. The trend has revived debate over the 'honesty gap' — the discrepancy between NAEP's higher standard for proficiency and the often lower bar set by states. Others, like Wright in Maryland and Virginia education Secretary Aimee Guidera are phasing in tougher assessment and accountability systems. To Blew, that shows the federal government should just stay out of the way. 'At the end of the day, states are going to determine this,' he said. 'Let's give them the freedom to do that.' Related Passed a decade ago, ESSA requires states to test all students in third through eighth grades in reading and math, to assess students once in high school and to ensure at least 95% of students participate in testing. States also have to break down results by race and for different student groups, including those in poverty, English learners and students with disabilities. The major components meet the threshold of what Barone describes as the 'bare minimum' for accountability. Testing every student allows parents to get assessment results for their own children, which can then be used to determine where students are struggling or if they need more challenging work. Disaggregating the results shines a light on how districts serve historically marginalized students — data that is especially important to policymakers and advocacy groups. Finally, a common test allows for apples-to-apples comparisons across schools and districts. 'Over the years, a consensus has formed that you want certain guardrails in place,' Barone said. Observers don't expect Rounds' bill to get very far. But some call it a harbinger of a return to the days before No Child Left Behind, the strict accountability law that preceded ESSA. In the 1990s, just a fraction of states tested students every year and many imposed no consequences for failing schools. 'I think accountability is already at a pretty low point,' said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri. 'If things go back to the states even more formally, I would just expect that unwinding to complete itself.' Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the education committee, is expected to introduce another proposal to eliminate the education department and revamp the role of the federal government in education. Blew said that bill could be weeks away. Democrats and some state leaders warn that dumping federal testing and accountability requirements and issuing block grants would allow states to turn their backs on the neediest students. 'If you get rid of accountability, you're just essentially giving [states] a blank check,' said Stephanie Lalle, communications director for the Democrats on the House education committee. Federal mandates, she said, are how you push them to 'not discriminate and incentivize them to close the achievement gap.' At a February conference on assessment and accountability in Dallas, Virginia ed secretary Guidera shared data showing how her state's performance on NAEP steadily improved between 2003 and 2013 — the NCLB years. The landmark education law, which set strict testing and accountability requirements in exchange for Title I funds, passed in 2002. Data shows the policy led to math and reading gains nationally, but it quickly became highly unpopular. The law set ambitious goals for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, but drew considerable pushback from critics who said it led schools to teach to the test. But even if states continue their own testing and accountability systems, Guidera doesn't want Washington out of the picture. 'We need the federal backstop,' told The 74. 'We have to have high standards, and we need to be honest with ourselves about where every child is.' Related Opposition to standardized testing comes from both the left and the right. Educators grumble that it eats up too much class time and that results from spring tests come back too late to help students or make adjustments for the fall. Others, especially teachers unions, say state tests offer a narrow view of student learning. The question is what states would do if the federal government were no longer in the picture. In his conversation with Wright and other experts earlier this month, Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, leaned on a handy metaphor: a motorcycle cop holding a radar gun. 'What if nobody was checking your speed?' he asked. State leaders have been thinking about the possibilities. Rep. Robert Behning, an Indiana state legislator, said he 'would be willing to look at other options, like sampling' — giving tests to a random, representative group of students instead of everyone. That approach can be less of a drain on teachers' and students' time and still give the public district and school-level results. But the tradeoff is that most parents would be left in the dark about their children's performance. Other state leaders like the idea of spreading assessments throughout the year rather than building up toward one big test. 'We've got better assessments that tell us more about our students,' Eric Mackey, Alabama state superintendent, said during a different webinar in March. But research shows there are challenges with arriving at a final score for the year and the model might not reduce testing time. Marion suggests giving state exams every other year, which would allow more time in the intervening years to employ innovative methods like asking students to complete a project to demonstrate their learning. Related Marianne Perie, an assessment expert who advises states on test design, said she wouldn't be surprised if Oklahoma completely stopped giving statewide assessments. In March, state Superintendent Ryan Walters questioned the integrity of the 2024 results, even though they were included in annual report cards for districts and schools. But in other states like Tennessee and Mississippi, annual tests have been 'a rallying cry' for parents and policymakers, said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who tracks states' pre- and post-COVID performance. Such states 'have championed their gains in the last few years,' especially in English language arts, she said. Tennessee, for example, was among the first to bounce back from pandemic-era learning loss. At the same time, the fact that roughly 60% of third graders still scored below grade level in reading was worrisome enough to lawmakers that they passed a law requiring students to be retained or get extra help over the summer and retake the test. Remote learning during the pandemic and in-depth reporting on poor literacy instruction has also motivated more parents to push for improvements. 'Parents are increasingly demanding accountability from their educational system, which will make sunsetting these assessments more complex,' Oster said. Roughly 80% of parents value state assessments and think they should be used to guide support for struggling schools and students, according to a National Parents Union poll. If the federal government does hand more control over assessment and accountability to states, Barone said it's far more likely to happen through waivers from McMahon than legislation. ESSA allows the secretary to excuse states from annual assessments. That's what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did in 2020 during the pandemic. She waived the accountability provisions for both 2020 and 2021. Barone sees no reason why McMahon wouldn't do the same. A former Democratic staffer in the House, he thinks it would be hard to improve on the existing testing regimen. But even he agrees that the accountability side of the equation hasn't led to measurable progress in how states support — and attempt to turn around — their most troubled schools. The law requires states to identify the lowest-performing 5% of schools, analyze why they're struggling and adopt a proven strategy for improvement, like coaching teachers or changing leadership. But a 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that less than half of states were complying with those requirements. 'There's not a lot of evidence that even those that are doing it are doing it well,' Barone said. Maybe Trump's planned overhaul of the federal role in education, he said, is an opportunity to 'come up with something better.'
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Every Student Succeeds Act Turns 10 This Year. Why I Won't Be Celebrating
This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the Every Student Succeeds Act. I predict there won't be any grand celebrations. That's because ESSA is proving to be a weak law. Although it was hailed at the time for its bipartisan nature and called 'the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century,' student achievement has fallen dramatically, especially for the lowest-performing youngsters. Part of the problem is that ESSA doesn't have the same muscular elements as its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. It's a pretty damning comparison: NCLB required states to hold districts accountable for their results; it paid close attention to low-performing student subgroups; and it included other improvement efforts like school choice, tutoring and a $1 billion reading program. ESSA has none of those things. This lack of ambition probably helped it win widespread bipartisan support when it passed, and also why it has led to student achievement declines. Related Admittedly, this is an awkward point to be making at the current moment. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to kill the U.S. Department of Education and hand full control of education back to the states. Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren are responding by defending the status quo with chants like 'Save our Schools.' But history suggests neither deregulation nor blind support for the current federal-state relationship is the right approach. And with state leaders seeking waivers for even less oversight over their use of federal funds, now is the time to start thinking about what a better accountability framework might look like. Here are five places to start: The Trump administration wants to send even more control back to the states with 'no-strings-attached formula block grants.' But that seems unwise, given the achievement declines most states have experienced over the last decade (many of which preceded COVID). More importantly, it wouldn't make sense to offer the same flexibilities to, say, Maine or Oregon, where scores have declined rapidly over the last decade, as to Mississippi, which has dramatically improved outcomes for kids. Different states deserve different levels of earned autonomy. Andy Smarick, Kelly Robson and I outlined this approach in a 2015 report we called 'Pacts Americana.' We envisioned a set of federal-state compacts where each state established ambitious student performance goals and developed a comprehensive plan for reaching them. In exchange, states would be freed from strict federal rules on how to identify low-performing schools and the specific steps for improvement those schools must take, and the government would monitor the results. The feds could then extend the length of compacts with states that make progress and ask those where performance has stalled to revisit their plans. Related ESSA has some elements of this framework. Nominally, states are in charge of writing their own plans and the feds are responsible for oversight. But the states would tell you the feds are too strict on what's allowable and what's not. More importantly, that process ignores student results, and performance can — and has — stalled without any impetus for change. Whereas NCLB had both school and district accountability components, ESSA focuses solely on schools. That turned out to be a huge mistake. The school-level emphasis was fundamentally flawed. After all, district leaders control the budget, adopt the school calendar, negotiate major contracts and determine pay schedules. In other words, district leaders should be blamed if a school doesn't have the resources it needs to succeed. The nation saw this play out during COVID. It wasn't teachers or principals who set COVID policies, yet the national education law ignored the district role and instead required states to focus on individual schools. That made no sense — and it was borne out in the data. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard report found achievement gaps within the same districts stayed about the same during the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, achievement gaps between districts grew substantially. Why? Because the districts were making different decisions. As a research team led by Dan Goldhaber found, 'In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools.' That is, district decisions over how to handle COVID, not COVID itself, were what caused gaps to grow. Going forward, districts, not schools should be the primary unit of accountability. American society is becoming more diverse, and old categories of race and ethnicity are becoming harder to neatly measure and define. It's not that the U.S. has suddenly become colorblind or that race doesn't matter, but policies haven't caught up to the fact that people who identify as multiracial are the fastest-growing group in the country. Moreover, there's wide variation in which children are identified as having disabilities. Related These categories are also less salient in education than they once were. While there's been tremendous growth in the gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, who those students are has changed. Yes, the bottom has fallen out for children in traditionally low-performing subgroups, but it has fallen even faster for native English speakers, students without disabilities and those who do not live in poverty. As such, policymakers should follow the lead of states like Florida and Mississippi, which specifically look at how the bottom 25% of students are doing, regardless of their race, ethnicity or disability status. Those kids rely on public schools the most, they're struggling right now and it's where the policy focus should be going forward. ESSA requires states to share results with families 'as soon as is practicable' after standardized tests are administered. But reporting has actually gotten slower over time. Even with the shift to digital exams, states take longer to process the scores than they did two decades ago. That's inexcusable. States could speed this up on their own, or the feds could step in and define 'as soon as practicable' to be no more than, say, two weeks after the test. That's the standard in the private sector, and there's no reason it can't be met in public education. Did you know that all students in low-performing public schools once had access to free after-school tutoring? Or that all families in low-performing schools once had the right to transfer to another public school of their choice? Related Both these programs existed under NCLB. They had flaws, for sure, and school districts tended to hate them, but they pressured schools to improve, and thousands of families took advantage of them each year. Congress should consider bringing back these other forms of accountability too. This is far from a comprehensive list of all the things that need to improve with current accountability systems, but it's not enough to shout 'local control' or defend the status from both sides of the aisle need to reckon with the current state of public education and articulate a vision for the future that matches that reality.
Wall Street Journal
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Albany's Sleight of Hand on School Attendance
In 'Albany Doesn't Overlook Chronic Absenteeism' (Letters, March 26), JP O'Hare defends the New York State Education Department's decision to shift from a narrow focus on chronic absenteeism to a broader measure that includes the attendance of all students. While the education department is still publishing chronic absenteeism metrics, it has removed that measure from its Every Student Succeeds Act plan, which assesses school quality. This signals to school districts across the state that they don't have to focus on reducing chronic absenteeism if their overall attendance is acceptable.
