States Need “Serious Help” with ESSA Implementation
February 21, 2018
Former Department of Education official Anne Hyslop writes about how state ESSA plans, now “on the brink of implementation,” are both “underwhelming and uneven” – which means progress for children will be as well, unless we can find ways to help states take advantage of ESSA’s many opportunities. Hyslop says that ESSA gives state governors and education officials plenty of room to innovate, but evidence of creative thinking is “less than promising,” based on the plans submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. To bolster this point, she notes that independent reviews—like Check State Plans, which Hyslop worked on with Bellwether Education Partners and the Collaborative for Student Success—“found state ESSA plans to be mostly uncreative, unambitious, unclear, or unfinished.”