Are States Limiting Schools Identified for Support?
March 26, 2019
This report by Lindsay Dworkin and Anne Hyslop for the Alliance for Excellent Education takes a look at how, under ESSA, “states have reimagined their school accountability systems and come up with new ways to identify schools for support and improvement.” Though ESSA has some built-in flexibility for states when it comes to approach, the law also requires states to identify schools that need additional support in three categories—comprehensive (CSI), additional targeted (ATS), and targeted support and improvement (TSI). However, according to Dworkin and Hyslop, two states (Arkansas and Connecticut) are “likely to underidentify schools for ATS because their definitions for ‘consistently underperforming’ are narrower than ESSA’s definition for ATS schools.”