“U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos may have approved every state’s vision for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act—but that doesn’t mean the plans are all done and dusted,” Klein also writes in Education Week. “States can still make changes to their plans,” and after...
Rebecca Klein reports for HuffPost that a “coalition of advocacy and teacher groups” has sued the U.S. Dept. of Education in an attempt to get “information related to its decision to allow schools to purchase firearms using federal funds.” Controversy over this issue “started in August,...
Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, columnist Maureen Downey is skeptical of the Georgia Board of Education’s recent approval of three pilot tests via ESSA’s Innovative Assessments program. “The danger here is that you dial back expectations,” she quotes Fordham’s Amber Northern. “If you are going...
Education Secretary DeVos recently “unveiled” an ESSA letter and guidebook that aims to help parents “understand the flexibility provided to States and school districts” under ESSA, according to Jessica Campisi in Education Dive. The guidebook will share how ESSA’s flexibility gives parents an opportunity to influence...
Alyson Klein reports in Education Week that Georgia, which has announced their intention to apply for ESSA’s Innovative Assessment pilot, is taking a bit of a different approach by running “its own miniature innovative assessment competition,” which “ended up giving three consortia of districts the...
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently announced that New Hampshire will be just the second state to officially participate in ESSA’s innovative assessments pilot program, EIN News reports. New Hampshire’s Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) is “grounded in a competency-based educational approach designed to...
Alyson Klein of Education Week reports that, despite the approval of most (now all) state ESSA plans by the U.S. Department of Education, in some ways, “the federal government’s work on ESSA is just beginning.” While the law’s “hallmark may be state and local control,”...
The Senate education committee will be holding a hearing today to listen to the state perspective on implementation of ESSA. The committee have invited education chiefs from Nebraska (Matthew Blomstedt), Delaware (Susan Bunting), and South Carolina (Molly Spearman), as well as the president of Democrats...
The new iteration of federal preschool grants created under ESSA “offer substantive differences from the legacy program created during the Obama administration,” Christina A. Samuels reports for Education Week. The grant application was released earlier this month, and “gives states the opportunity to apply for...
Jeffrey Solochek reports for the Tampa Bay Times that the Sunshine State’s latest ESSA plan redraft addresses a number of the issues raised by the U.S. Department of Education. However, according to the Department’s Libby Witt, “some of the revisions that FDOE made in the...
