Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced its final regulations on the accountability, reporting, and state plan provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The rules address the use of multiple measures, including new indicators of school quality and student success, in state accountability systems, design and delivery of state and district annual report cards, and development of state plans across ESSA programs.
The final regulations make a few important changes from the draft version released in June. As noted in ACTE’s fact sheet on ESSA accountability, states must develop an accountability system that includes measures of student academic achievement as well as non-academic indicators of school quality or student success, which can include career readiness indicators. Under the draft rule, these additional indicators would need to be supported by research that shows the measure contributes to student achievement, or in the case of high schools, higher graduation rates. Because this standard would likely have been too restrictive to allow for many non-academic indicators, and with the urging of ACTE and other education stakeholders, the department broadened the standard in its final rule. It now states that the measure must be supported by research demonstrating that it helps “increase student learning, such as grade point average, credit accumulation, or performance in advanced coursework, or for high schools, graduation rates, postsecondary enrollment, persistence, or completion, or career success.”
You can read a summary of the final rule here. For more ESSA implementation updates, follow the CTE Policy Watch Blog.
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