Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The replacement for the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act is now law and expected to take effect in area schools in the next two years.
Colfax District Superintendent Jerry Pugh discussed the new Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 with school board members Monday night.
He and other eastern Washington superintendents met with U.S. Senator Patty Murray last Friday in Spokane, listening as she described the new law and how it came about.
Every Student Succeeds was signed by President Obama Dec. 11, with bipartisan lawmakers touting the change as a more flexible approach to student evaluation and school accountability, sending responsibility back to states for fixing under-performing schools and evaluating teachers.
“No Child Left Behind is now gone,” Pugh said of what was a hallmark of George W. Bush's presidency.
The new act takes the previous' principles and lessens testing, while giving more control back to states and local districts on education.
“It was nice to see the federal government recognize and back away from federal control for local control, which we appreciate,” Pugh said.
The new act maintains annual statewide testing in reading and math for third through eighth-graders – and once during high school – along with science tests three times between third and 12th grade.
The law requires states to have three levels of achievement standards in order for parents to receive meaningful information about individual student and school performance.
For the high school testing element, states reserve the right to use traditional high school assessments such as the ACT or SAT instead of statewide assessments, as long as the test is deemed equivalent to statewide assessment in content and difficulty, fulfills requirements of federal law and is approved through federal peer review.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) also includes funding to allow states and school districts to audit testing with the goal of reducing and eliminating unnecessary tests.
In another requirement maintained from No Child Left Behind, the ESSA calls for each school to assess 95 percent of all students and 95 percent of each subgroup of students.
A key change is that the new law repeals and replaces the previous federal standard known as “adequate yearly progress,” with a system that improves state capacity to identify and support struggling schools.
“We get to come up with our own interventions for students who are struggling, not meeting the standard,” Pugh said. “And the state will keep an eye on it.”
Under No Child Left Behind, school performance was almost exclusively based on annual reading and math testing. The ESSA, however, will require states to use other indicators of student achievement to evaluate students and schools: such as student engagement, access to and completion of advanced coursework, school climate and safety.
To measure these other factors, ESSA requires that they can be disaggregated by student subgroups to provide meaningful information to parents.
ESSA will begin to be implemented after a new federal budget is passed.
“All the rule changes have to have the financial backing, is my understanding,” said Pugh.
As far as the school board's involvement, the superintendent said much is yet to become clear.
“It is too soon to tell what new testing will look like, teacher evaluation, etcetera,” he said. “We will just continue to learn, continue to pay attention. It used to be that we had no voice in this, it came from Washington, D.C. Now that it is back to the states and local districts, it is our obligation to engage in that process.”
Schools hire public affairs consultant
In a separate development, Colfax and five other Whitman County school districts joined the newly formed Eastern Washington Quality Schools Coalition, which came to be last week, with 23 schools contributing a flat fee to hire a public affairs consultant to represent them to the state legislature in Olympia.
The consultant, Marie Sullivan, will act on behalf of levy, state funding and other matters for the group of schools.
“If you are on the west side of the state, you can take a half a day and zip down to Olympia to meet with people, but here in eastern Washington we can't do that,” said Pugh. “It takes more time, it takes hotel rooms, it’s expensive. This way we will have someone there we can contact to work directly on our behalf.”
Other county districts part of the coalition are St. John-Endicott, Rosalia, Oakesdale, Pullman and LaCrosse.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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