Feds OK state's education plan

The U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced Tuesday she had approved Missouri's consolidated state plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act - meaning the federal government has signed off on the state's presented plan to address inequitable access to quality education.

The state's plan includes the continued expansion of programs including virtual education access and leadership development for principals.

ESSA also requires school districts in the state to report new kinds of data, including how much money is spent for students' education on a per building basis.

"It's about actually improving schools. It's not just about maintaining federal funds," said Sarah Potter, the communications coordinator for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

ESSA is former President Barack Obama's reauthorization and iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act - the national education law signed into effect by the President Lyndon Johnson administration in 1965. ESSA is the replacement for President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" iteration of ESEA.

"Allowing states more flexibility in how they deliver education to students is the core of ESSA," a U.S. Department of Education news release read. "Each state crafted a plan that it feels will best offer educational opportunities to meet the needs of the state and its students."

States are required to show through their individual ESSA plans that they are taking actionable steps to close achievement gaps for disadvantaged groups of students, like from rural areas, low-income families and minority groups.

In exchange, states receive federal funds for the programs administered through ESSA, including to support non-school hours academic enrichment, professional development for teachers and to provide assistance to students who are migrants, at-risk (including neglected and delinquent), homeless and English learners.

Potter said the Missouri School Improvement Plan is still the main driver of school accountability and improvement in the state, but the goals in the ESSA plan are still "the direction of how we're going to do school improvement in the state."

The Missouri Virtual Instruction Program has existed for a little more than a decade to provide students - particularly, rural, small school, minority or economically-disadvantaged students - with coursework offerings that might not otherwise be available to them.

The state's ESSA plan aims to improve that access. Chris Neale said DESE is currently identifying areas where they need to support schools, to then actually provide that access next year. Neale is DESE's assistant commissioner for the Office of Quality Schools.

He said one of the most important aspects of the state's plan is to support its Leadership Development System for principals. More than 625 principals are already learning through the system, but a new support network coming next school year will specifically be for principals with seven or more years of experience.

"Missouri's plan met the requirements of the law, and so I am happy to approve it," DeVos said in a news release. "This plan should not be seen as a ceiling, but as a foundation upon which Missouri can improve education for its students."

Neale also explained the new data metrics the state will have to provide under ESSA. Guidance for districts on building-level expenditure data is being finalized, and will be collected starting next year, he said.

"There is a shift that will occur around teacher quality," he also noted.

"(The federal government wants) to ensure that students in Title I schools that are of low-income or minority status are not disproportionately served by (teachers) who are inexperienced or teaching out of their field," he said. DESE is still figuring out how to collect and report that kind of data.

The state's Annual Performance Report for public school accreditation will also change slightly too. The state currently lumps together measurements of academic achievement of historically under-performing groups of students - racial and ethnic minorities, low-income students, students with disabilities and English language learners - into a category of "super-subgroup" achievement.

ESSA no longer allows for that, so the academic achievement of those various historically under-performing groups of students will be reported individually.

"There will be a lot more data coming out that's available publicly," Neale said.

"ESSA really made us take a hard look at ourselves," he said in terms of presenting such data in a user-friendly format on the DESE website. He added there's now a "greater push toward graphical presentation" as opposed to large spreadsheets of data.

Potter said DESE is hosting parent focus groups around the state to give the department a better idea of what parents are looking for and want to see from an online report card of districts' performance.

DESE submitted its initial ESSA plan to the U.S. Department of Education in September, and the revised and finalized plan as approved by DeVos will see the major portions of it implemented beginning in the fall of 2018, according to a DESE news release.