This Week’s ESSA News: Preschool Programs More Segregated Than K-12 Schools, Montana Receives $50 Million Literacy Grant, Failing Foster Kids & More

Adam Kirk Edgerton explores the relationship between state education departments and the districts they oversee under the Every Student Succeeds Act. “Since 2015, a team of faculty and graduate student researchers at the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) has collected a broad range of data on ESSA’s implementation across the country, as well as data specific to California, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts,” he writes. “Because we began collecting data immediately after ESSA’s passage, we have been able to observe closely as its implementation has evolved over the law’s first few years.”

Additionally, while these six “partner states” differ in multiple ways, many of the group’s findings “are remarkably consistent across states,” and in every state where they conducted interviews, they found “the underlying logic of education policy over the last two decades — the goal of developing, implementing, and using tests to hold students accountable to K-12 standards — continues to hold sway in state education associations (SEAs) and school districts.”

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