HOW USDE RELEASES FINAL REGULATIONS TO PROMOTE A HIGH-QUALITY, WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION & SUPPORT ALL STUDENTS (1144 hits)
DID YOU KNOW?
After considering and incorporating extensive feedback from stakeholders across the education system and the public, the U.S. Department of Education today announced final regulations to implement the accountability, data reporting, and state plan provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), with a focus on supporting states in using their flexibility to provide a high-quality, well-rounded education, and ensure equity remains at the core of implementation. The regulations will help states, districts and educators seize the opportunity ESSA provides to ensure a high-quality, well-rounded education that sets every student in America up for success in college and career.
The Department greatly appreciates the many productive comments and suggestions from parents, teachers, school leaders, district and state officials, members of Congress, civil rights organizations, and others throughout the regulatory process. The final regulations issued today reflect much of that input.
“The final rules give states more time and flexibility to provide every student with a high-quality, well-rounded education while ensuring that states and districts keep the focus on improving outcomes and maintaining civil rights protections for all of our children, particularly those who need our support the most,” U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said. “The thoughtful comments we received have helped us make our regulations better than our draft proposal, and we are grateful for the input.”
The final regulations will replace the rigid and prescriptive systems that defined No Child Left Behind with new flexibility for states and districts; a more holistic approach to measuring a quality education that will help prepare all students for success in college and careers; and strong protections to ensure that academic progress and equity for all students matters. They also reinforce ESSA’s strong commitment to transparency and emphasize meaningful engagement and an active role for parents, educators, students, civil rights and community groups, and other stakeholders in implementing the new law.
In the following ways, the final regulations give these states and districts more opportunity for ownership of their accountability, intervention, and support systems, with the additional responsibility to make sure that those systems result in an excellent and well-rounded education for every child.
Accountability – A more comprehensive picture of school success: The final regulations give states flexibility to incorporate new measures of school quality or student success into accountability systems while maintaining the core expectation that states, districts, and schools work to improve academic outcomes for all students, including individual subgroups. More specifically, states will: •Set their own ambitious goals and measurements of interim progress for academic outcomes; •Choose their own indicators of academic progress and school quality or student success that are supported by research indicating that high performance or progress on these indicators is likely to increase student learning or, for high schools, graduation rates, postsecondary enrollment, persistence, or completion, or career success;
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