Archived Content

BRT Comment on NPRM related to the ESSA

June 27, 2016

Meredith Miller
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Room 3C106
Washington, DC  20202-2800

Dear Ms. Miller:

On behalf of Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies, I am writing in response to the Department’s May 31 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) related to accountability and state plans under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Business Roundtable is pleased with many of the provisions included in the NPRM and believes that, overall, they reflect the spirit and intent of ESSA with respect to accountability, while also maintaining the law’s focus on expanded flexibility for states and local educational agencies (LEAs). 

The Rule Addresses Several Key Business Roundtable Issues

As part of the final regulations, Business Roundtable particularly urges the Department to maintain proposed language with respect to the following issues:

Additional Indicators

Under ESSA, each state must establish a system to meaningfully differentiate among all public schools each year. This system must be based on academic achievement, graduation rates, a measure of student growth if determined appropriate by the state, progress in achieving English language proficiency, as well as at least one other “indicator of school quality or student success.”  Under the law, the indicator of school quality or student success must receive less weight than the combination of the other indicators for the purposes of differentiating schools.

This provision was included in order to ensure that academic achievement is the primary focus when determining the overall quality of schools. There was also the concern, expressed by Business Roundtable and other groups, that given the significant flexibility to determine additional indicators, states would
have had an incentive to establish questionable outcomes, such as teacher surveys, which would have created the potential for schools to be highly rated despite poor academic achievement. 

Business Roundtable was pleased the law limited the impact of this additional indicator, and was further pleased the regulations clarified this limitation under proposed § 200.18. Specifically, the proposed regulations will ensure the indicator of school quality or student success is not used to change the identification of schools that would otherwise be identified for comprehensive support and improvement or targeted support, unless such schools are making significant progress for the “all students” group on at least one of the other indicators. 

Summative Rating

As part of the statewide accountability system under ESSA, states are required to not only differentiate the performance of schools using the annual indicators, as noted above, but must also provide a wide range of other data to parents and the public related to school quality and outcomes. While this information is critically important, it can also be overwhelming for anyone trying to use this information to gauge the quality of an individual school.

Therefore, we fully support the proposed regulation under § 200.18(b), which requires that performance on the indicators result in a single summative rating based on at least three rating categories of a school’s overall performance. We agree with the Department that a single summative rating “is easy for stakeholders, parents and the public to understand, summarizes complicated information into a more digestible format, and provides clear comparisons among schools.”

Participation Rates

Under ESSA, states are required to annually measure the achievement of not less than              95 percent of all students and all subgroups of students in public schools. States are required to factor this requirement into their accountability system; however, the law was not specific on how states should approach this task.

Business Roundtable is pleased the proposed regulations provide a framework for incorporating this requirement into statewide accountability systems. The regulations spell out options states may choose for schools that fail to meet this requirement – including assigning a lower summative performance rating – but also allow flexibility for states to develop their own approaches, as long as they are equally rigorous as the examples spelled out in the regulations and will result in improvement regarding participation rates.

Maintaining the proposed regulations in this area is critically important to ensuring that states, districts and schools take seriously the need to assess at least 95 percent of students. A system that creates loopholes that allow states to systematically keep certain students from participating in assessments undermines accountability and is unfair to schools, students and the public. 

Data and Transparency

In addition to data previously required to be provided by states to parents and the public, LEAS and schools under prior law, ESSA requires the reporting of other valuable information such as per-pupil expenditures by school. The regulations reflect this expanded transparency and include several important provisions to ensure that, despite more information being required, the information will be more timely and meaningful.

Specifically, Business Roundtable supports the requirement that parents be involved in the development of school report cards. Too often under prior law, these report cards were filled with education jargon and were hard to read if they could be found at all. Parental involvement should help improve the utility of these report cards and make schools more accountable to parents and the public.

The proposal would also require states and LEAs to have a format and process for developing and disseminating report cards in a manner that is concise, accessible, informative, timely and understandable. It would also require that each LEA provide overview information to the parents of students through mail or email, to create awareness that the data is available and so they are not required to search for this information on their own. In addition, the proposed regulations would require report cards to be available to the public no later than December 31 of each year, so that this information is more actionable for parents and teachers. 

Business Roundtable strongly encourages the Department to maintain each of these important provisions as part of the final rule.

Areas of Concern

Although Business Roundtable supports much of what is included in the NPRM, there are several areas that we believe should be given further consideration by the Department.

Foremost, we are concerned that the regulations exacerbate an underlying issue in the law, which could result in states developing overly-complex systems of accountability, especially in the identification of schools for further assistance. In developing a final rule, we urge you to take into account the relative benefits of each additional requirement in the context of the complexity such requirements may add to the system. 

We also note that the proposed regulations greatly expand reporting requirements under consolidated state plans. Again, as part of the final rule, we believe it is important to ensure that each additional reporting requirement is justified in terms of its relative burden and utility to educators, parents and the public.   

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on these proposed regulations and we commend you for maintaining a strong focus on improving accountability and achievement in our nation’s schools. If you have any questions regarding our comments, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

 

John Engler

We use cookies to give you the best experience when using our website. You can click “Accept” if you agree to allow us to place cookies. For more information, please see our Cookie Notice.