ESSA and Equity – One State’s Approach

By Beth Olanoff
Special Assistant to the Secretary, Pennsylvania Department of Education

The mission of the Pennsylvania Department of Education is to ensure that every learner has access to a world-class education system that academically prepares children and adults to succeed as productive citizens. The guiding principles of Pennsylvania’s state plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) are transparency, equity and innovation:

• Transparency means multiple, transparent, and easy-to-understand indicators of school success;
• Equity means equity in educational opportunity and achievement for all students; and
• Innovation means innovation in teaching and learning in schools and classrooms.

Three strategies are key to achieving transparency, equity, and innovation for our students.

The first strategy is Pennsylvania’s new public facing school progress report, called the Future Ready PA Index.  This new progress report provides data on a broader, more holistic set of measures of student and school success than just proficiency scores on standardized tests. The measures on the Future Ready Index fall into three categories: (1) State Assessment Measures including proficiency, growth, and percent advanced; (2) On Track Measures which includes English Language Proficiency, Chronic Absenteeism, and an indicator of success in grade three reading and grade seven math; and (3) College and Career Measures which includes graduation rate, a new career standards benchmark, access to industry-based learning, access to high rigor courses and post-secondary transition to school, work or the military.

Each of these indicators will be disaggregated by student group, with an n-size of 20, and presented with a comparison to state average, interim and long-term goals for that indicator, and to the previous year’s data.

An important innovation in the Future Ready PA Index is that data will be presented in a dashboard format; schools will not be awarded a summative score or performance grade.  This innovation serves to maximize transparency of performance on individual measures, especially for student groups; promotes use of the report card as a tool for continuous improvement; and keeps dissimilar measures distinct, avoiding the issue of awarding values for specific indicators.

The second strategy is elevating the value of growth vis a vis proficiency in Annual Meaningful Differentiation under ESSA. In Pennsylvania, we use the Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System to measure growth. While both growth and proficiency are derived from student performance on standardized test scores, each indicator measures different things and tells a different story of school success. “Proficiency” refers to student performance on tests at a single point in time, for example, 50 percent of students scored proficient, 25 percent scored basic and 25 percent scored below basic.  “Growth” measures student growth from one year to the next using state assessments, and reports whether students made the expected growth based on their prior testing.

Two schools could have the same proficiency profile, but the school with high growth scores is performing better than the school with low growth scores.

In addition, research tells us that proficiency is highly correlated with student demographics; growth data typically shows little to no relationship to student demographics.

For these reasons, Pennsylvania will use a plot of achievement and growth as preliminary identification as a low performing school under ESSA.  Title I schools will be plotted on a chart of academic achievement/proficiency against growth.  Only those schools which fall in the low achievement/proficiency AND low growth quadrant will move to the next step in analysis, applying the remaining accountability indicators. In other words, even a school with low achievement will NOT be identified for improvement under ESSA if it has high growth.

A third strategy with a focus on equity is an innovative executive level professional learning opportunity for superintendents and charter school leaders.  Pennsylvania Education Secretary Pedro Rivera’s Secretary’s Superintendents’ Academies are designed to engage district leaders in the work of improving achievement where significant numbers of students – in both rural and urban areas – face the challenges of poverty.

The Superintendents’ Academies are two-year, cohort-based programs.  Participants develop Action Learning Projects (ALPs) to improve teaching practice and increase student learning through a systems approach to change. Seventy-three Cohort One participants completed the program in May 2018; Cohort Two began in September 2017; and Cohort Three has been approved to start in September 2018.

Examples of the Action Learning Plans demonstrate the scope of projects developed by the participants in Cohort One:

• Developing a system of professional learning communities across districts using technology to achieve job-embedded professional development;
• Establishing a county-wide, first-day-ready principal credential for post-certification, pre-employment principal candidates;
• Transforming a charter school into a high-performing STEM academy through community partnerships;
• Working with families and community partners to ensure all students are reading on grade level by age eight; and
• Eliminating grade- and age-level determinants for access to high-rigor math coursework.

As Pennsylvania works towards the debut of the Future Ready PA Index in fall 2018 and prepares to identify schools in need of improvement pursuant to the Annual Meaningful Differentiation described in our ESSA plan, we are excited about the potential to have a positive and significant impact on the education opportunities and success of Pennsylvania’s students.

The Center for Education Equity (CEE) at MAEC is inviting members of our advisory board, partners, and other colleagues to share their views on current equity issues. Their opinions do not necessarily reflect CEE’s views or those of the Department of Education and we do not necessarily endorse any products or resources they promote.