have about the rise in this issue on campuses. as well as many other issues on campuses. but the office of civil rights at the department of education is very committed to investigating complaints that reach the office of the civil rights and we are invested in fully funding ocr. i think -- i know that there are a number of viewpoints on how this -- the rules surrounding this have been implemented. we are looking at those very closely. i've been meeting with a number of stakeholders including first lady schneider from michigan. we take this issue very seriously. it is certainly an issue for the office of civil rights to be engaged with. and for the department of education to grapple with. but we are not at a point where

we can communicate any change in direction or any new information at this point. >> okay, well thank you. see the rest of education secretary devos's testimony online in the video library at cspan.org. back now to our coverage on the conference of the federal role in education. >> remember to use the sign in sheet wherever that is going around. please sign in. right here. i think. i don't know. should i pass it? i'll pass it down. i'm going to hand it to you. sign the sign in sheet. awesome. we're here today to talk about the every students succeeds act. i'm a reporter at politico here in d.c., i cover education policy. and we are going to talk about this law that passed in 2015,

that replaced no child left behind and where states are at right now. we're going to talk about that today. to bring you up to speed, essentially, there are two submission windows for states to send in their plans under this law for holding schools accountable for how they plan to intervene in schools. for how they plan to intervene in groups of students that are consistently underperforming. we have about 16 states in d.c. so far have submitted for this spring window. we have another window coming up this september. i'm sure you're familiar with the fact that education secretary betsy devos is tasked with reviewing these plans, along with a group of people known as peer reviewers. so with that, i'd love to get o are experts on these plans. we have the executive director of the council of chief state

school officers. we have linda darling handenmmo. the president of the thomas b. fordham student. at the far end is liz king, the director of education policy at the leadership conference. i would love to get started by, you know, jumping into this and make sure we have a lot of times for questions at the end. i'd like to ask you, chris, if you can sort of just give us a high level overview of where states are right now. obviously, ccseo is an important partner in this process. talk a little bit about that work and where you see states right now. >> it's a real honor to be on the panel with these three folks. i don't often get to speak with them. it's great to be here and thanks for inviting me to ewa. i think essa has been a

devolution to the states as promised. 17 states have submitted so far. the rest coming in in september. if you're in a state where they've submitted you probably are pretty aware of their plan. if you're in a state that's not yet submitted there's a lot of work going on before september to define that for that state. there's two pieces i think we're most interested in, one making sure that as states set these plans we don't go back to a time preno child left behind where we were able to ignore groups of kids or ignore poor performance in any sort of way in any school. before no child left behind, we didn't report out subgroups. so a school could just sort of skate by on averages or things like that. and so i think it's really important -- that's good in the first 17 plans that we don't see a real backing away from student performance as the goal for the states. and so i think that's a real

positive. i think another area where i think we have a lot of work to do is on the intervention side. let's say we grade a school, if you're in a letter grade state, a d or an f. or if you're in a star state, at the low end of the star, one or two stars. what are we going to do as a state or as a district to help that school improve? there are new parts of the law that gives states more flexibility with those resources, the money. and i think we will largely look back on this law as a success or failure about how we deal with the schools that aren't getting it done with kids right now. meaning, the lowest performing in our state are we able to significantly improve those schools? and i think some of the techniques we've been using in the past haven't necessarily worked in states. largely under no child left behind, states did a lot of reporting data. and then asking districts and schools to improve themselves.

either by coming up with a plan or, you know, just saying, you need to improve. that didn't work as well. and i think we need a structure in place in each state, and it has really been left up to the states. one area where i'm really interested in states improving is to think about how do we intervene in low performing schools. the last thing i'll say, i don't want to take all my time, is just as we have these conversations, it's really important that we get into the plans and figure out what states are actually doing. states may have submitted something to the federal government that may not have everything in it that they're going to do in their state. because of the way the template played out and some other things. the federal government is only asking for certain types of information from states. their process and their plan may be bigger than what they submit to the federal government. i think it's an important thing for reporters to ask is what else besides the federal plan is

going to go on in the state to help improve the schools. i'll stop there. >> awesome, thank you, chris. i would like to turn to liz and ask about, you know, what the change in this administration means for these plans. obviously, civil rights advocates have been concerned about president trump and education secretary devos and how they'll be looking at these plans and what level of scrutiny they'll be giving these plans. there's sort of a concern out there that essentially this will be a rubber stamp. we've yet to see how that will play out. i'd love to hear about what is the civil rights community looking for when you're going through these plans? what are the concerns you might have about how this administration will be scrutinizing them? >> one thing i would just say right off the bat, because of who you are is a big thank you

on behalf of marginalized community to education reporters and just investigative reporting right now is so important. there's a great piece in the atlanta journal constitution about the qualifications and background of police officers who are serving in schools, so that the individuals charged with policing children really value that work. thank you to all of you and please keep going. so on the sort of essa implementation, our two biggest priorities are that the process itself is inclusive of diverse communities and that there are diverse parents and community stakeholders at the stable when decisions are made. and that at each point in the process, that we drive towards equity. and so that's what we're looking for. i think we're absolutely concerned about the review process coming from this administration. we keep hearing over and over a deference to states, even at

times when states are violating federal law. i think we saw, for example, recently in the appropriations labor hhs hearing, secretary devos was not willing to commit that federal dollars would not be used to discriminate against students. i think that is something we should all be concerned about. using federal dollars to discriminate violates federal law. it's the responsibility of the secretary of education to stop that. we have not gotten the assurances that we need, that this administration is going to make sure that these essa plans are consistent with the law and the law's long-standing intent to raise achievement for marginalized children. we're listening and hoping for that assurance. we have seen some bright signs in plans being returned to states because they are insufficiently complete. we need to make sure that it's not just they're using a sufficient number of words but the words that are included in the plans are compliant with the

law. and describe a system of accountability which holds schools accountable not just for the performance of children on average but the performance of each group of children. the purpose of the law is not just to raise educational quality overall. but to address long-standing barriers to success, faced by low income students, students of color, students with disabilities and english learners. if a state is not doing that. if that's not what they've described, then their plan should not be approved. we're absolutely concerned we won't be able to count on secretary devos to do that job. >> so, linda, from what you've seen so far of the plans that have been handed in or the draft plans that are out there, you know, do you feel as though states are delivering on this promise of insuring equity, you know, are they being innovative and thinking about accountability differently? i mean, what are you seeing? >> well, there's a whole gamut of approaches. the earliest filed plans are

less ambitious in some ways in innovateing in some cases than the ones that are still under construction. partly because, you know, when you have more time you think think harder and do more modeling of different kinds of approaches. that's not to say there aren't some interesting innovations in some of the plans that have been filed. i think there's even more to come in the next batch. there are some places that are really picking up, just to take up liz's equity theme, which is so important. that are taking up equity in some really interesting ways. one of those is taking up the place of the kinds of indicators that typically discriminate between and among subgroups and have strong implications for whether kids will graduate and go on. for example, places like california are taking up an indicator of whether kids are suspended at differential rates

and having had that in the state accountability system, has reduced the suspension rates quite a lot. school climate indicators are being looked at in a number of states. illinois is one that's really taking that very seriously. if you look at that carefully, those kinds of indicators can create quite a lot of information about how kids are being treated in school, as well as giving school people information that will allow them to improve. access to rich curriculum for all kids. a number of states are doing college and career ready indicators. this is really important. course taking is a stronger predictor of success in college and beyond than test scores. and so getting access which is typically been unequally alloca allocated to advanced courses, dual credit courses, as a lot of states are measuring, to strong career technical education

programs that meet a quality standard. those kinds of things. and getting to a place where 100% of kids are really prepared to go on in life would be a huge change in where we are as a nation. a lot of countries have been way ahead of us in thinking about to making sure everyone is prepared to go ahead. a number of states is looking at those things. new york is looking at a diversity indicator which would look at the extent to which within a district students are together in schools and classrooms relative to their proportion in the district by race, by class, by special education and english learner status. so there are a lot of states that are taking up these questions in very interesting ways. and looking for the equity nuggets in the law, which we identified in a publication called equity in essa. there are ways by which you can

highlight the school funding differentials across districts. encourage student formulas, it gets more money to the kids who need them the most. 50 districts that can engage in pilots. look at assignment practices to encourage integration. all of those things are baked into law. and they're kind of lurking there for states to pick them up and pursue them. not all of the states are doing that. but some of them really are pursuing those kinds of strategies. >> mike, i know that you have a few thoughts about how you feel states are doing in this respect. i've seen you write about how they could be doing better when it comes to high achieving students. where do you think there's room for improvement in what you're saying? is there a state you think is being particularly innovative. >> it's great to be with you all today. if i knew that cspan was coming i would have worn my flashy

jacket instead. i look forward to the ewa, you know, you love twitter, i love twitter. you like getting quotes, i like giving quotes. you are my favorite peeps. when it comes to q&a i hope somebody is going to ask linda about her son who is the american ninja warrior superstar who is a big name in our house. >> competing june 19th in the national ninja warrior competition in las vegas. which then becomes my vacation. >> amazing. okay. but back to essa. yes. so i think when we look at these plans, and we're talking about the accountability plans. and especially when it comes to the ratings. a couple things i hope you ask when you look at your own states' plan. the first one is whether or not it does a good job helping parents and taxpayers regular, you know, man and woman on the street understand if a given school is a good school or not.

you know, this law does provide more flexibility. and it does not in the end say absolutely that you have to provide one final rating. and there are a few states, including california, most famously, that are going to provide a ton of data and that's good. that data is a form of transparency. you all are going to be able to get access to that data and probably do some really cool stories with those data. and those data can be helpful when schools, teachers, parents, administrators sit down and try to understand how they can improve what they're doing. but what that doesn't do is provide a very clear answer to the public or the taxpayers. hey, is this school a good school or not? so ask that question. you know, certainly in my view the f ratings or five star ratings are the most clear way to do that. ifio uv g you've got a rating w it's in a language.

the school got a good rating. that's number one. by the way, if there's not a clear rating, this is something that your newspapers could do something about. you could take the data that you're getting from the states, and you could build your own ratings. in california, hey, california reporters, if the state of california is not willing to do this, you could do this and you could construct your own ratings using the state data to come out and say, you know, based on all the information we've got are these schools doing a good job or not. the second thing i'd look at is whether or not the ratings are doing a good job differentiating between really good high poverty schools and really bad high poverty schools. as we know from the no child left behind era, we had a huge problem, which was that basically every high poverty school got labelled as a failing school. so many indicators were strongly correlated with demographics and prior achievement.

because we looked at proficiency rates, graduation rates. if you're a high poverty high school you're going to have some pretty low proficiency rates. so your graduation rate might not be great either. if that's all the state's looking at you're going to get a low rating. when you start to see these ratings come out, if not a single high poverty school in your state is getting a good rating, something has gone very strong. and you can even model some of this right now and try to ask these tough questions to your state. if you're a high poverty school and you're doing a great job and kids make a lot of progress while they are under your care, is it possible for you to get an "a"? is it possible for you to get a five stars? and if not there's something wrong with that system. and finally, what are the signals that states are sending to the schools in terms of who matters? we've heard a lot from liz and rightfully so that we want to make sure the signal is that all kids matter. that we don't go back to the old days as chris said where you could do well on average and

sweep low performance from minority kids or others under the rug. we also want to make sure that kids across the achievement spectrum matter. not just low performing kids, but also kids at the middle and the top. the message i hope we want to send with all schools is, hey, it's your job to help everybody in your school make progress. as much progress as possible. we have a particular problem, and had a big problem under no child left behind that kids at the middle and at the top were not a priority because the standards were so low. because all of the incentives were about getting kids to that proficient level. and as a result, schools learned that, you know, kids who are going to pass the test in september, they were ready by the fall to pass that spring test. you could ignore them, and you'd still do fine. and schools that were especially at risk of hitting the interventions had a particularly strong incentive. so that meant in high poverty schools, that high achievers, especially low income high achievers were not at all in

priority. and we see that in the data. we see that there has not been as much progress for those kids as there should be. now states have a chance, by moving especially to gross model, looking at progress over time and looking at growth for all kids they can send their message to those schools, everybody matters, low performers, middle, high achievers, and so ask those questions. when you look at your state accountability system what signals are they sending. who matters? do all kids matter? are they prioritizing some kids over others? and who are the winners and losers in that kind of a system? because we do know from good research that schools do tend to pay attention to those signals, and so we should take them seriously. in terms of a state that's doing well we like colorado's plan, at least on the ratings, quite a lot. they have gone out of their way to make sure that the way they measure academic achievement sends a message that everybody matters. you look at average scale scores and that's a way to basically the school has to improve for everybody to get those scale scores up.

they also do a lot at looking at growth over time. so we think that's a promising start. d.c.'s is pretty good. massachusetts is pretty interesting. a little complicated. but many of the others, unfortunately, have not moved very far past no child left behind. they are still looking at proficiency ratings at high school, still put a lot of weight on graduation. i think there's a very good chance in those states you're going to have a situation where basically, if you serve a lot of poor kids you're going to get a low grade and if you serve a lot of rich kids you're going to get a high grade. that is not a good accountability system. >> i know that chris and linda would like to share their thoughts on that. >> about my jacket? i'm ready for it. >> this is kind of like your super bowl i think. you just love this panel. but i mean i think my -- i think mike brings up some good points. one point i would push on a bit is thinking about the overall rating. so california's dashboard has

gotten much, much better since it first came out. it's starting to get to a place where i could look at a one pager on a school and understand what their school performance looks like. so i don't think you have to have a single indicator to be clear with your public. i think you can do that through a variety of ways. i think the bar is correct that parents should be able to look at the report and understand how their school is doing. i don't know that it's the only way to do that. the second thing is thinking about how you rate schools, you know, if you have 15 indicators, maybe there are things you should be reporting out but not including in school performance. ratings. so, for example, suspension data. i think is something we should be monitoring and something we should be looking at across the country, it's clear that we have a challenge there. but, if we start putting that in to school performance, the reaction from schools could be to simply just not suspend kids and find other ways to deal with that. and i -- what i think we learned

under no child left behind i was going to state in oregon right after no child left behind, and we had tests before no child left behind in oregon, they didn't have the kind of stakes they had after no child left behind so the behaviors in our schools changed about assessment after no child left behind. i'm worried we could have a similar challenge here if we aren't -- if we aren't careful about how we weight these indicators. i think that's something for you guys to be watching. >> well, i want to agree with mike about the fact that you should be looking in states to see if they have measures of growth or progress. which is really how you give credit to schools for what they contribute to student learning, not just what the kid came in with. new york actually has measures of both growth and progress for each of their indicators, or at least growth for the academic achievement ones and progress on all the others and i think a lot of states are trying to figure out how to do that and that's really important.

also very important and i agree with that states should move away with proficient which only tells you how many kids met a score and look across the whole continuum. i think the use of the sort of single score, "a" through "f" or single number, can mask what's going on on individual indicators unless you're also very clear about having a dashboard. and if you think about it, in many states, moving, california has seven indicators altogether on its dashboard. kind of like getting your kid's report card. you want to know how they're doing in math. you want to know how they're doing in english, you want to know about social studies and science and maybe citizenship, et cetera, it's less of a need, i felt as a parent to have my kid rated on a single summit of scores, a first grader than for me to know in which areas are they doing well and which areas are they doing poorly. what we found is that very few schools do badly on all the indicators. most of them are low on one or two and so if you really want to

address improvement, you've got to know where schools are doing well. and where they're doing poorly. and then you've got to design the intervention to address those areas. you know, we can imagine states putting together, you know, mass professional development for schools that are struggling in math, and actually working with them very intensely to move the needle on that rather than just saying you're in the bottom 5% or you got an "f" and then we have some generic idea of what we're going to do with or to you. so whether you have a score or not, the dashboard itself, is really important. those measures that tell you which schools are struggling to move english learners forward. and what are we going to do to build a system in our state to ensure that those schools and the teachers and principals in those schools know what to do to improve that situation? so i think that the dashboard piece of it is actually what can drive the school improvement system. in a much more productive direction.

>> did you want to jump in on this? >> yeah, i think from our perspective, the central question here is whether all kids matter in the system or not. and i think that's the bigger challenge that we see. the politically hard thing to do is to hold accountable a school which on average may be performing well but is really just failing to serve a group of students. whether it's an all-white middle class school that is not serving its children with disabilities or well or an all-white school that is not serving its low income children well or a newly diverse school that's not meeting the needs of english learners or african-american students. that would be a politically hard thing to do. it is not hard to hold accountable a high profile school. those schools are in the situation they're in because they have so little political power. when you design a system only about holding accountability the schools with the least amount of power you're undermining the ability to create behavior

change. chris talked about behaviors changing when you measure and report things and that's absolutely true. they can change for the worse but goodness knows we hope they change for the better. the system we have right now is not working. it is not serving all of the children it needs to serve. these historic barriers to opportunity persist and in order for them to go away behaviors need to change, policies and practices need to change. and our theory of actions here, the logic of accountability, is that if you come up with a system which makes clear where schools are supposed toish going, how they're supposed to be serving kids, what the goal line is, college and career readiness for every child, right? if you start with that's where we're trying to go and then you come up with a system that indicates where are we doing really well on that path and where are we falling short not just overall but for every group of children. and this is the thing we're seeing, these state plans are just not following the law in that regard. they are avoiding the politically hard challenge. they are focusing only on

overall achievement and they are not holding schools accountable for disaggregated achievement and that's just unacceptable. we can't have that system. >> mike? >> you know, with all due respect, what i worry about is that some of the groups have not learned some of these lessons from no child left behind, which is first of all, i understand that your concern is that there are going to be schools that should be rated poorly, that get away with a high rating. and i get that. we should also be worried, though, about a system that labels every school as failing which is what we had by the end of the no child left behind process. and what we could have is we're not careful about how we design these systems again. if you have every school is rated as failing because, for example you take literally the school of every kid college career ready and say people that ain't going to happen. not going to happen in my lifetime. we're at 30%, maybe 35% of kids right now college and career ready. we're not getting to 100% unless we start like about what it means to be college and career

ready. should we be aiming to boost those numbers? absolutely. but if you literally build a system that says you're a failing school unless you get 100% of kids college and career ready every school is going to be a failure. and what you're going to have is what we had back in the 2009, 2010 are every school is a failing school and so no school is failing. there was no accountability because nobody took the rating seriously. you've got to be able to differentiate between these schools that are making progress, aren't making progress. if you have a really good growth model, well designed that controls for prior achievement, and is for everybody, that it would be almost impossible mathematically to mask -- to have a school you know, where on average the kids were doing well and they weren't doing well for certain subgroups. you know. if we design these systems right i think we're going to be able to address that issue. let's make sure we don't go back to the day where we say every school in america is failing because we set these utopian goals in washington and schools are not meeting them.

>> when we're talking about utopian goals we're talking about the goals that every parent has for their own child right? every kid puts their baby on the bus so that they go to school and learn what they need to learn to be proficient and to graduate high school on time and to be ready for college career and life. so that is the im -- the priority and the belief of every parent and i believe every educator goes to work every day with the intention that they are going to serve all of their children. we no longer have a binary system. this is not you pass, fail, it is much more nuanced, and frankly a lot more complicated, but it is a much more nuanced system. we are unwilling to accept, we think it is a fallacy to our view that achievement gaps are inevitable or natural or preordained. this is a system we have created. we have created an inequitable system through policies and practices over the past several hundred years and we are working very hard now, many of us, to fix that. and that's the work that we need to be doing. and it didn't start with nclb and it didn't start with the civil rights movement. this work is much older than all of that. in the language that we use,

this is an america as good as its ideals. we all believe in an education system which supports the success of all children. and that's the system we need to be working towards. so i think it is wrong to argue that our options are only to ignore historical differences, to sweep under the rug inequitable opportunities, and to look only at overall achievement -- >> but liz that's not what i argue. what i'm saying is watch out for the utopian goals. here in washington, d.c., look at kip. we have a fantastic network of kip schools because of universal preschool here they start at age 3. they have kids from age 3, they work with them until they go to college age 18. they spend a bazillion dollars a year, thanks to d.c.'s funding and also private fund-raising, they do an amazing job. and they're getting great results. but we're still talking about, you know, i think at the last data was senior like 50% of their kids graduating college. that's five times better than the national average.

that's amazing. that's the best case scenario right now, i would argue, and we're at 50%. so i'm just saying that 100%, yes, aspirationally, rhetorically, that's great to aim for that. but we cannot base that into accountability systems because i promise you that will result in virtually every school in the country failing and if that happens there is no accountability. there's no differentiation. >> let me make sure that we get -- >> the equity opportunity gap real quickly and just point out that in this law, in contrast to nclb where you would rank schools and label them and create a whole net of sanctions that could occur, there was no requirement to invest in those schools. there was a period of time when there were school improvement grants but a lot of schools were, you know, just basically underresourced because we inequitably fund schools in this country. most states have a two or three to one ratio between their high and low funded schools. in essa, they still have the

obligation when they identify a school as requiring intervention, to do a resource audit. to really look at the ways in which the sources may be inequitable or inadequate to do the work in that school. i think that's part of what has to be leveraged as we look forward. some of this is about measuring. but we can't just keep weighing over and over again a lot of it is about making the investments that allows us to get the opportunities that they would need. the 100% of college and career ready that i was talking about, i don't know what your 30% is, maybe it's shares of people who end up with a college education, which is about 38% or 40%. but or maybe it's the percent who are proficient on -- >> from a.c.t., from s.a.t., we're about a third of graduating seniors. >> are hitting -- well are hitting a good score on a test. >> and right now right it's about the same as kids -- >> what i was talking about is ensuring that kids have the curriculum opportunities, and california was something that

measures college preparedness, if you get a certain set of courses and grades on those, as well as approved high quality career technical pathways, and in most countries around the world, kids are in some set of courses, and learning situations where they graduate either ready to go in to a reasonable career, or a reasonable working situation, or they're ready to go on to college and i think that is a reasonable goal, a lot of countries do it. i think we could do that. and i think states that are working towards that are going to substantially improve the opportunities they could have. so we have a lot of kids coming out, probably a third or more, who are kind of just unready for anything. and then that is the school pipeline that creates a lot of the social dysfunction. >> okay i'm going to give chris the final word on this one because i want to make sure that we have plenty of time for questions from these guys. i want to make sure we have at least 20 minutes. so, chris?

>> i'll be very quick. at first i just want to thank you for trying to moderate. sorry. and i want to just, my admiration for these three people is quite high. could you imagine being a state commissioner and having these as our stake holders? i mean, i've heard these arguments in state town house when i've been visiting states that they've been trying to put their plans together. so mike came and spoke to our chief at our meeting in march, and you know, advocated for growth. and then we had somebody else advocate to use proficiency more heavily. so state commissioners have this process they have to go through of trying to write a plan that satisfies all three of these folks and they're stakeholders in the state. so they're not going to be able to do that. and i think -- i think a big thing we are pushing for is to not replicate the things that we have done that haven't worked.

when i talk to commissioners i'm holding on to making sure we don't lose kids in this process. that there are clear bench marks and clear goals for all groups of kids in your accountability significance tell. at the same time that we set goals for those kids that are reasonable. they may be interim goals. we may have a goal of 2030 or 2040 of 100% proficiency but we can set benchmarks we know we're on the way to that. i think it's really dangerous to say, because which kids can't make proficiency? i do worry about that part of the signal. we only have to have 30% or 40% of our kids. you know which kids will be left out of that conversation. so i just think these are really hard questions. i think they did a great job of describing differences there. i think mike is probably tweeting right now. >> why not? >> so have a -- but this panel

shows you what your state is dealing with as a microcosm and the feedback. and they're going to get reviews of their plans and people criticizing their plans so it's important to understand states aren't off doing this randomly. they're actually engaged with people in the state having conversations. so i think that part can't be oversold and can't be talked about. some states need a push to do more. so encourage that. >> okay. let's try and squeeze in as many questions as we can. who wants to start us off? [ inaudible question ] >> there is a microphone on either side of the room. so please use those and just identify your name, and where where you are from. >> colorado. the question for mike and liz, what sort of questions do you think reporters should be asking states regarding their targeted intervention for particular subgroups? instead of schools as a whole?

>> yeah so the first question that i'm at on one of the problems we have is the continued use of super sub groups which ignores the differences between african-american, latino, native american, asian american students, white students, low income students, students with disabilities and english learners so the first question is how do you plan to apply an intervention when your identification system, your accountability system does not meaningfully disaggregate among diverse students. that's the first question. is that what you need is the information about who is not being effectively served and then to liz's point earlier, on what? a general knowledge that the tool is not working for that group of kids is not helpful. is it reading achievement? is it math achievement? is it a graduation rate issue? and so i think having those pieces of information, who is not getting the support they need, and then in what area, how is that manifesting itself in a student outcome, the very next

question is how are you going to engage the parents and communities of affected students in the decision about what to do? because if you're talking about a school that is not effectively serving it's african-american students i bet you african-american parents in that community have a good understanding of part of the challenge. whether it is something like, you know, barriers to access in higher level courses, whether it is something like implicit bias, whether it is disciplined disparity in school push-out. what the sort of the cause of the challenge i think that parents are in a really important source of information about what to do there. and then looking at other schools that have done a great job. right? for all of the challenges we have in our system there are schools that really are exc excelling at serving all students and really learning from that and figuring out what it is that they did and how did that work and how do you apply those lessons in other places. that's where i would start. >> yeah, and i would just say let's start with something -- we don't know -- we don't know what to do with low performing schools and we don't necessarily know what to do with schools

that have low performing subgroups. that's one good lesson from last 10 or 15 years of this is that we really suck at turning around low performing schools, and we're not great at intervening in these others. i think in colorado, where if you got a low performing subgroup that means they are not making a lot of progress, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, then you've got to get under the hood and look at the teaching and learning. you know you've got to try to understand what is happening. are the teachers that are teaching those groups of kids not strong enough? are they using a curriculum that's not strong enough? are they, you know, what -- you know, is there issues with low expectations? this is difficult work. this gets into the very heart of the educational enterprise. so probably need to build some capacity with people who have these kinds of skills to go into a school and get under there and figure out what's happening. we don't know how to do this in

washington. don't look to d.c. for answers on this one. >> do we have any other questions? yes. >> i'm wondering, with -- i'm sarah from wbz but one of the issues that i have is it's very hard for me as a reporter to look under the hood of growth models and see like, what is their formula for determining growth. and especially as we change data accountability tests. it kind of seems like a mess and i'm very suspicious because i can't understand what they're looking at. so, even though like you might look at two scores, two like average scale scores, they could be exactly the same, but yet have different growth percentages. and i know that -- but it's a mess. >> yes. so >> i agree with you. i think we should be pushing toward simpler models that people can understand.

i think states have a responsibility to have the public and reporters be able to replicate their calculation. and i don't think i think we should be able to give reporters access to the data set in a way that you could check that. so i understand growth modeling is very complicated. but i think we can do better at sort of understanding if similar kids, with similar demographics, should have similar growth targets. so, that's -- i think it's something that we kind of we get into the research side, and we sometimes lose the ability to explain what we're doing and therefore we lose parents. and the general public. so i think we could be better on that front. and linda has a lot of experience. >> yes? >> we talk a little bit about those interim bench marks and setting interim benchmarks, so i

know certain subgroups have lower starting points, right? and we get this oh, well we're just being realistic. how do y'all feel about that? having, you know, black kids, kids with disabilities, ells, and everybody's got this starting benchmark. what are your thoughts? >> you know, mike made the point earlier that it's important to set, you know achievable targets. with efforts. and most states are doing that in a way that looks at where kids are now. and then sets an expectation that there will be steeper growth for kids who are starting further behind. so that you're looking at lines that should, you know, over time, move towards convergence. and i think that's a reasonable thing to do. a lot of the challenges are about how quickly do you expect that slope to, you know, go up, and over what period of time? but you have to start with where

things are now. and then set that expectation for closing the achievement gap. that means, though, also closing the opportunity gap. and we've been so familiar with talking about at chiefment gap for the last 15 years that there's been much less conversation about the opportunity gap. the fact that kids do get access to very different curriculums in many, many places. they get access to very different learning opportunities before they get to kindergarten. they have access to very different resources within schools, et cetera. so as we worry about the goals and the targets and the movements of kids along those, it's really important to continue to loop back to the question about what opportunities to learn are different groups of students receiving. really from birth forward. and as we look at the interventions that states can -- the evidence-based interventions that states can put in place, it's going to be very important

that they consider such things as -- and some places are looking at this. as preschool, as high quality preschool for some children. it may be very important in some communities for high-quality community schools models to be put in place, we're doing -- releasing a report on monday looking at 125 studies of community school models, many of which have very strong achievement gains because they get the wraparound services that students need, plus before and after study time and support systems. there are a variety of ways that states and districts and schools can approach the improvement question, including strong curriculum in reading and math and professional development for teachers. again another place where they're going to need access to the research about what actually works and what doesn't in that regard, but those are going to be the most important questions once the target is set. tlpz a lot of, you know, measurement angst right now but the next angst really has to be

about the investment or the improvements. >> and if you want to find schools that are making that breakthrough progress, for disadvantaged groups, in a lot of states, at least the ones with high quality charter school sectors, i know patrick not ohio's, what you see is a lot of them are charter schools. charter schools in neighborhoods where you've got lots of kids in low performing schools, hope to see states doing some innovative things with that, as well. and again, we know that on average charter performance, district performance, you know, depending on the study, but, what you tend to see again in high quality places is that if you want the really high performers, it is overwhelmingly in the charter sector. >> i would take issue with that but i don't know that we have that question on the table. >> question over here.

[ inaudible ] but our legislature is in the process right now of recrafting our own state's accountability system through the legislature. i'm just curious, what happens if there is sort of a duelling accountability? you have one system on the federal level and one system on the state level? what impact would that have on education in the states? >> many, many states are working very hard to create an integrated accountability system. i think that's one of the states that the essa reboot is allowing people to do. what they think is viable as a state can also meet the expectations for the federal law. so i think it's going to be less common. >> i think the word linda was looking for was -- but that's just my opinion. that's nuts. they don't need -- sorry. they don't need two accounts. sounds like you're going to have a great story to cover. at some point these things should converge. >> from our perspective, is this a plan something other than just

a policy compliance exercise? you know, from our view, the state planning process should be the state coming together and deciding what it's going to do to meet the needs of all children in that state. and that's what we are expecting and we're see sol strong state leadership around that we're seeing room for improvement when it comes to state leadership but really these state plans should be a demonstration of the commitment by a state to educate all the children in that state. and that necessarily involves an integrated system of holding schools accountability. i think differentiated targets, the question that you need to be asking, right, so okay so we're saying in year one or year two, we're expecting lower achievement for students with disabilities, but you're telling me that the long-term plan is everybody get into the same high goal and that's great. and we're going to all have to move faster with different group of kids along the way, the big question then is, what are the differentiated supports that you're providing? so we're going to say as a state

we have not been serving children with disabilities for way too long and here is our plan to change that. talk about integrating. states also have plans under i.d.e.a. and how they're going to better serve children with disabilities are they integrating their plan for how to serve children with disabilities for their essa plans for how to serve children with disabilities and are they integrating all of their fees? if you've got a state making state driven progress on closing discipline gap and ending exclusionary discipline and racial disproportionality discipline how are they integrating that to help raise achievement for students getting pushed out of school. our hope is really that this is an opportunity for states to come together and really make a new commitment to educating all the children of the state. >> and where they have that happening i would just like to call the question of paying attention to the schools that are succeeding, and sometimes those will be some charter schools. not always everywhere. there are also, in some states, more likely schools that are run by districts that are outperforming others. but knowing who they are,

knowing what those districts are doing to make those changes, studying that, making that available to others, if you look at other countries, pairing schools and putting schools and networks where they learn from each other from those who are defeating to help teach those who are doing well is really part of the strategy here. it's you know, start more schools, or leverage more schools to do what those who have succeeded have done and districts are a key part of this. and can't be ignored in that process. >> one thing on this. i just think -- well, first my communications people are hoping i don't pass -- >> sorry. >> i think that's probably what's going on over here. so, i just think it's ridiculous that we would -- that we would have two sets of plans. now, to be said, the federal government isn't asking for everything that a state needs to do to make their school successful.

so, to be fair, if i was sitting in a state i don't think i'd send the federal government everything that i'm going to do, because they're not asking for it. now, i think states should have one plan that they might send parts of it to the federal government. you look at d.c. d.c. deserves a ton of credit for getting their charter schools and public schools on the same accountability system through the essa process and they're working very hard to have the same accountability system for both sectors and i think that's a huge step in the right direction. so things like that are happening and i think states should drive towards a single plan. >> let's see if we can get two more questions over here and then over here. >> r.j. wolcott from lansing, michigan. when states are putting these plans together how can they ensure that the impact of poverty, you know, that poverty doesn't have a significant impact on achievement so that like michael said, districts that serve large populations of students in poverty aren't all just marked as failing. >> one thing i think that is you

think about your metrics. i think it's really important to balance the access metrics with the student achievement metrics. so if you prioritize only student achievement on a standardized assessment score you will see the biases that come up in some of these metrics. so if you are simply just recreating your no child left behind plan you will see some of the same problems and mike is completely correct if all your high poverty schools in the state are ranked low that would be a sign to me that you are -- you would have to do some serious investigating about what's going on in the schools. maybe they're all failing but i think there's at least one school that could be showing progress. so i think the metrics actually matter the most in that conversation. >> and i would say -- sorry. the other piece of that, right, if it's not just about the metrics. you could also then remove the barriers to opportunity that exist for children of poverty. >> right. >> you could provide, you know, greater funding for schools with greater challenges.

you could provide the strongest teachers to students who need the strongest teachers. you could equalize access so all children have regular access to meaningful courses and college preparatory curriculum. it is really dangerous if we play with the metrics but don't play with the opportunities that matters at the child level. right? the child doesn't get to -- the child does not care about the metrics. right? the child cares about their experience in school. do they have a school with a high concentration of teachers? and i think these are the real core questions and this is to the point of not -- you know learning from the lessons of past and making the changes, we need to solve the fundamental inequalities that exist. we need to stop providing less for children who need more and that's what we need to do. >> yeah i want to just i was going to go that direction and take it a step further if you look at massachusetts which is our highest performing state and has been for quite a long time, what they did in the early 1990s was first they put in place a weighted students formula for

funding schools so that schools serving poor kids and english learners and special needs kids got more money. one of the first states to do that. they then put in place useful standards, and put in place reschool education, they put in place health care for students, they have a system of wraparound services, statewide. that's been evaluated. so they've looked at all of these components, that really provide opportunity and they've provided stronger, better, and more equitable opportunities, and other states are now beginning to look at that, but this is an agenda that has to go state by state. in addition, we have a higher rate of poverty in children in this country, than we have had before. the poverty rates for children now are almost double what they were in the 1970s. half of the kids in public schools receive free -- are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. and if you compare us, somebody asked a question on the earlier panel about how we compare to

other countries on things like -- one of the things that differentiates us from high scorers is the rate of poverty in the country. we are way above any of the high achieving countries in that regard. interestingly, in literacy, in schools in the u.s. that serve kids with fewer than 10% of kids in poverty we're number one in the world. if you look at schools with as many as 25% of kids in poverty, which is way above any other country we're still number three in the world. a lot of our teachers are working very hard to make progress but the content is really challenging so at some point we have to have a conversation again as we did in the '60s, about how we're going to reduce poverty. and, you know, in addition to doing everything we can in school to address the effects on this. >> yeah, and i mean just sort of building back on that again, mass deportation, mass incarceration, taking away children's health care, taking away access to family nutrition support, all of those are bad for student achievement.

right? even if we all -- if we only care about student achievement all of those things are bad for student achievement. that's also not the society any of us want to live in. but that's the proposal on the table. >> one last fact the war on poverty and the set of programs that were part of the great society in the '60s and the '70s actually reduced the reading achievement gap by two-thirds by the early 1980s. had we stayed on course with those programs we probably would have had no black white achievement gap by the year 2000 but almost everything was undone. so we have never recouped the opportunity strategy that we once put in place that were successful. >> okay, we have one time for one more quick question jackie. >> in connecticut, the overwhelming majority in our high schools or in our elementary, middle schools are graded on [ inaudible ] that in

high schools see how many people are going to college, you can grade them on that. there's other measures, a lot more measurements in high school access to ap courses. do you have recommendations in elementary and middle school of alternative measures that are aren't based on test scores as well as financial. there's a lot of things that go on input into schools have you noticed in any districts or any state plans that have begun grading their schools based on what's going into the school not just on the test scores and the output? >> you probably know that connecticut has access to the arts in its list of indicators and i think access to physical education, as well. there are other states that are trying to look at how you get measures of access to a full, rich curriculum including science, including social studies, et cetera, because the curriculum got so narrowed. of course, some states are looking at measures like for the school quality and student success indicator school climate, as another part of what can be looked at at the

elementary level. so, folks are reaching for ways to describe the students' experience beyond the english language arts and math test scores. >> but i think it's telling that so few states have come up with other measures for those grades that aren't test scores and the reason is, it's really hard to come up with measures that are valid and reliable and statewide and can be disaggregated by the sub groups. and one lesson is that, even though everybody loves to hate tests, there is a reason that we use them. and it's that they are valid and reliable measures, they're not perfect. but they're better on the other things we've got. it's just good context to be reminded of, that when people say let's stop testing or let's stop grading schools based on tests, what that basically means is, let's stop providing information to the public that's transparent about school performance. and so, you know, because that is at least the current state of measurement. >> the key for us beyond that, i think there is a demand in the

u.s. for the data that comes from tests, is that we improve the quality of the assessments that we give. we are alone in the world in relying heavily on multiple choice tests in the way that we do in most countries the assessments even at elementary level are open ended assessments where kids are writing the answers to questions. they may be doing oral examinations, as well as written examinations, as well as problem, solutions of various kinds in math as well as investigati investigations, in fields like science and those are scored. just like ap tests or ib tests or any others which teachers in ways that are reliable and valid but they are much more conducive to a curriculum in which kids are taking up the inquiry skills, the investigation skills, the communication skills that we really need in the 21st century. and i would refer you to look at what goes on in singapore and australia, and the uk, and a

number of other countries if you want to see what's thoughtful assessment, that really supports a rich curriculum looks like. >> the other thing, though, i would say that connecticut is doing is they have a super sub group that kwiens low income students, students with disabilities and english learners. they do not hold school accountable for disaggregated performance. i don't know that their assumption is that all children of color are low income students or students with disabilities they're not. there's also a difference between being an english learn and a child with disability and being low income. those are not redundant category. each one of those students has a different experience even while they have an experience shared amongst themselves. that's the other thing to remember. not just what is being measured but for whom and whether schools are being held accountable for disaggregated performance across all the indicators. >> i feel a need to stand up for connecticut. so i will. i don't think that's quite true. because i do have a super sub group but they are also as part

of their accountability system disaggregating. we can have that out if you want some other time. >> i think in the accountability or just in reporting? >> in the reporting system. so they're following the law is what i am saying. >> okay. so that we can have out later. >> okay, all right. i mean, i just think -- this is just great example of what, you know, like when you get into the details of this, there are things that really matter, and liz is very passionate about making sure that we tend to every kid, and i am, as well. i just worry that we're relitigating some of the things that were decided in the law. so you know, some of these things are allowed under the law. if we didn't like the law we should change the law. but now states are responding and getting criticized for doing what's in the law. >> right and some of them are just not applying the text of the law. would have been great to have a regular tliegs clarify the law. >> it's debatable whether they're i guess we will have that out later.

>> okay, well, this was a great discussion. and mike i think you are officially banned from c-span. but feel free to follow up with these guys afterward and please give them a round of applause. thank you guys. [ applause ]

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