Student Biographical Data: is your school giving test vendors this “extra” information about your child? – Missouri Education Watchdog

Student Biographical Data: is your school giving test vendors this “extra” information about your child? – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Student Biographical Data: is your school giving test vendors this “extra” information about your child?

It is end of year, high-stakes testing season again.  PARCC, SBAC, SAGE, FCAT, CMAS*, AIR, Questar, Pearson. These words trigger anger for parents, many opt their children out of these tests. (*CMAS is PARCC Math and English test in Colorado; they just cleverly renamed it.)   Why do so many parents, students, and teachers loathe these tests?  There are plenty of reasons, such as the tests have never been validated, the tests do NOT measure what a student learned in class that year, the tests are incredibly disruptive and take away valuable time from the classroom, the test questions cannot be seen by teacher or parent, scores don’t come back until the following year/grade level, the test scores are used as weapons to rank schools, teachers, and students,  much more so than the actual instruction-based curriculum and assessment they do the other 180 days out of the school year.

Another big reason parents dislike these big tests: data mining.  What information about the student is the test vendor getting? When tests are taken online, every key-stroke can be collected and later analyzed, via computer algorithms; this could be 1000s of hidden data points that parents have no way of seeing.   Some parents believe that taking the test via paper-pencil instead of online is a safer way to control what data is collected by the testing vendor.  Paper-pencil versions do eliminate the keystroke meta data, but please read on and follow up with your school.

ALL parents should be asking: Does your school / district give voluntary student information to the test vendor?  

In March 2015, the Colorado Board of Education (to their credit)  invited representatives from PARCC and Pearson to answer questions regarding what student data they collect from the PARCC test. The room was packed, parents submitted a plethora of questions beforehand. As reported here, many thought PARCC and Pearson side-stepped most of Student Biographical Data: is your school giving test vendors this “extra” information about your child? – Missouri Education Watchdog:

JOSE GASPAR: A parental talk like no other | Columnists | bakersfield.com

JOSE GASPAR: A parental talk like no other | Columnists | bakersfield.com:

JOSE GASPAR: A parental talk like no other

Parents can shield their children from only so much before they catch on that something is amiss. Sooner or later parents must have a talk with their children about an issue that is usually kept quiet.

For a countless number of Kern County families, parents who are in the country illegally confront the reality of telling their kids that one day they might come home from school and find mom and dad have been picked up and deported by immigration agents known as ICE.

"I just couldn't find the words to explain this to my teen-age son who was born here," said a Bakersfield parent who asked not to be named because of what he sees as increased ICE arrests. 

He, a fieldworker, and his wife, a waitress at a popular local restaurant, came here from Zacatecas, Mexico, on a visa and stayed after it expired. They are working through an immigration attorney to see if they qualify to stay in the country.

"My son became extremely sad when we told him this. My son said, 'Dad, God willing, that's not going to happen to us.'"

But it is happening to many others. Given the current political climate fanned by the immigration rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump, ICE appears to be stepping up its enforcement actions in going after people who normally would not be considered a priority for deportation.

The talk that ICE would prioritize its efforts on only the most dangerous immigrants with criminal records was just that, talk. The reality is that all people in the country illegally are at risk of being snatched up on the street, handcuffed and hauled away.

Under an executive order Trump signed in January, an immigration judge could deport anyone in the country illegally if in the eyes of the court he or she is a threat to public safety. Just what does that mean?

Another local parent put it this way: "I feel so helpless, so impotent that we have not been able to resolve our situation."

Her husband runs a small business and is doing well to support her and their two small children, but fear they can lose everything with a stroke of bad luck should ICE come calling.

In light of what may happen, these and other parents are preparing for the worst should they get separated. They are signing affidavits under the California Family Code that states with whom their children are to be placed if the parents are deported.

Both parents I spoke with said they would not want their kids placed in foster care and are making arrangements for them to be left with other family members just in case.

And it's not just parents who are addressing this. Schools all over Kern County are encountering concerns from students, worries they have never seen before.

"There was a little girl on the playground and she was crying," said Ana Ruiz, principal at Del Vista Elementary School in Delano.

The third-grader approached her principal and said, "My mom and dad are at home!" The child feared ICE would go to her house and take them both away.

Ruiz's motherly instincts kicked in and assured the child all would be fine. In another instance, a student at Fremont Elementary School in Delano had a most pointed question for Principal Teresa Kushnyr:

"Is it true that they're going to come to school and they're going to take kids that don't have papers?"

That came from a second grader! The insightful question floored the principal. Her response?

"Over my dead body!"

Both Ruiz and Kushnyr said that whenever the issue comes up in class, students' feelings are acknowledged to calm their fears.

"We really believe our district to be very open with the kids and reassure children that they're safe," said Ruiz.

Students' fears about parents being suddenly arrested and deported are not unfounded. Just recently early one morning, two men waiting outside their home for a ride to work were picked up by ICE. Word JOSE GASPAR: A parental talk like no other | Columnists | bakersfield.com:

Still Separate/Still Unequal: 62 Years After Brown vs. Board, U.S. Schools Are Resegregating Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública:

Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública: Still Separate/Still Unequal: 62 Years After Brown vs. Board, U.S. Schools Are Resegregating:

Still Separate/Still Unequal: 62 Years After Brown vs. Board, U.S. Schools Are Resegregating

Why GAO Did This Study 

Recent literature shows that poor and minority students may not have full access t o educational opportunities . GAO was asked to examine poverty and race in schools and efforts by the Departm ents of Education and Justice, which are responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws prohibit ing racial discrimination against students. 

This report examined:
(1) how the percentage of schools with high percentages of poor and Black or Hispanic student s has changed over time and the characteristics of these schools , 
( 2) why and how selected school districts have implemented actions to increase student diversity, and 
(3) the extent to which the Departments of Education and Justice have taken actions to identify and address issues related to racial discrimination i n schools. 

GAO analyzed Education data f or school years 2000- 01 to 2013- 14 (most recent available) ; reviewed applicable federal laws, regulations, and agency documents; and interviewed federal officials, civil rights and academic subject matter specialists, and school district officials in three state s, selected to provide geographic diversity and examples of actions to diversify . 

What GAO Recommends 

GAO recommends that Education more routinely analyz e its civil rights data to identify disparities among types and groups of schools and that Justice systematically track key information on open federal school desegregation cases to which it is a party to better inform its monitoring. In response, both agencies are considering actions in line with GAO's recommendations.
--------------------------------


----------------------
K- 12 EDUCATION 

Better Use of Information Could Help Agencies Identify Disparities and Address Racial Discrimination 

What GAO Found

The percentage of K-12 public schools in the United States with students who are poor and are mostly Black or Hispanic is growing and these schools share a number of challenging characteristics. From school years 2000-01 to 2013-14 (the most recent data available), the percentage of all K-12 public Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública: Still Separate/Still Unequal: 62 Years After Brown vs. Board, U.S. Schools Are Resegregating:

Is the Historic Role of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in Jeopardy or Simply Undergoing an Expected Shift? Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog:

Is the Historic Role of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in Jeopardy or Simply Undergoing an Expected Shift?

James Murphy's new article in the Atlantic offers a excellent and compelling overview of the Office for Civil Rights.  He details the various people who have headed the Office over the last fifty years and the major policies they have pursued.  He also contrasts the policies of the administrations that have transitioned into and out of the office.  With this backdrop, he suggests that major changes from the new administration are the norm for this Office.  How far those changes will or will not go, however, is not yet clear.

Under DeVos, the guidance on sexual violence will almost certainly be modified, if not withdrawn, as will the transgender guidance law. So, too, might the guidance on discipline, seclusion, and restraint, in particular. Seclusion (removing a student from a classroom and putting her in isolation) and restraint (restricting a student’s movement, often by pinning him to the floor) have been used disproportionately against students with disabilities and African American students. President Trump’s rhetoric about “American carnage” and “bad dudes” suggests he is more likely to embrace the “zero-tolerance” policies.

The time and effort it takes to resolve many of the thousands of complaints the OCR receives each year help explain why the office pursued a more assertive (or, depending on the perspective, aggressive) policy on guidance in the past eight years. The fastest way to resolve a complaint is to prevent its ever having been made, which is why the department said it placed so much emphasis on making its guidance and data more usable, available, and visible.

Justice is slow, childhood is fleeting, and the task of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is to make those schedules match. Information and transparency are key to attaining that goal. In addition to making its resolutions part of the public record so other school leaders could learn from them and increasing its outreach to schools through technical assistance (through, for example, workshops, flyers, and community meetings), the OCR under Obama made the data it is required to collect about civil rights in primary and secondary schools more easily accessible, comprehensive, and public-facing. Now, state and local governments, schools, community organizations, journalists, and citizens could use them. The OCR has used it biennial CRDC reports to highlight disparities in such areas as discipline, college and career readiness, and absenteeism.

Repeatedly in interviews, civil-rights stakeholders expressed their support of the OCR’s decision to make Education Law Prof Blog:

Congress Has Just Done Away with ESSA Accountability Rules: This Is Not a Tragedy | janresseger

Congress Has Just Done Away with ESSA Accountability Rules: This Is Not a Tragedy | janresseger:

Congress Has Just Done Away with ESSA Accountability Rules: This Is Not a Tragedy

In 2001, Congress passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a new reauthorization of the 1965 federal education law. NCLB imposed test-based accountability on all of America’s public schools. Because NCLB and its punitive, test-and-punish mechanism became so controversial, it took nearly 15 years for Congress to agree on what was supposed to be its routine five-year reauthorization. Finally late in 2015, Congress came up with a replacement called the Every Student Succeeds Act, but it really left much of NCLB intact—including annual high-stakes standardized testing and a sanctions-based—instead of a school improvement, investment-based—strategy for improving public education.

In new 2017 academic evaluation of the No Child Left Behind Act, Duke University’s Helen Ladd reports, “Perhaps the most positive aspect of NCLB is that it generated huge amounts of data on student achievement in math and reading… A second positive component of NCLB, especially in the eyes of civil rights groups, is that schools are held accountable not only for the aggregate test scores of their students but also for the average test scores of subgroups of students whom they might otherwise ignore… A third arguably positive element of NCLB was its requirement that all teachers be ‘highly qualified.'”  In reality, however, there were serious problems with all these three things Ladd calls the law’s accomplishments. First another national test without high-stakes and punishments—the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)—already gathers plenty of data about our schools; second, NCLB never succeeded, as intended, in improving the achievement of the students in the subgroups it was supposed to help; and third, the law’s requirements for teachers, which later under the Obama administration, came to include strategies to fire teachers who couldn’t raise scores fast enough, have left the teaching profession demoralized.

Ladd also summarizes what she believes were the law’s serious flaws: “An initial problem with the test-based accountability of NCLB is that it is based on too narrow a view of schooling… NCLB… has narrowed the curriculum by shifting instruction time toward tested subjects and away from others… Further, NCLB has led to a narrowing of what happens within the math and reading instructional programs themselves… NCLB also encouraged teachers to narrow the groups of students they attend to… A second flaw is that NCLB was Congress Has Just Done Away with ESSA Accountability Rules: This Is Not a Tragedy | janresseger:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Not buying this NYT piece about how Rahm's principals fixed Chicago schools

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Not buying this NYT piece about how Rahm's principals fixed Chicago schools:

Not buying this NYT piece about how Rahm's principals fixed Chicago schools

The principals that are making gains are making them, not because of the system, but in spite of CPS. -- Principals Assoc. Pres. Troy LaRavier 

I'm not sure who in Rahm Emanuel's oversized City Hall PR Dept. planted this story in the New York Times, but kudos to them for getting this piece of fluff  past the fact checkers and custodians of common sense. Peter Cunningham swears it wasn't him, but I congratulated him anyway.

The Op-ed by David Leonhardt, "Want to Fix Schools, Go to the Principal's Office" focuses on Chicago and gives all the credit to the mayor and CPS super-principals for the district's supposed "fastest in the nation" gains in student achievement, rising graduation rates and lower dropout rates.

Using cherry-picked data, he makes a case that Chicago is on or near the top of the nation's public schools, even while 85% of its students continue to live in poverty and the entire district teeters on the brink of financial collapse.

In other words, Leonhardt is whistling past the graveyard. He's over his head when it comes to writing about education in Chicago.

All this reminds me of the Arne Duncan, Chicago Miracle  in 2008, when no success claim about turnaround schools was ludicrous enough to be challenged by a compliant media.

As for fewer dropouts and spiraling graduation rates, I'd love to believe the reports but don't know how anybody can, given CPS's history of deception in reporting such data.

Remember when in 2015 they were forced to lower the official high school graduation rate following revelations that thousands of dropouts were being misclassified as "transfers"?

According to the NPR report:

At just 25 CPS high schools, more than 1,000 students were mislabeled as moving out of town or going to private schools. But they had 

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Not buying this NYT piece about how Rahm's principals fixed Chicago schools:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Who Are These Groups?

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Who Are These Groups?:

Who Are These Groups?

In my effort to keep up with who's who in ed reform in Washington State, here's a list of some groups you may run into.

Campaign for Student Success (a coalition group) 

We are a diverse group of education advocates, parents, community leaders and fighters for equity.

This group runs the gamet from Asian Pacific Islander Coalition, Coalition of Immigrants, and Refugees and Communities of Color and Statewide Poverty Action Network to DFER, LEV and Stand for Children as well as Washington State Charter Schools Association and the Washington Roundtable.

The group says:
Collectively, the coalition sees McCleary as a unique demand to positively impact public education on behalf of Washington kids.

And yet, over and over, we have seen virtually no visible support for McCleary action from the Washington State Charter Schools Association.  Beware of groups that make claims that have no real evidence behind that claim. 

Our state legislators can create equal opportunity for our kids, and our coalition is urging them to create a sustainable solution based on three key pillars:

• Funding & Fairness: Sufficient funding must also be equitable and fair, meaning we must support those students who need it most; 
• Talent: Educator compensation must be funded with a focus on equity, growing the pipeline of excellent educators and matching them with students who need the most help; 
• Accountability: Funding and talent must be accompanied by a robust accountability system that sets clear goals, tracks progress over time, and provides appropriate supports and programs for under-performing schools and struggling students.

You can send them your e-mail address for updates but there is no contact info, no info on leadership or funders.  Their Facebook page has mostly generic kid shots.  The phone number there - one with a (415) area code actually goes to someone in San Francisco at a company called Rally.

RALLY is a communications firm that works to influence the way people think about and respond to political and social issues.

Rally is also the voice behind the group for charter school students in Seattle Schools Community Forum: Who Are These Groups?:

Letters to Betsy

by Melissa Westbrook / 11h

That's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The first letter is from the head of the NEA , Lily Eskelsen García . Key points (bold mine): I must ask you to give us the substantive answers that I did not hear you give to the senators at your hearing 

Beware of AstroTurf Ed Reformers 

Astroturf lobbying refers to political organizations or campaigns that appear to be made up of grassroots activists but are actually organized and run by corporate interests seeking to further their own agendas. Such groups are often typified by innocent-sounding names that have been chosen specifically to disguise the group's true backers

Michael Flynn, Karma, And Ohio Charter School Connects

Michael Flynn, Karma, And Ohio Charter School Connects:

Michael Flynn, Karma, And Ohio Charter School Connects

What is it about karma that eventually winds up biting you in the arse? Michael Flynn should certainly know something about that subject.

The guy who exhorted stalwarts in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention in July to Lock Her Up! could himself be vulnerable to being locked up as a result of not registering as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

As thousands of people have recently viewed the grating video of the retired three-star general working the crowd of rabid Hillary haters, many are thinking of one word to describe what has happened in a fortnight to the flagitious Flynn: karma.

In trying to fathom the depth of this ever-developing scandal for the Trump administration in terms of hypocrisy, lack of judgment, criminality, and, of course, karma, the lede in the New York Times said it all:

The candidate he was advising last fall was running on a platform of America First. The client he was working for last fall was paying him more than $500,000 to put Turkey first.

“There’s a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone,” Sylvester Stallone once said. Could this ever happen to a mean, vindictive, retired three-star general?

He’s not broke yet, nor alone. But it’s early in the long-term scheme that is karma, some would say.

All during the presidential campaign, we were told by candidate Donald Trump that it should be the policy of the U.S. government to apply “extreme vetting” to Michael Flynn, Karma, And Ohio Charter School Connects:

Sometimes Florida Voucher School Gain Scores Are, Uh, Negative… | deutsch29

Sometimes Florida Voucher School Gain Scores Are, Uh, Negative… | deutsch29:

Sometimes Florida Voucher School Gain Scores Are, Uh, Negative…

One of the individuals present at Donald Trump’s address of Congress on Tuesday, February 28, 2017, was Denisha Merriweather, a graduate student who years earlier received a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (i.e., voucher) that was delivered by the nonprofit administrator, Step Up for Students. (Merriweather also later worked for Step Up for Students as part of a growing career in advocating for vouchers.)

On March 03, 2017, following her visit with Trump to St. Andrew Catholic School in Orlando, Florida, DeVos issued this statement, which includes the following excerpt regarding Merriweather:

Denisha Merriweather, who was able to attend a private school when her public school did not meet her needs, exemplifies the hope and positive impact of school choice, and her story should serve as a model for the nation.

I featured the above information in a March 06, 2017, post on Merriweather’s circumstances. In short, she acknowledged that instability in her home life had her changing public schools “constantly.” When she changed caregivers, her living situation stabilized so that she was able to stop constantly changing schools. Her new caregiver used a tax credit administered by Step Up for Students to allow Merriweather to attend a Florida private school, Esprit de Corps Learning Center.

A tax credit is a way for corporations and wealthy individuals to give money directly to a voucher-providing nonprofit and in turn receive tax breaks. Such programs cleverly reduce a state’s tax revenue via the promise of post-donation tax credits. Thus, the private-school-funding tax credit is a back-door voucher program, useful in states in which spending public money on private schools is declared unconstitutional, as it was in Florida by the Florida Supreme Court in 2006.

Just as DeVos sells Merriweather’s voucher usage as a private-school-over-public-school success, the nonprofit Step Up for Students also includes a success narrative on its tax forms, which I included and reviewed in this March 10, 2017, post.

Step Up for Students purportedly demonstrates the success of its back-door voucher program via its gain scores (e.g., national percentile rank changes from one school year to the next). From the Step Up 2015 tax form:

Standardized test scores released in August 2014 showed that scholarship students were achieving the same gains in reading and math as students of all income levels nationally. By law, scholarship recipients every year must take a nationally recognized norm-referenced test approved by the state, and most take the well-regarded Stanford Achievement Test. The results reported 

Sometimes Florida Voucher School Gain Scores Are, Uh, Negative… | deutsch29:

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid:

FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid

Florida, land of more stupid education rules than you can shake a dead alligator at, embarked on a new level of stupid last year when it fought to keep some third graders from moving on to fourth grade.

As you may recall, Florida is one of the states with a third grader retention law, declaring that third graders cannot move on unless they pass the Big Standardized Test for reading. This is a dumb law, without a lick of evidence to support it, and several licks to suggest that it's actually counter-productive. However, the legislature, in one of its rare lucid moments, opened the door to local districts substituting a portfolio display of reading skills in place of a BS Test score, and sixty-ish Florida county districts walked through that door into a land of sense and clarity.

A few other districts, however, decided to be dopes about the whole thing.

Mind you, I generally try to be semi-respectful here and remember that the people I disagree with are still human beings with families and lives. But what the hell is there to say about a grown adult who declares that an eight year old child must be held back a year, even if that child got straight A's and demonstrated exemplary reading ability? That grown adult, even if she is a professional superintendent of schools, should be ashamed. She should be ashamed of visiting such abuse on any of her young charges, and she should be ashamed that she has so blatantly announced that she is not really concern3ed about that child's reading skills at all, but is only interested in forcing that child to comply and take the Holy BS Test. (Or at least "participate," which in Florida means breaking the seal and signing their names, which at least some of the plaintiffs did.)

But it just got worse. Initially, the state ed department threw the local districts under the bus, saying, "Well, it's their choice." But by summer's end, the education department lawyers were arguing in court that the grades given by teachers on student report cards didn't really mean anything.

And so about a dozen opt-out students were dragged into the Florida public square to be made an CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid:

WILL THE DENVER PLAN BECOME THE NASHVILLE PLAN « Dad Gone Wild

WILL THE DENVER PLAN BECOME THE NASHVILLE PLAN « Dad Gone Wild:

WILL THE DENVER PLAN BECOME THE NASHVILLE PLAN

Last week, Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Director of Schools Dr. Shawn Joseph announced that the district was preparing to undergo a realignment that would change how the central office supervises the district. According to Joseph, the move will create four zones, each with its own community superintendent, overseeing numerous school clusters, or groups of schools. In talking to people about this, their initial assumptions were that the clusters would fall into north, south, east, and west zones. But that’s not quite how things worked out.

Hillsboro, Hillwood, and Overton will be one cluster. Antioch, Cane Ridge, and Glencliff will be another. Pearl-Cohn, Hunters Lane, and Whites Creek will be grouped together. As will be McGavock, Maplewood, and Stratford. If you never saw the official announcement from MNPS, despair not; it’s only been released through MNPS’s job postings. Let’s take a deeper look at what this change could mean for Nashville’s schools. National readers you’ll want to follow along and I’ll explain why at the end.

Before we go any further, I want to go on record as stating that this is an awfully big change to be announced in such a haphazard manner with very little public input or discussion. This is not just a “leadership change” but rather a  large-scale district realignment that could have serious repercussions for the district if it doesn’t work. All we have to do is go back ten years for evidence of how serious the repercussions could be. Nashville operated under a similar structure during Dr. Pedro Garcia’s tenure as Director of Schools. But then MNPS changed to the current system after the state took over the district in 2008 due to low performance. Currently we have three Executive Officers who oversee all the schools in each separate tier: high school, middle school, and elementary school. That means we have an expert at every tier, which is important because the needs of each tier are so disparate.

To be fair, some would argue that the previous system under Garcia was not a major contributor to the need for corrective action by the state. Low performance was more a result of No Child Left Behind being enacted, which changed the way things were WILL THE DENVER PLAN BECOME THE NASHVILLE PLAN « Dad Gone Wild:

NYC Public School Parents: Why dumping the ESSA regs is not a big deal; and what is

NYC Public School Parents: Why dumping the ESSA regs is not a big deal; and what is:

Why dumping the ESSA regs is not a big deal; and what is

There has been an unnecessary amount of angst and ink spilled on the blogs and elsewhere over the fact that Congress has voted on eliminating the ESSA regulations on accountability.  It bears repeating that the law itself -- the Every Student Succeeds Act -- still exists in force and is quite prescriptive, for good or for ill only now just a little bit less so.  Every state must still give standardized exams annually to students in every in grades 3-8 and once in high school; must evaluate and rate schools mainly on the results of those exams plus graduation rates; and must intercede in schools rated in the lowest 5 percent.  The fact that the regulations were ditched by Congress changes very little.  What this instead has done is give schools a little more flexibility in deciding what to do with schools with high opt out rates, which is a good thing in my view.  

See the EdWeek explainer on this:

The Obama administration wanted schools to take the testing participation requirement in the law seriously, so that states, districts, and educators could have data on how English-learners and students in special education were doing relative to their peers. So it used the now-dead-in-the-water regulations to call for states to take pretty dramatic actions for schools that didn't meet the 95 percent threshold. The choices laid out in the regs included lowering the school's overall rating or putting it on a list of schools deemed in need of improvement. The Obama regulations also allowed states to use their judgement, putting in harsher penalties for a school that had a really high opt-out rate vs. one that didn't quite hit the 95 percent participation threshold. Some Republicans, including Alexander, thought this went beyond the bounds of the law. 

Now that the regs are being killed? We go back to ESSA, as it was written originally. Schools still must test 95 of their kids. But their state gets to decide what happens if they don't meet that target.

What this piece doesn’t mention is that the law still requires that in every state’s accountability system, at least 95% of the students in each testing grade must be included in the denominator of the academic indicator for each school, whether they took the test or not.  Unfortunately, this language was incorporated into the law, even though it appeared to contradict other sections of ESSA, including that the Secretary of Education is prohibited from telling a state how school participation rates will be factored into its accountability system and cannot punish states that allow kids to opt out of exams.  

What this seemingly technical but very damaging requirement would seem to do is to force states to label schools with high opt out rates as NYC Public School Parents: Why dumping the ESSA regs is not a big deal; and what is: