Commissioner of Education Mike Morath wrote school administrators yesterday to inform them that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) submitted its revised plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The U.S. Department of Education (ED) issued feedback in December to Texas’s original state ESSA plan, which required some revisions and asked for additional clarity.

Morath’s letter to administrators largely focused on how the revised plan would impact the implementation of House Bill (HB) 22, a piece of accountability-related legislation passed by the 85th Texas Legislature, as the major areas addressed by ED involve the new academic accountability system.

“Due to federal timeline requirements, the Agency was forced to make preliminary decisions on the new House Bill 22 (HB 22) accountability system ahead of the timeline for our state rulemaking,” Morath wrote. “I want to emphasize the decisions laid out in our revised ESSA plan do not reflect final stakeholder input and are an effort to comply with federal timelines and requirements.”

Among the changes made to address issues outlined by ED, TEA’s revised plan:

• alters the long-term goal for ESSA to entail 30 percent growth based on baseline scores from the 2016-17 school year (the original long-term goal didn’t cut it for ED because, for example, it failed to anticipate graduation rate growth for certain student subgroups, in this case white males; proficiency goals are also now based on a meeting grade level expectation rather than the originally proposed approaching grade level expectation);
• removes writing, science, and social studies test results from the academic achievement considerations (ED interprets the law to say only math and reading/language arts results can be used to calculate this indicator; the other test results will still be used for calculating student success and school quality);
• aligns the accountability impact for failing to meet the required 95 percent testing participation rate with federal stipulations, which will impact schools where parents opt their students out of state standardized testing;
• adjusts the federally required summative rating calculationso that either student achievement or progress (the better score of the two) makes up 70% of the rating, while 30% consists of progress towards closing the gaps (the original calculation would have averaged the two percentiles); and
• changes accountability for recently arrived English language learners so that it begins in their second year in U.S. schools (the original plan would not have included some recently arrived ELL students in some accountability results for the first two years and would have omitted some asylum/refugee students for up to five years).

The revised state plan also adds language to clarify various aspects of the proposal. For example, ED asked for more information on how Texas plans to satisfy a federal requirement to track and publicly report the disproportionate rates at which poor and minority children have access to experienced, qualified educators, an issue on which ATPE has long advocated for change driven by research-based solutions. The revised plan dives deeper into Texas’s landscape and the way TEA intends to calculate and report the data.

The letter goes on to inform administrators that TEA will submit amendments to the plan if additional feedback leads to “decisions different from what is proposed and already submitted in our ESSA plan.” Similar language in the original plan submitted to ED was omitted in the revised plan.

Read Morath’s full letter and access the revised state ESSA plan here.