Opportunities for educational equity under the federal Every Student Succeeds

Opportunities for educational equity under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act – which replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015. States are responsible for implementing this important piece of civil rights legislation to leverage federal dollars for low-income students and school improvement. ESSA is an opportunity for states to do right by their kids by using the law to collect data and track the performance of all students so that families and the public know how schools and kids are doing; and use data to target federal dollars effectively and equitably to school communities. It is not enough for states to treat ESSA as a compliance exercise, each state ought to seize the opportunity to design an accountability system that meaningfully sets goals, weights indicators, and disaggregates data by subgroup – and then reports that out to the public in a transparent and accessible way.