By Christopher Klaver
CIO
Posted: August 9, 2017 4:02 PM

When Superintendent of Public Instruction Brian Whiston and his staff put together the state’s plan to comply with the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act, he said they put the state’s needs first and actual compliance with the federal law second, a strategy that could now overcome the goal of filing the plan early to have it approved before the 2017-18 school year.

Mr. Whiston and others have already spent time on the phone with the U.S. Department of Education, and it sounds like there could be more phone and email time before federal officials understand what Michigan is trying to do with the flexibility provided under the new law.

Michigan is not alone in having to answer questions. Nearly every state that has submitted an ESSA plan received an “interim feedback letter” with a page or two of points where federal reviewers did not see the connection between the federal law and what the state submitted.

The one point where Michigan does appear to be alone is in having overall questions about its accountability system. Several states had questions about individual points in their system. New Jersey, for instance, appears to want to exempt all of its eighth grade students from its mathematics assessment.

Federal reviewers failed to see, however, how Michigan’s transparency dashboard and the indicators on it meet the federal requirement of a state accountability system.

Mr. Whiston and others have acknowledged that it could be a struggle to show how the dashboard provides a method to differentiate school performance and highlight schools in need of assistance, but he has also remained steadfast that the dashboard would replace the current top-to-bottom list for identifying, among other things, the bottom 5 percent of schools.

The challenge could be increased with the State Board of Education’s overwhelming support for eliminating any grading of schools on the dashboard. Once the site is in place, parents and others will be able to see comparisons between their school and the state as a whole and potentially some other schools on the various measures, but they will not see an overall grade or even a rating on those measures.

Discussions with USED are likely made even more interesting by having to explain that the dashboard on which the accountability system will be based is still under development. A presentation at the board’s meeting Tuesday showed there is still much work to be done before the system launches later this year.

Federal reviewers have also indicated that, as they see the state’s initial plan, some pieces might have to go back for peer review before approval, which could mean missing the 120-day deadline for reviewing the plan and pushing any implementation even further into the school year.

But it is also still unclear how much flexibility USED will actually give states. The prior administration had indicated it would give fairly wide leeway, but the current administration has been somewhat tightlipped on its expectations, at least in public comments. No state has yet been approved or rejected, so there is apparently still room for discussion and negotiation on what constitutes compliance.