UMass Amherst Education Professors Brief Congress on Initiative to Improve Every Student Succeeds Act

Jack Schneider and Stephen Sireci, professors in the College of Education, met with Congressman Jamaal Bowman and congressional aides Sept. 27 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to discuss new policy agenda ideas to improve upon the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and create more effective and equitable approaches for student learning assessment and accountability in schools and districts nationwide.

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Schneider and Sireci, along with members of the Beyond Test Scores Project (BTS) working group, presented ideas at the Rayburn House Office Building outlined in Educational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA, a joint report from the National Education Policy Center and BTS, whose goal is to provide a vision for outlining improvements to the existing law in the areas of assessment and accountability.

The ESSA is the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), after the reauthorization in 2015 under the Obama administration, and was designed to continue to provide equal opportunity for all students, strengthen schools and close opportunity gaps. However, the report notes ESEA’s iterations have fallen short in addressing systemic inequalities, including those impacting “racially minoritized students, low-income students, students with disabilities, emerging bilingual students, and others.”

In the report, the authors suggest six interlocking principles for building a more equitable assessment for student learning in hopes that schools and districts will adopt locally, and which Congress will consider upon the future reauthorization of ESSA.

Those principles include aligning assessment policy with goals for high-quality curricula and instruction; developing a system with reciprocal accountability; ensuring that representative community members play a meaningful role in the system; moving toward a broader array of school quality indicators; ensuring interpretable and actionable results and designing a system that will evolve and improve. 

To read more about the briefing and the report, visit the College of Education website.