Afton Partners

An analysis of 17 states’ plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), released Thursday by the nonprofit Collaborative for Student Success, provides a glimpse into how those states intend to target federal funding to improve low-performing schools. In four states — Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Tennessee — state education departments are taking a leading role in articulating a clear message regarding improvement and developing a system to monitor the process. Education agencies in five states — Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota and Nevada — are working in partnership with districts and taking more of a “how can we help” approach, the report says. Finally, eight states have taken a district leadership approach, allowing districts to make decisions about interventions based on a local needs assessment. These states are Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York and Texas.

School finance systems…should go beyond funding to ensure equal access to core educational services, with outcomes-based accountability as a check, the Center for American Progress says in a new report. “In our mind, there’s been equity debate, there’s been adequacy debate, and we need to move beyond that. That’s what we tried to really hit on,” said Ulrich Boser, one of the report’s authors. An ideal school finance system should start with a weighted student funding system that provides more resources for higher-needs kids, like English learners or those growing up in poverty. Though many factors influence a child’s education, a school finance system should at minimum ensure access to “a strong teaching workforce,” high-quality preschool, and “a robust curriculum and instructional tools,” according to the report by the left-leaning think tank. A strong teaching workforce might be supported by raising salaries, improving professional development, and, at the federal level, enhancing loan forgiveness programs that encourage graduates to teach in low-income neighborhoods, the CAP authors wrote.

A study from K-12 data management company BrightBytes used data collected from the company’s analytics platform to measure learning outcomes from digital apps. If you’re a school leader who has invested big in education apps, or a proponent of digital apps in the classroom, the findings from this report are bleak. Schools will buy these licenses, and then they never really get touched,” says Baker, who analyzed the data and co-authored the report. The majority of purchased licenses don’t get used. A median of 97.6 percent of licenses analyzed in Baker’s study were never used “intensively” (for 10 or more hours between assessments), despite the recommendations of the edtech app providers.

Unlocking Time announced Wednesday the release of a free assessment tool that can help school leaders identify where learning time is spent so they can hold conversations to determine whether current schedules best optimize and align that time with school and district priorities. The tool asks teachers and school staff members to take a 10-minute survey, which it uses to generate an “Insight Report” that helps school personnel better understand where their school time is allocated and how school calendars, bell schedules, class schedules and staff time might be changed to produce better results.