Center for American Progress

Quality Early Learning Programs Are a Key to Future Success. Why Don’t States Put Them in Their ESSA Plans?
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Quality Early Learning Programs Are a Key to Future Success. Why Don’t States Put Them in Their ESSA Plans?

Samantha Batel highlights the importance of early learning programs and encourages states to incorporate them into their ESSA plans.

Grades are a touchy subject. Understanding how students are doing, and how well schools are serving their students, is an imperfect science. But as states rethink what success looks like, they can use more holistic measures of school quality to improve school and student performance.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the main K-12 federal education law, gives states this opportunity. The new law requires states to look beyond test scores to design school ratings with the whole student in mind. States can use different measures for different grade spans, using age-appropriate ones where it makes sense, and are limited only by their imagination (and some technical requirements of the law).

The above excerpt was originally published in The 74. Click here to view the full article.

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Authors

Samantha Batel

Senior Policy Analyst