Under the newly enacted Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states now face the challenge of creating school accountability systems that can vastly improve upon the model required by No Child Left Behind. To help spur creative thinking about how they might do so, and also to inform the Department of Education as it develops its ESSA regulations, the Fordham Institute hosted an ESSA Accountability Design Competition.
Out of more than two dozen submissions, 10 finalists were selected. Fordham President Michael Petrilli writes in a blog post that he chose the 10 finalists because their submissions were particularly well designed, especially creative and/or raised important issues for the department to consider in the regulatory process. He also wanted finalists to represent a variety of voices.
The finalists are:
Note: Affiliations are for identification purposes only. In many cases, the authors are not representing the views of their institutions.
- Chad Aldeman, Bellwether Education Partners
- Lydia Burns, et al., Student Voice Team, Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence
- Ronald F. Ferguson, Harvard University and Tripod Education Partners, Inc.
- Chris Hoffman et al., Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellows, Teach Plus
- Morgan S. Polikoff, Matthew Duque, and Stephani Wrabel, University of Southern California and Baltimore County Public Schools
- Jennifer Vranek et al., Education First
- Richard J. Wenning, BeFoundation and SpreadMusicNow
- Dale Chu and Eric Lerum, America Succeeds
- Sherman Dorn, Arizona State University
- Josh Boots, EmpowerK12
For more about the contest, see ESSA Design Contest.
For a summary of great ideas from these samples, see http://edexcellence.net/articles/some-great-ideas-from-our-essa-accountability-design-competition
