In December 2015, the education world in Washington, D.C. crowded into Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s auditorium at the White House to celebrate President Barack Obama’s signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the long overdue overhaul of No Child Left Behind.

But for now, all we have are the plans. They have attracted a great deal of attention and analysis but are just that: plans.

Yet at Bellwether we worked with the Collaborative for Student Success and brought in dozens of experts, including former state officials and analysts with deep state policy experience to review all the state ESSA plans. It was a qualitative review so that states could get credit for how the pieces of their plans fit together to form a coherent whole, not just whether they had checked boxes. These reviewers were unimpressed overall and saw most of the plans as real missed opportunities to improve equity and drive improvement. And there was consistency to the reviews.

Yet as Bellwether principal Juliet Squire cautioned, states use the ESSA plans for different purposes based on various leadership styles. That’s why 2018 is when things start to get really interesting on ESSA. The state plans cease being exercises in planning and become live exercises in improving schools.

Read the full article Every Student Succeeds Act gets interesting by Andrew Rotherham at The 74.