Refining State Accountability Systems for English Learner Success

Between the 2001 and 2015 reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA),1 the federal framework for school accountability has evolved in terms of the requirements and flexibility afforded to states. [...] This variability adds to the complexity of accurately capturing and understanding ELs’ performance and progress in academic content areas and ELP5 on standardized tests—over and above the complexities inherent in understanding the progress of all students in their academic growth. [...] Looking back to Student A and Student B’s performance in Figure 1, it is possible to calculate the average of the change in scale scores for each student from 2016–17 to 2017–18 and from 2017–18 to 2018–19, otherwise known as the slope, and infer that this average score represents growth in math. [...] Both sets of community respondents were puzzled and concerned by the enormous variation in curricular and extracurricular offerings between and even within schools (some aspects of which they knew about prior to the focus groups, and others they heard about from other study participants), and many wanted to learn more about why and how schools differed in the programs and services they offered. [...] In order to implement new data collection related to EL programs, this study’s findings point to the following recommendations: 1 Whereas most of the attention around accountability focuses on outcome measures and school ratings, federal and state accountability policy could lift up the importance of data collection and reporting related to programmatic inputs.