Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming. Were going to get started, running a couple of minutes late here. I think everybody is still trying to find the room. So, just a couple of housekeeping things, if youre tweeting, please use the ewa17. Everything here is on the record. Remember to use the signin sheet, wherever that is going around. Please sign in. Its right here. Okay. Yeah. Sign the signin sheet. Awesome. We are here today to talk about the every Student Succeeds act and the states. My name is caitlin emma. Im a reporter here at politico in d. C. I cover education policy. The law passed in 2015 that replace nod child left behind and where states are at right now. Y were going to talk about that today. To bring you up to speed, essentially, there are two submission windows for states to send in their plans under this law for Holding Schools accountable, for how they plan to intervene in schools, for how they plan to intervene in groups of students that are consistently underperforming. We have about 16 states and d. C. So far have submitted for this spring window. We have another window coming up this september. Im sure youre familiar with the fact that education secretary betsy devos is tasked with reviewing these plans, along with a group of people known as peer reviewers. So with that, id love to get started with our panelists who are experts on these plans. We have chris, the executive director of the council of chief state school officers. We have linda darling hammond. The president of the thomas b. Fordham student. At the far end is liz king, the director of education policy at the leadership conference. I would love to get started by, you know, jumping into this and make sure we have a lot of times for questions at the end. Id like to ask you, chris, if you can sort of just give us a high level overview of where states are right now. Obviously ccsso is an important partner in this process. Talk a little bit about that work and where you see states right now. Thanks, caitlin. Its a real honor to be on the panel with these three folks. I dont often get to speak with them. Its great to be here and thanks for inviting me to ewa. I think essa has been a devolution to the states as promised. 17 states have submitted so far. The rest coming in in september. If youre in a state where theyve submitted you probably are pretty aware of their plan. If youre in a state thats not yet submitted theres a lot of work going on before september to define that for that state. Theres two pieces i think were most interested in, one making sure that as states set these plans we dont go back to a time preno child left behind where we were able to ignore groups of kids or ignore poor performance in any sort of way in any school. Before no child left behind, we didnt report out subgroups. So a school could just sort of skate by on averages or things like that. And so i think its really important thats good in the first 17 plans that we dont see a real backing away from student performance as the goal for the states. And so i think thats a real positive. I think another area where i think we have a lot of work to do is on the intervention side. Lets say we grade a school, if youre in a letter grade state, a d or an f. Or if youre in a star state, at the low end of the star, one or two stars. What are we going to do as a state or as a district to help that school improve . There are new parts of the law that gives states more flexibility with those resources, the money. And i think we will largely look back on this law as a success or failure about how we do with the schools that arent getting it done with kids right now. Meaning, the lowest performing in our state are we able to significantly improve those schools . And i think some of the techniques weve been using in the past havent necessarily worked in states. Largely under no child left behind, states did a lot of reporting data. And then asking districts and schools to improve themselves. Either by coming up with a plan or, you know, just saying, you need to improve. That didnt work as well. And i think we need a structure in place in each state, and it has really been left up to the states. One area where im really interested in states improving is to think about how do we intervene in low performing schools. The last thing ill say, i dont want to take all my time, is just as we have these conversations, its really important that we get into the plans and figure out what states are actually doing. States may have submitted something to the federal government that may not have everything in it that theyre going to do in their state. Because of the way the template played out and some other things. The federal government is only asking for certain types of information from states. Their process and their plan may be bigger than what they submit to the federal government. I think its an important thing for reporters to ask is what else besides the federal plan is going to go on in the state to help improve the schools. Ill stop there. Awesome, thank you, chris. I would like to turn to liz and ask about, you know, what the change in this Administration Means for these plans. Obviously, civil rights advocates have been concerned about President Trump and secretary of education devos and how theyll be looking at these plans and what level of scrutiny theyll be giving these plans. Theres sort of a concern out there that essentially this will be a rubber stamp. Weve yet to see how that will play out. Id love to hear about what is the Civil Rights Community looking for when youre going through these plans . What are the concerns you might have about how this administration will be scrutinizing them . One thing i would just say right off the bat, because of who you are is a big thank you on behalf of marginalized community to education reporters and just investigative reporting right now is so important. Theres a great piece in the Atlanta Journal constitution about the qualifications and background of Police Officers who are serving in schools, so that the individuals charged with policing children really value that work. Thank you to all of you and please keep going. So on the sort of essa implementation, our two biggest priorities are that the process itself is inclusive of Diverse Communities and that there are diverse parents and Community Stakeholders at the table when decisions are made. And that at each point in the process that we strive towards equity. And so thats what were looking for. I think were absolutely concerned about the review process coming from this administration. We keep hearing over and over a deference to states, even at times when states are violating federal law. I think we saw, for example, recently in the appropriations labor hhs hearing, secretary devos was not willing to commit that federal dollars would not be used to discriminate against students. I think that is something we should all be concerned about. Using federal dollars to discriminate violates federal law. Its the responsibility of the secretary of education to stop that. We have not gotten the assurances that we need, that this administration is going to make sure that these essa plans are consistent with the law and the laws longstanding intent to raise achievement for marginalized children. Were listening and hoping for that assurance. We have seen some bright signs in plans being returned to states because they are insufficiently complete. We need to make sure that its not just theyre using a sufficient number of words but the words that are included in the plans are compliant with the law. And describe a system of accountability which holds schools accountable not just for the performance of children on average but the performance of each group of children. The purpose of the law is not just to raise educational quality overall. But to address longstanding barriers to success, based on lowincome students, students of color, students with disabilities and English Learners. If a state is not doing that. If thats not what theyve described, then their plan should not be approved. Were absolutely concerned we wont be able to count on secretary devos to do that job. So, linda, from what youve seen so far of the plans that have been handed in or the draft plans that are out there, you know, do you feel as though states are delivering on this promise of insuring equity, you know, are they being innovative and thinking about accountability differently . I mean, what are you seeing . Well, theres a whole gamut of approaches. The earliest filed plans are less ambitious in some ways in innovating in some cases than the ones that are still under construction. Partly because, you know, when you have more time you think think harder and do more modeling of different kinds of approaches. Thats not to say there arent some interesting innovations in some of the plans that have been filed. I think theres even more to come in the next batch. There are some places that are really picking up, just to take up lizs equity theme, which is so important. That are taking up equity in some really interesting ways. One of those is taking up the place of the kinds of indicators that typically discriminate between and among subgroups and have strong implications for whether kids will graduate and go on. For example, places like california are taking up an indicator of whether kids are suspended at differential rates and having had that in the state accountability system, has reduced the suspension rates quite a lot. School climate indicators are being looked at in a number of states. Illinois is one thats really taking that very seriously. If you look at that carefully, those kinds of indicators can create quite a lot of information about how kids are being treated in school, as well as giving School People information that will allow them to improve. Access to rich curriculum for all kids. A number of states are doing college and career ready indicators. This is really important. Course taking is a stronger predictor of success in college and beyond than test scores. And so getting access which is typically been unequally allocated to advanced courses, dual credit courses, as a lot of states are measuring, to strong career Technical Education programs that meet a quality standard. Those kinds of things. And getting to a place where 100 of kids are really prepared to go on in life would be a huge change in where we are as a nation. A lot of countries have been way ahead of us in thinking about to making sure everyone is prepared to go ahead. A number of states is looking at those things. New york is looking at a diversity indicator which would look at the extent to which within a district students are together in schools and classrooms relative to their proportion in the district by race, by class, by special education and english learner status. So there are a lot of states that are taking up these questions in very interesting ways. And looking for the equity nuggets in the law, which we identified in a publication called equity in essa. There are ways by which you can highlight the School Funding differentials across districts. Encourage student formulas, it gets more money to the kids who need them the most. 50 districts that can engage in pilots. Look at assignment practices to encourage integration. All of those things are baked into law. And theyre kind of lurking there for states to pick them up and pursue them. Not all of the states are doing that. But some of them really are pursuing those kinds of strategies. Mike, i know that you have a few thoughts about how you feel states are doing in this respect. Ive seen you write about how they could be doing better when it comes to high achieving students. Where do you think theres room for improvement in what youre saying . Is there a state you think is being particularly innovative. Its great to be with you all today. If i knew that cspan was coming i would have worn my flashy jacket instead. Just kidding. I look forward to the ewa, you know, you love twitter, i love twitter. You like getting quotes, i like giving quotes. You are my favorite peeps. Its great to be back here. When it comes to q a i hope somebody is going to ask linda about her son who is the american Ninja Warrior superstar who is a big name in our house. Competing june 19th in the national Ninja Warrior competition in las vegas. Which then becomes my vacation. Amazing. Okay. But back to essa. Yes. So i think when we look at these plans, and were talking about the accountability plans. And especially when it comes to the ratings. A couple things i hope you ask when you look at your own states plan. The first one is whether or not it does a good job helping parents and taxpayers regular, you know, man and woman on the street understand if a given school is a good school or not. You know, this law does provide more flexibility. And it does not in the end say absolutely that you have to provide one final rating. And there are a few states, including california, most famously, that are going to provide a ton of data and thats good. That data is a form of transparency. You all are going to be able to get access to that data and probably do some really cool stories with those data. And those data can be helpful when schools, teachers, parents, administrators sit down and try to understand how they can improve what theyre doing. But what that doesnt do is provide a very clear answer to the public or the taxpayers. Hey, is this school a good school or not . So ask that question. You know, certainly in my view the f ratings or five star ratings are the most clear way to do that. If youve got a rating where its in a language. The school got a good rating. Thats number one. By the way, if theres not a clear rating, this is something that your newspapers could do something about. You could take the data that youre getting from the states, and you could build your own ratings. In california, hey, california reporters, if the state of california is not willing to do this, you could do this and you could construct your own ratings using the state data to come out and say, you know, based on all the information weve got are these schools doing a good job or not. The second thing id look at is whether or not the ratings are doing a good job differentiating between really good High Poverty Schools and really bad High Poverty Schools. As we know from the no child left behind era, we had a huge problem, which was that basically every High Poverty School got labelled as a Failing School. So many indicators were strongly correlated with demographics and prior achievement. Because we looked at proficiency rates, Graduation Rates. If youre a high poverty High School Even if you were doing a phenomenal job if youre a High Poverty School and you do a great job and kids make a great progress while theyre under your car, is it possible for you to get an a or five stars . If not, whats wrong with that system . And finally, what are the signals that states are sending to the schools in terms of who matters . Weve heard a lot from liz and rightfully so that we want to make sure the signal is that all kids matter. That we dont go back to the old days as chris said where you could do well on average and sweep low performance from minority kids or others under the rug. We also want to make sure that kids across the achievement spectrum matter. Not just low performing kids, but also kids at the middle and the top. The message i hope we want to send with all schools is, hey, its your job to help everybody in your school make progress. As much progress as possible. We have a particular problem, and had a big problem under no child left behind that kids at the middle and at the top were not a priority because the standards were so low. Because all of the incentives were about getting kids to that proficient level. And as a result, schools learned that, you know, kids who are going to pass the test in september, they were ready by the fall to pass that spring test. You could ignore them, and youd still do fine. And schools that were especially at risk of hitting the interventions had a particularly strong incentive. So that meant in High Poverty Schools, that High Achievers, especially low income High Achievers were not at all in priority. And we see that in the data. We see that there has not been as much progress for those kids as there should be. Now states have a chance, by moving especially to gross model, looking at progress over time and looking at growth for all kids they can send their message to those schools, everybody matters, low performers, middle, High Achievers, and so ask those questions. When you look at your state accountability system what signals are they sending. Who matters . Do all kids matter . Are they prioritizing some kids over others . And who are the winners and losers in that kind of a system . Because we do know from Good Research that schools do tend to Pay Attention to those signals, and so we should take them seriously. In terms of a state thats doing well we like colorados plan, at least on the ratings, quite a lot. They have gone out of their way to make sure that the way they measure academic achievement sends a message that everybody matters. You look at average scale scores and thats a way to basically the school has to improve for everybody to get those scale scores up. They also do a lot at looking at growth over time. So we think thats a promising start. D. C. s is pretty good. Massachusetts is pretty interesting. A little complicated. But many of the others, unfortunately, have not moved very far past no child left behind. They are still looking at proficiency ratings at high school, still put a lot of weight on graduation. I think theres a very good chance in those states youre going to have a situation where basically, if you serve a lot of poor kids youre going to get a low grade and if you serve a lot of rich kids youre going to get a high grade. That is not a good accountability system. I know that chris and linda would like to share their thoughts on that. About my jacket . Im ready for it. This is kind of like your super bowl i think. You just love this panel. But i mean i think my i think mike brings up some good points. One point i would push on a bit is thinking about the overall rating. So californias dashboard has gotten much, much better since it first came out. Its starting to get to a place where i could look at a one pager on a school and understand what their School Performance looks like. So i dont think you have to have a single indicator to be clear with your public. I think you can do that through a variety of ways. I think the bar is correct that parents should be able to look at the report and understand how their school is doing. I dont know that its the only way to do that. The second thing is thinking about how you rate schools, you know, if you have 15 indicators, maybe there are things you should be reporting out but not including in School Performance. Ratings. So, for example, suspension data. I think is something we should be monitoring and something we should be looking at across the country, its clear that we have a challenge there. But, if we start putting that in to School Performance, the reaction from schools could be to simply just not suspend kids and find other ways to deal with that. And i what i think we learned under no child left behind i was going to state in oregon right after no child left behind, and we had tests before no child left behind in oregon, they didnt have the kind of stakes they had after no child left behind so the behaviors in our schools changed about assessment after no child left behind. Im worried we could have a similar challenge here if we arent if we arent careful about how we weight these indicators. I think thats something for you guys to be watching. Linda . Well, i want to agree with mike about the fact that you should be looking in states to see if they have measures of growth or progress. Which is really how you give credit to schools for what they contribute to student learning, not just what the kid came in with. New york actually has measures of both growth and progress for each of their indicators, or at least growth for the academic achievement ones and progress on all the others and i think a lot of states are trying to figure out how to do that and thats really important. Also very important and i agree with that states should move away with proficient which only tells you how many kids met a score and look across the whole continuum. I think the use of the sort of single score, a through f or single number, can mask whats going on on individual indicators unless youre also very clear about having a dashboard. And if you think about it, in many states, moving, california has seven indicators altogether on its dashboard. Kind of like getting your kids report card. You want to know how theyre doing in math. You want to know how theyre doing in english, you want to know about social studies and science and maybe citizenship, et cetera, its less of a need, i felt as a parent to have my kid rated on a single summit of scores, a first grader than for me to know in which areas are they doing well and which areas are they doing poorly. What we found in studying the data is that very few schools do badly on all the indicators. Most of them are low on one or two and so if you really want to address improvement, youve got to know where schools are doing well and where theyre doing poorly. And then youve got to design the intervention to address those areas. You know, we can imagine states putting together, you know, Math Professional Development for schools that are struggling in math, and actually working with them very intensely to move the needle on that rather than just saying youre in the bottom 5 or you got an f and then we have some generic idea of what were going to do with or to you. So whether you have a score or not, the dashboard itself is really important. Those measures that tell you which schools are struggling to move English Learners forward. And what are we going to do to build a system in our state to ensure that those schools and the teachers and principals in those schools know what to do to improve that situation . So i think that the dashboard piece of it is actually what can drive the School Improvement system. In a much more productive direction. Did you want to jump in on this . Yeah, i think from our perspective, the central question here is whether all kids matter in the system or not. And i think thats the bigger challenge that we see. The politically hard thing to do is to hold accountable a school which on average may be performing well but is really just failing to serve a group of students. Whether its an allwhite middle class school that is not serving its children with disabilities or well or an allwhite school that is not serving its lowincome children well or a newly Diverse School thats not meeting the needs of English Learners or africanamerican students. That would be a politically hard thing to do. It is not hard to hold accountable a high profile school. Those schools are in the situation theyre in because they have so little political power. When you design a system only about holding accountability the schools with the least amount of power youre undermining the ability to create behavior change. Chris talked about behaviors changing when you measure and report things and thats absolutely true. They can change for the worse but goodness knows we hope they change for the better. The system we have right now is not working. It is not serving all of the children it needs to serve. These historic barriers to opportunity persist and in order for them to go away behaviors need to change, policies and practices need to change. And our theory of actions here, the logic of accountability, is that if you come up with a system which makes clear where schools are supposed toish going, how theyre supposed to be serving kids, what the goal line is, college and Career Readiness for every child, right . If you start with thats where were trying to go and then you come up with a system that indicates where are we doing really well on that path and where are we falling short not just overall but for every group of children. And this is the thing were seeing, these state plans are just not following the law in that regard. They are avoiding the politically hard challenge. They are focusing only on overall achievement and they are not Holding Schools accountable for disaggregated achievement and thats just unacceptable. We cant have that system. Mike . You know, with all due respect, what i worry about is that some of the groups have not learned some of these lessons from no child left behind, which is first of all, i understand that your concern is that there are going to be schools that should be rated poorly, that get away with a high rating. And i get that. We should also be worried, though, about a system that labels every school as failing which is what we had by the end of the no child left behind process. And what we could have is were not careful about how we design these systems again. If you have every school is rated as failing because, for example you take literally the school of every kid College Career ready and say people that aint going to happen. Not going to happen in my lifetime. Were at 30 , maybe 35 of kids right now college and career ready. Were not getting to 100 unless we start like about what it means to be college and career ready. Should we be aiming to boost those numbers . Absolutely. But if you literally build a system that says youre a Failing School unless you get 100 of kids college and career ready every school is going to be a failure. And what youre going to have is what we had back in the 2009, 2010 are every school is a Failing School and so no school is failing. There was no accountability because nobody took the rating seriously. Youve got to be able to differentiate between these schools that are making progress, arent making progress. If you have a really good growth model, well designed that controls for prior achievement, and is for everybody, that it would be almost impossible mathematically to mask to have a school you know, where on average the kids were doing well and they werent doing well for certain subgroups. You know. If we design these systems right i think were going to be able to address that issue. Lets make sure we dont go back to the day where we say every school in america is failing because we set these utopian goals in washington and schools are not meeting them. When were talking about utopian goals were talking about the goals that every parent has for their own child right . Every kid puts their baby on the bus so that they go to school and learn what they need to learn to be proficient and to graduate high school on time and to be ready for College Career and life. So that is the im the priority and the belief of every parent and i believe every educator goes to work every day with the intention that they are going to serve all of their children. We no longer have a binary system. This is not you pass, fail, it is much more nuanced, and frankly a lot more complicated, but it is a much more nuanced system. We are unwilling to accept, we think it is a fallacy to our view that achievement gaps are inevitable or natural or preordained. This is a system we have created. We have created an inequitable system through policies and practices over the past several hundred years and we are working very hard now, many of us, to fix that. And thats the work that we need to be doing. And it didnt start with nclb and it didnt start with the civil rights movement. This work is much older than all of that. In the language that we use, this is an america as good as its ideals. We all believe in an Education System which supports the success of all children. And thats the system we need to be working towards. So i think it is wrong to argue that our options are only to ignore historical differences, to sweep under the rug inequitable opportunities, and to look only at overall achievement but liz thats not what i argue. What im saying is watch out for the utopian goals. Here in washington, d. C. , look at kip. We have a fantastic network of kip schools because of universal preschool here they start at age 3. They have kids from age 3, they work with them until they go to college age 18. They spend a bazillion dollars a year, thanks to d. C. s funding and also private fundraising, they do an amazing job. And theyre getting great results. But were still talking about, you know, i think at the last data was senior like 50 of their kids graduating college. Thats five times better than the national average. Thats amazing. Thats the best Case Scenario right now, i would argue, and were at 50 . So im just saying that 100 , yes, aspirationally, rhetorically, thats great to aim for that. But we cannot base that into accountability systems because i promise you that will result in virtually every school in the country failing and if that happens there is no accountability. Theres no differentiation. Let me make sure that we get the Equity Opportunity gap real quickly and just point out that in this law, in contrast to nclb where you would rank schools and label them and create a whole net of sanctions that could occur, there was no requirement to invest in those schools. There was a period of time when there were School Improvement grants but a lot of schools were, you know, just basically underresourced because we inequitably fund schools in this country. Most states have a two or three to one ratio between their high and low funded schools. In essa, they still have the obligation when they identify a school as requiring intervention, to do a resource audit. To really look at the ways in which the sources may be inequitable or inadequate to do the work in that school. I think thats part of what has to be leveraged as we look forward. Some of this is about measuring. But we cant just keep weighing over and over again a lot of it is about making the investments that allows us to get the opportunities that they would need. The 100 of college and career ready that i was talking about, i dont know what your 30 is, maybe its shares of people who end up with a college education, which is about 38 or 40 . But or maybe its the percent who are proficient on from a. C. T. , from s. A. T. , were about a third of graduating seniors. Are hitting well are hitting a good score on a test. And right now right its about the same as kids what i was talking about is ensuring that kids have the curriculum opportunities, and california was something that measures college preparedness, if you get a certain set of courses and grades on those, as well as approved high quality career technical pathways, and in most countries around the world, kids are in some set of courses, and learning situations where they graduate either ready to go in to a reasonable career, or a reasonable working situation, or theyre ready to go on to college and i think that is a reasonable goal, a lot of countries do it. I think we could do that. And i think states that are working towards that are going to substantially improve the opportunities they could have. So we have a lot of kids coming out, probably a third or more, who are kind of just unready for anything. And then that is the School Pipeline that creates a lot of the social dysfunction. Okay im going to give chris the final word on this one because i want to make sure that we have plenty of time for questions from these guys. I want to make sure we have at least 20 minutes. So, chris . Ill be very quick. At first i just want to thank you for trying to moderate. Sorry. And i want to just, my admiration for these three people is quite high. Could you imagine being a state commissioner and having these as our stake holders . I mean, ive heard these arguments in state town house when ive been visiting states that theyve been trying to put their plans together. So mike came and spoke to our chief at our meeting in march, and you know, advocated for growth. And then we had somebody else advocate to use proficiency more heavily. So state commissioners have this process they have to go through of trying to write a plan that satisfies all three of these folks and theyre stakeholders in the state. So theyre not going to be able to do that. And i think i think a big thing we are pushing for is to not replicate the things that we have done that havent worked. When i talk to commissioners im holding on to making sure we dont lose kids in this process. That there are clear bench marks and clear goals for all groups of kids in your accountability significance tell. At the same time that we set goals for those kids that are reasonable. They may be interim goals. We may have a goal of 2030 or 2040 of 100 proficiency but we can set benchmarks we know were on the way to that. I think its really dangerous to say, because which kids cant make proficiency . I do worry about that part of the signal. We only have to have 30 or 40 of our kids. You know which kids will be left out of that conversation. So i just think these are really hard questions. I think they did a great job of describing differences there. I think mike is probably tweeting right now. Why not . So have a but this panel shows you what your state is dealing with as a microcosm and the feedback. And theyre going to get reviews of their plans and people criticizing their plans so its important to understand states arent off doing this randomly. Theyre actually engaged with people in the state having people in the state having conversations. So i think that part cant be oversold and cant be talked about. Some states need a push to do more. So encourage that. Okay. Lets try and squeeze in as many questions as we can. Who wants to start us off . [ inaudible question ] there is a microphone on either side of the room. So please use those and just identify your name, and where where you are from. Colorado. The question for mike and liz, what sort of questions do you think reporters should be asking states regarding their targeted intervention for particular subgroups . Instead of schools as a whole . Yeah so the first question that im at on one of the problems we have is the continued use of super sub groups which ignores the differences between africanamerican, latino, native american, Asian American students, white students, low income students, students with disabilities and English Learners so the first question is how do you plan to apply an intervention when your identification system, your accountability system does not meaningfully disaggregate among diverse students. Thats the first question. Is that what you need is the information about who is not being effectively served and then to lizs point earlier, on what . A general knowledge that the tool is not working for that group of kids is not helpful. Is it reading achievement . Is it math achievement . Is it a Graduation Rate issue . And so i think having those pieces of information, who is not getting the support they need, and then in what area, how is that manifesting itself in a student outcome, the very next question is how are you going to engage the parents and communities of affected students in the decision about what to do . Because if youre talking about a school that is not effectively serving its africanamerican students i bet you africanamerican parents in that community have a good understanding of part of the challenge. Whether it is Something Like, you know, barriers to access in higher level courses, whether it is Something Like implicit bias, whether it is disciplined disparity in school pushout. What the sort of the cause of the challenge i think that parents are in a really important source of information about what to do there. And then looking at other schools that have done a great job. Right . For all of the challenges we have in our system there are schools that really are excelling at serving all students and really learning from that and figuring out what it is that they did and how did that work and how do you apply those lessons in other places. Thats where i would start. Yeah, and i would just say lets start with something we dont know we dont know what to do with low performing schools and we dont necessarily know what to do with schools that have low performing subgroups. Thats one good lesson from last 10 or 15 years of this is that we really suck at turning around low performing schools, and were not great at intervening in these others. I think in colorado, where if you got a low performing subgroup that means they are not making a lot of progress, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, then youve got to get under the hood and look at the teaching and learning. You know youve got to try to understand what is happening. Are the teachers that are teaching those groups of kids not Strong Enough . Are they using a curriculum thats not Strong Enough . Are they, you know, what you know, is there issues with low expectations . This is difficult work. This gets into the very heart of the educational enterprise. So probably need to build some capacity with people who have these kinds of skills to go into a school and get under there and figure out whats happening. We dont know how to do this in washington. Dont look to d. C. For answers on this one. Do we have any other questions . Yes. Im wondering, with im sarah from wbz but one of the issues that i have is its very hard for me as a reporter to look under the hood of growth models and see like, what is their formula for determining growth. And especially as we change data accountability tests. It kind of seems like a mess and im very suspicious because i cant understand what theyre looking at. So, even though like you might look at two scores, two like average scale scores, they could be exactly the same, but yet have different growth percentages. And i know that but its a mess. Yes. So i agree with you. I think we should be pushing toward simpler models that people can understand. I think states have a responsibility to have the public and reporters be able to replicate their calculation. And i dont think i think we should be able to give reporters access to the data set in a way that you could check that. So i understand growth modeling is very complicated. But i think we can do better at sort of understanding if similar kids, with similar demographics, should have similar growth targets. So, thats i think its something that we kind of we get into the research side, and we sometimes lose the ability to explain what were doing and therefore we lose parents. And the general public. So i think we could be better on that front. And linda has a lot of experience. Yes . We talk a little bit about those interim bench marks and setting interim benchmarks, so i know certain subgroups have lower starting points, right . And we get this oh, well were just being realistic. How do yall feel about that . Having, you know, black kids, kids with disabilities, ells, and everybodys got this starting benchmark. What are your thoughts . You know, mike made the point earlier that its important to set, you know achievable targets. With efforts. And most states are doing that in a way that looks at where kids are now. And then sets an expectation that there will be steeper growth for kids who are starting further behind. So that youre looking at lines that should, you know, over time, move towards convergence. And i think thats a reasonable thing to do. A lot of the challenges are about how quickly do you expect that slope to, you know, go up, and over what period of time . But you have to start with where things are now. And then set that expectation for closing the achievement gap. That means, though, also closing the opportunity gap. And weve been so familiar with talking about at chiefment gap for the last 15 years that theres been much less conversation about the opportunity gap. The fact that kids do get access to very different curriculums in many, many places. They get access to very different learning opportunities before they get to kindergarten. They have access to very different resources within schools, et cetera. So as we worry about the goals and the targets and the movements of kids along those, its really important to continue to loop back to the question about what opportunities to learn are different groups of students receiving. So were going to break way gr. This can you always see it. Were going to take you live now capitol hill. A hearing about to get under way with treasury secretary who is testifying about his departments 2018 budget request. Hell speak before this House Appropriations subcommittee. We have live gavel to gavel coverage here on cspan3