Every Student Succeeds Act

Very few of you applied.

So then that gets sunsetted, and now we have what? Every student succeeds act, which gives us what? States an awful lot more opportunity to tell their story and to ask for changes, or they can stay with the existing structure.

How many states actually asked for something new and novel? Not a whole lot.

They want to stay with the existing structure because, one, it's easier.

But there are tons of videos out there of folks sharing these cell phones to do what? To get access to content that is interested so that they can move and help their communities do whatever or get some information and possibly get a remote degree or whatever.

I mean, distance learning is A blessing and a curse in so many different ways, depending on what you want to do with it and the requirements that are in place to give you access to it.

And I think that's why a lot of people are saying, wait a second, your roles, rules, responsibilities, requirements are such that I'm willing to take the Every Student Succeeds Act idea individually.

a variation and the centralized pieces, mostly the federal government are saying, go for it.

ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

What happens when a law shifts power from Washington to your local school board and to kids in detention or foster care? Meet ESSA, the law quietly rewriting the American school day.

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Ten, why advocacy groups still watch state ESSA plans closely.

ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act, became the primary K twelve education law in two thousand fifteen, replacing No Child Left Behind's rigid test-only model.

It shifts real authority to states, letting them design accountability systems, set standards, and choose interventions for struggling schools while preserving core equity protections for disadvantaged students.

This episode explores how ESSA reshaped testing, funding flexibility, and teacher evaluation, plus its lesser-known reach into the justice system.

in a mental health epidemic, and we, you know, aren't asking the right questions, and that's what I'm trying to expose with this film.

When you eliminate recess, when you eliminate playtime, and what we've done really since 2016 with the No Child Left Behind bill and then the Every Student Succeed Act really kind of built upon this obsession with standardized testing, is we've gotten so far away from what learning actually is.

And that was kind of one of the most shocking things I learned on this journey, going to all these different countries, interviewing neuroscientists and some of the, you know, leaders in education, is I realized I didn't even know what learning was.

I didn't even know the definition of education.

And what happened right at that point, if you think back to it historically, and we talk about this, I think in chapter one, that No Child Left Behind went away at the end of 2015.

And what came in to replace it, ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act, was a lot more, you know, like personally tailored instruction, less accountability on assessments.

Not that You know, draconian accountability is great either.

But once that shift happened through the E-rate, funding happened where funding exploded to where every district could have broadband and be able to have 30 Chromebooks on at the same time in every classroom.

The one catch, the one interesting thing is that a lot of the recruitment costs were not coming out of the local taxpayer pocket.

They were paying for it with a Title II fund So ESSA, Every Student Succeed Act funds, that is federal money that's about $2,000 or $3,000 a pop in most cases that is supposed to help with teacher recruitment.

Now, that could be spent, and I think when Congress created it, they were thinking of spending it on local teacher recruitment.

But in this case, it's being spent on foreign teacher recruitment.

Mm-hmm

... um, which is now under the, uh, Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2016, which was the successor to No Child Left Behind.

Um, so every student in every state is tested, uh, in math and ELA from grades three through eight.

Um, they get tested in each of those things once in high school, and these are just federally required tests.

Right

... by, by using i-Ready.

So, uh, the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, which was the successor, as you pointed out, to the Many Children Left Behind Act that so many of us were, were, uh, were doing our best-

I like to use Jesse Jackson's, uh, term.

Education law is doing real work here, too.

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires school stability for students in foster care.

That includes staying in the school of origin when it serves the child, immediate enrollment, transportation planning, and designated points of contact linking schools and child welfare agencies.

CASAs use those provisions as leverage.