According to Alyson Klein, author for Education Week, state and district leaders were eager to try out a new kind of assessments when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). But, as state policymakers started to take a closer look at the ESSA, they started to reconsider whether they wanted to participate or not. It has been more than a year after ESSA was put into place and the process has not taken off the ground yet. There are still a lot of unknowns about how the ESSA bill will play out. The U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration had not yet outlined what the application process will look like for each state. This leaves the key details of the ESSA up to the Trump administration. As of mid-December, neither Trump nor his secretary of education nominee, Betsy DeVos, had said much about the bill or testing in general.
Click here to learn more about ESSA Testing Pilot.
Abstract by Samantha Armie, senior Ball State University, elementary education