What Are the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools?

 

Shifts Following the Every Student Succeeds Act

Policymakers have long debated how to best identify and target resources to the nation’s persistently low-performing schools, which are of particular concern as they often enroll historically underserved students. Most recently, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 sought to address perceived problems with prior federal school accountability policies, including too many schools being labeled as low performing.  This report focuses on state identification of their lowest performing schools, designated as Comprehensive Support and Improvement schools under ESSA. It compares the set of schools identified just before (2016–17) and just after (2018–19) ESSA’s implementation to see if changes to school accountability regulations played out as policymakers expected. Key findings include the following: Consistent with ESSA’s intent to better focus improvement efforts on the lowest performing schools, a smaller set of schools was identified following ESSA implementation. At the same time, more alternative, small, and charter schools were identified, which may have resulted from ESSA’s goal to broaden the range of schools eligible for identification. Finally, while ESSA’s changes did not decrease the identification of schools with the lowest test scores, it may have reduced the focus on schools with high concentrations of historically underserved students.