Ohio has pumped the brakes on an education plan it intended to submit to the federal government next month, a delay and victory sought by some educators who want more public input and student testing cuts.
State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria announced Monday that the Ohio Department of Education won’t send in its required response to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act on April 3, as previously scheduled. Instead, Ohio will wait until the U.S. Department of Education’s second deadline in September to submit its final plan.
Mr. DeMaria rejected critiques that the state’s draft plan — released earlier this year and denounced by some teachers, superintendents, and others — ignored public feedback. The state education department developed the proposal over the course of 13 months and said 15,000 Ohioans participated in the process.
Mr. DeMaria said the state will use the extra months to carefully consider feedback.
“The submission of the state’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) response should be an event that unites us. In recent weeks, we’ve heard from stakeholders who feel their input was not reflected in the ESSA template,” Mr. DeMaria said in a prepared statement.
He also will form an advisory committee to review Ohio’s testing requirements.
Chief among critics’ concerns was that Ohio’s proposal didn’t call for a reduction in the number of tests students take.
The draft plan maintained 24 state tests, instead of dropping to the 17 required under ESSA, which in 2015 replaced the No Child Left Behind Act.
Eliminating state tests requires an Ohio law change, and state officials repeatedly have said that review would occur as part of a separate process.
Mr. DeMaria pledged that work on a strategic plan will take place “in a transparent way.”
Those who criticized Ohio’s draft plan want officials to use the extra months to address concerns they said the state ignored in its initial version. In addition to testing, those include the report-card system Ohio uses to grade school districts and a desire to give more local control to school districts, which the federal law allows.
“Now I want a commitment from the state superintendent to engage the stakeholders in developing an Ohio plan as it should have been done originally,” said state Rep. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo), who held a forum in Toledo last week about the draft plan and asked the roughly 50 people in attendance to tell the state to wait before sending in a final plan.
Ohio’s education department announced the delay on the same day the federal education department released a revised template for how states submit their ESSA plans. In a letter Monday to state school officials, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos touted the “flexibility” provided in the new “streamlined” application.
Ms. Fedor contends federal changes are the reason Ohio agreed to halt its submission, not because Mr. DeMaria “all of a sudden ... has a heart.” State education department spokesman Brittany Halpin said the just-released federal updates did not contribute to Ohio’s decision to wait.
Chris Varwig, president of the Toledo Board of Education, lauded the pause.
She said she’s “thrilled” with the delay and thinks state officials “are hopefully listening at this point.”
The Ohio Federation of Teachers also praised the move.
“This extra time will allow ODE, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to craft more meaningful public education goals for our children,” union president Melissa Cropper said, also in a prepared statement. “Missing from the draft ESSA plan, as it stands, is a vision for reshaping our current education system to be more reflective of what students truly need.”
Contact Vanessa McCray at: vmccray@theblade.com or 419-724-6065, or on Twitter @vanmccray.
First Published March 14, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
