NPR – Elissa Nadworny
“How do you judge how good a school is? Test scores? Culture? Attendance? In the new federal education law, states are asked to use five measures of student success. The first four are dictated by the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. Three are related to academics — like annual tests and graduation rates. The fourth measures proficiency of English language learners. The fifth is the wild card — aimed at measuring “student success or school quality” — and the law leaves it to states to decide. There are many ideas out there for what schools could choose — including suspension rates and school climate surveys.”(more)