 They're now being recorded. And I'm delighted today to be joined by Carmen Ruland of the Center for Education Equity at the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. Welcome, Carmen. We're also going to be joined by two colleagues from State Department of Education who are doing a special interesting equity work. And we'll introduce you to them shortly. Just a couple of logistical matters. Please note that the audio portion of today's webinar is only available by phone out of respect for those who may not have terrific broadband access. When you log in, if you did not choose to have the webinar system call you, please use the following toll-free number for audio. Tim Cook, could you please sign that number and mute it? That would be really helpful. Thank you. So the number to call in, if you didn't have the system call you, is 877-423-6338. And the passcode is 142587 pound signed. And that information is also in the chat box. This is also a reminder that if you are not speaking, please mute your phone so that we can hear the presenters clearly. Thank you very much. Again, welcome to today's webinar. And I'm really excited to welcome today's speakers. Carmen Verland oversees the Center for Education Equity at the Mid-Atlantic Equity Assistance Consortium. She leads the EE's Technical Assistance Portfolio where she also delivers technical assistance and training on racial equity, cultural competence, and family, school, and community engagement. So welcome, Carmen. We're really glad to have you today. Also joining us is Beth Olenoff, who is Special Assistant to the Secretary of Education at the Pennsylvania Department of Education. She's charged with the development and implementation of the state's consolidated state plan under the federal SFX. And finally, we're joined by Paul Fleming, who is the Assistant Commissioner for the Teachers and Leaders Division at the Tennessee Department of Education. This division is responsible for designing, implementing, evaluating, and support of policies, practices, and programs that are related to all aspects of teacher and leader preparation, institutions, licensure, evaluation and development, and educator talents that we're delighted to hear from Paul as well today. Now we'll tell you a little bit about each of our respective organizations very quickly. The Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center, otherwise known as the ARC, is for state, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. We are commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to provide technical assistance to state departments of education, principally, to build and enhance their capacity to undertake important reform. So that's us. Carmen, will you tell us a little bit about your organization? Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. The Center for Education and Equity is one of four regionals. Equity Assistance Center is funded by the U.S. Department of Education under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Center for Education and Equity is a partnership with WestEd and the American Institutes for Research, as well as the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. We are the Region I Equity Assistance Center. Our, the state and our region, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Bursk, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, the Virgin Islands, and West Virginia. So quite a few states that we oversee technical assistance for. Our goals are to improve and sustain a systemic capacity of public education systems to address problems caused by segregation and inequities, and also to increase equitable educational opportunities for all students, regardless of race, gender, religion, and national origin. We provide technical assistance and training to states, school districts, schools, and community-based organizations within our region at the request of school boards and other responsible governmental agencies. So to begin, our talk today is around equity and the Every Student Succeeds Act, and how that particular piece of legislation, or law now, how that allows states and districts to think about opportunities around providing equitable education for students. And so as we begin talking about equity and ESA, we thought it would be a great idea to just have you all in the chat box respond to this particular question, and this is an image I know that's been out for a while and something that we like to start our trainings off with, but when you see this image of the three people standing on crates on one side, and then on the other side there's a different distribution of resources, what comes to mind? I'll just take a few moments to type within that chat box. Thank you. So someone wrote equal versus equitable. Fairness does not always equal equity. Meet people where they are. Equity does not mean equality and vice versa, so some of the same summaries there. And then also it's more important or fun to play than what. So how can we get people in the game? Thank you. Equal does not mean equitable. Many times we speak of ensuring resources and human capital are equally distributed and that does not always mean it is appropriate to the needs. And then someone said, well, where are the girls? We really want to break down equity. Thank you, siblings. And all students' needs are met. So thank you. Thank you for indulging us with that and participating. We try to make our webinars a little bit interactive and hard to do so. But thank you for that. And you guys are spot on. And as you said, equality means everyone receives the same resources, opportunities and support. And equity is where we meet each person where she or he is, utilizes and builds on their strengths and ensures everyone receives what they need to thrive. Thank you again so much for that. And when we think about meeting everyone where they are and here's back to the picture, equality on the left side, equity on the right side, we see that this is where our work is. How do we ensure equity? How do we reach or get to a common understanding where not everyone receives the same things in order to meet their needs? And as districts and as state education agencies and educators and principals, how do we bring everyone along to that same understanding? So that's where we want to start with a brief overview of equity as we start talking about policy and it's in particular the Every Student Succeeds Act and how that provides opportunity for equity. And when we think about equity in reality, it means that our intentions often do not translate into culturally sustaining equitable impact, but if we think about equity through liberation, that means that everyone in the system has a responsibility to make sure that systems and policies and practices are put in place that empower everyone regardless of their background, their language, their SES status, their race, that everyone's needs are met and that we operate from a place of empowerment. And as someone just pointed out in the right-hand picture, when you have liberation, there's no wall, right? So everyone's able to see that game and participate. Okay, I'll get off my horse now. I'm going to take a little box and move on. So MAP, the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, operates from a perspective of data-driven outcome-focused equity framework. And so our framework that you see on this slide really tries to outline the areas that are typically acknowledged as critical levers to improving student outcomes. So we have equitable systemic policies, procedures, and practices. There are positive and inclusive through climate. Students have access to... All students have access to rigorous curriculum. We're engaging families and communities. And we're coming from an asset-based approach and then we're creating effective partnerships that build positive youth development. And so we believe that those are the technical areas of the work that should be considered. But there's also adaptive areas of the work. We're talking about policy. It's important to consider social dimensions of change, where both cultural identities of schools, staff, state district leaders, communities are thought through collaboration and problem-solving, structural dimensions of change, those are the institutional barriers, communications, teaming, collaboration structures, data management systems, personal learning opportunities that sometimes prevent schools from providing students with equal opportunities to learn. And then there's the material dimensions of change. And so when you think about ESSA, thinking about resource allocation and distribution of funds, curricular materials, what is our curriculum? Is it cultural responses, talent investment? How are we recruiting and retaining effective teachers and leaders? And how are we developing those folks? That all ties into the Every Student Success Act and some of the things that you'll hear later on in the presentation from Beth and Paul from Pennsylvania and Tennessee as they talk about the things that they're doing in their respective states there. And then if we think about how we operationalize equity in particular policies and practices, I'm not going to read all of these examples to you, but just some that really stick out, starting with trust and relationships and building that shared responsibility and accountability in our districts and our families as schools work together with families, making sure that we're implementing policies and practices that open pathways to academic excellence for all students, situating learning and the lives of students and their families, associating high-level critical thinking and decision-making, building editor efficacy and capacity in a variety of equity and social justice contexts. I might as well, I'm reading all of them and integrating prerequisites for academic learning and position. So I'm stopping there. I think I'm turning it back over to Caitlin to really go in-depth in ESSA, but thank you. Thank you, Carmen. And this is just, I'll say this opportunity to remind folks, but if you're not speaking, we'd really appreciate it if you would go ahead and mute your line. And of course, anytime you want to add something or have a question or comment or observation, please unmute yourself and jump in. We're informal around here, but we would prefer if you'd mute your phone until you speak. So what is ESSA? Well, we think that it's really useful to acknowledge and recognize that ESSA is essentially a civil rights law with clear roots in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which emerged in the context of the civil rights movement and Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty, which sought to alleviate some of the worst discrepancies in people's life chances. The original ESEA focused on closing opportunity and funding gaps, largely by providing money used for professional development, instructional materials, and education programs, particularly in high poverty schools. There were early amendments as stakeholders in Congress recognized that there were other inequities that required redress in the law, particularly special education students and English learners. The original law also introduced the notion of standards and accountability as a mechanism for ensuring equity at the federal level, using federal levers of power. Originally, 5-6 of the funding for ESEA went to Title I, which was essentially money for supplementing the education of students in poverty or in otherwise under-resourced places who did not have access to the instructional support that students in wealthier schools and districts did. It's important to note, too, that the No Child Left Behind Act, which reauthorized ESEA, added requirements that states, districts, and schools report academic outcomes disaggregated by students from subgroups. So for the first time, we had a national view of how student subgroups were performing over time. The equity components of ESEA are in some ways continuous with those from the No Child Left Behind Act, and in some ways they're quite different. So I'm going to do a high-level kind of overview of what those are. As you saw in No Child Left Behind, subgroup reporting is still required. So I think that states, schools and districts must report how students in various categories are performing. So for example, how are African-American students performing, how are English learners performing, et cetera. In a move that sort of acknowledges that reality and effectiveness are very complex and social, the ESEA has permitted the use of new indicators and measures of success. So for example, rather than only hinging on academic performance, states may also require districts and schools to report on other indicators of school-wide effectiveness, such as school climate, for example. Another important equity component of ESEA concerns is equitable distribution of effective teachers. The details of this have changed, but it continues to be an important focus and of course also harkens back to the teacher equity plans that states were required to submit in years prior to the Department of Education. But the idea here is that students' access to strong teachers should not be determined by zip code. Another equity component is concerns addressing resource gaps. There are, as you're probably aware, large funding discrepancies between districts based on things like property tax, for example. As one lever for ensuring that we have a really clear picture of how states are funding, how districts are funding their schools, how states are funding their districts, there are new requirements that states report per pupil spending at the district and school level. This is new, it's complicated, it may become versile, but nonetheless it is a new lens on how resources are spent and what kinds of gaps arise. Another equity component of ESSA concerns evidence-based practices for those schools requiring improvement support from states or districts. This is an attempt to assure that those schools in need receive the very best kinds of interventions and there is room in the evidence-based tiers in the law for the implementation and study of practices that seem promising but may not have been implemented in the kinds of schools that are in particular need of support. So there is flexibility there for schools and districts to find those interventions that have some evidence but also to align those interventions with their local context. Another important equity component is stakeholder involvement. There was quite a requirement in ESSA that states actively, meaningfully engage a wide range of stakeholders in their planning for implementation of ESSA, bringing people back into the public conversations about the purpose and form of education. And finally, another equity component of ESSA concerns accountability. How will states hold schools accountable and related? How will they provide support to those schools found to be in need of assistance? There are new accountability requirements for English learners in acknowledgment that such students are increasingly important. They're increasingly growing and we need to allocate attention and resources to their support. Now we're going to focus on just a few of these and go into them in a little bit more detail, kind of to set you up for the good stuff that's coming from Pennsylvania and Tennessee as they talk about their own equity work. This next slide is Carmen's and she's going to talk about these four equity components of ESSA. Yes. And not to belabor any points, because Caitlin really did a good job of outlining the components of ESSA. But there are, you know, certain provisions that definitely will help states and districts forge pathways towards equity, one of being the disaggregated data by subgroups. ESSA asks that each district and state collect and report data out for all students disaggregated by subgroups, thinking about that data and how and examining outcomes related to students with disabilities, military, students from military families, students experiencing homelessness and students in foster care for instance. Those are some of the disaggregated subgroups that ESSA requires states to report out on. Support the access to quality education for students experiencing homelessness. So there are a lot of support, a lot of things that states are obligated to do and districts are obligated to do in order to serve students and enhances that were made specifically to the McKinney-Vento Act under ESSA or when ESSA came along. Also accountability goals and indicators of growth for students, especially in elementary and middle schools. It is something that ESSA came about with ESSA. And you'll hear a lot more about that during our state presentation. And then finally, Taitlin mentioned that ESSA is a very important part of ESSA. ESSA is a very important part of ESSA. ESSA is a very important part of ESSA. ESSA gave some resources around effective retention and recruitment but also there are a lot of flexibility within ESSA for states to provide professional development of teachers and leaders and some of those resources can be used to help educators and staff and administrators think about cultural responsive approaches, cultural competency in other areas of equity and racial equity when it comes to educating all students and providing an equitable education for all students. So we just wanted to call some of those initiatives out and or elements out as we get ready to hear from our states. Thank you, Carmen. I'm briefly going to overview some of the equity components of the Equitable Distribution Teacher's requirements associated with ESSA. I want to also explicitly make the link to the state teacher equity plans that the US Department of Education required in 2015 because interestingly, these showed up in ESSA plans as well as they ought to have. One big change in the new requirements is that there is no longer a highly qualified teacher requirement and states are no longer required to define and monitor what that is. On the other hand, states are required to report on ineffective teachers. So how are they distributed across districts by various demographic characteristics, et cetera. There are certainly an array of ways in which this can be defined. It can be defined by the percentages of teachers who are inexperienced, teaching at a field, who have provisional or emergency credentials. In any case, this is a tweak, a different way of slicing how we identify how teachers are distributed across schools. And states have proposed a variety of ways of doing that. Secondly, states are required to evaluate, monitor, and report their distribution of effective teachers across schools and districts. Again, this is principally an accountability and monitoring sort of strategy. However, there's also money entitled to Part A that can be applied to more active strategies to ensure that teachers are equitably distributed. These monies can be used for recruitment for ensuring diverse teachers, for mentoring, for induction programs, and for professional development. And so clearly the law sees that teacher equity can be enhanced, can be strengthened via training and support. So one thing that I want to mention here is that... I'm going to go back a slide. There are some components of this particular work that concern leadership and leadership development, and we'll hear more about that from Paul Fleming from the Tennessee Department of Education when he discusses his state's Leaders for Equity playbook. And keep in mind that Leaders for Equity can include and should include teachers and not just principals and superintendents. So we're looking forward to hearing from him. But first, I'm really delighted to introduce to you Beth Olumoff, who cannot unfortunately be seen because her camera is not behaving today. Those of you who enjoy her disembodied voice in that case. But she's going to describe today how her state uses the new indicators of success afforded by ESSA to understand the equity landscape in her state, to identify schools in need of assistance, and then to both support and hold them accountable. So Beth, this is all yours. Caitlin, thank you very much. And first let me say that I would like to thank the Appalachian Regional Comprehensive Center and the Center for Education Equity for giving us the opportunity to share with folks some of the work that we're doing here in Pennsylvania. And I bring greetings of course from Secretary Pedro Rivera, who's been an integral part of our ESSA work and our equity work. And in fact, this year he is president of CTSSO, which is the Council for Chief State School Officers. And I know that equity is high on his list of the work that CTSSO will be doing. So let's just get started with how Pennsylvania has approached ESSA in general to begin with. This slide is a quote that we have right in our ESSA plan, noting that ESSA provided Pennsylvania with the opportunity to accelerate important reforms that predate ESSA's enactment. We were already working on some of these things and I'll call that out as we go through. And continuing transitioning education policy here in Pennsylvania away from a strict focus on girls' violence and toward the establishment of rigorous expectations for students and collaboration and assistance for schools to help them meet this standard. We focused on guiding the following guiding principles in our ESSA work, transparency, equity, and innovation. Transparency, of course, means multiple transparent and easy to understand indicators of school success. And again, I'll call those out as we look at three examples of our equity strategy. Equity, of course, is what we're talking about here and that is probably the primary, premier goal of ESSA and, of course, a goal for us here in Pennsylvania as well. And innovation in teaching and learning in schools and classrooms. When I was asked to do this presentation, we were asked to kind of focus on picking out three of the biggest equity strategies in our plan. And so we're focusing on our future-ready PA index, which is a brand-new public facing with CookHeart. New indicators, a new way of presenting the data. We're using a dashboard format instead of a single summative score or even a main score, like an A to M schedule. In addition, we have the potential... I think I'm getting distracted by hearing somebody else's voice. If you're not me, could you mute? Thank you. The annual meeting for differentiation, we've increased the emphasis on growth vis-à-vis performance, and I think that that has an important equity aspect to it. And both of our new student success and school quality indicators promote equity. We have a career-ready indicator that goes all the way down into elementary school to help schools pay attention to the importance of presenting career readiness and career awareness content. And chronic absenteeism, of course. Many states are using chronic absenteeism, and we know that a big difference between chronic absenteeism and attendance is identifying the individual students who are not in their feet enough of the time. And then beyond the plan, the responsibility would fall on individual schools to figure out once their students are identified how to address the barriers that are coming in from attending under regularization. And finally, the third equity strategy that I'd like to highlight is something that I think is very innovative here in Pennsylvania. And that is the Secretary's... This is a two-year cohort-based program. We had almost 100 students and attendance and charter school leaders sign up in the first cohort, which is just on SNM now. The goal was to let these school and system leaders sit down and work together on strategies and change strategies that would raise the bar for all students in their districts to enable them to be college and career-ready. So we'll go into a little more detail on each of these items. So what is the future-ready PA index? Well, that's the fancy word for our new school report cards here in Pennsylvania. Early in 2015, before ESSA was enacted, newly elected Governor Tom Wolf charged the Department of Education with developing a more holistic school progress report. The existing forward-facing progress report was developed by the previous administration, very reliant on test scores. They did use growth, but proficiency had a heavier weight, and there weren't too many other kinds of indicators. So the new Governor was dissatisfied with that and charged the Secretary with coming up with a new way, using test scores, but not only test scores, to see how schools were doing at preparing students for post-secondary success. So charged with that responsibility by the new Governor, the new Secretary, charged employees at PDE to get out in the field and conduct a very wide-ranging stakeholder engagement process to capture ideas and discussions about what would be the appropriate measures of success beyond test scores. And we had superintendents and principals and parents and lots of different kinds of people hitting down and really discussing what was appropriate to measure, what were barriers to successful measurement. We kicked around school climbing a lot, but how do you measure that? Lots of different things in itself. By the end of the spring, we had spoken at more than 10 different full-day listening sessions across the Commonwealth, and we have a big Commonwealth, with 500 school districts. So it's always a challenge to get into the field and let everybody have a turn to participate. And over 1,000 stakeholders participated in that activity. Then ESSA was enacted in December 2015, almost a year later than our work had begun. And we were very gratified to see that ESSA was heading in the direction of transparency and a broader set of indicators, which was exactly what we had already begun to do. So, future-ready indicators. This is actually the lift of the indicators that we are measuring and will report on school by school, not the future-ready itself is about schools, but of course ESSA requires LEA reporting as well. So we will have both for all of these measures. We've divided them into three chapters of the matter of organization. Data assessment measure, on-track, what we call on-track measure, and college and career readiness measure. So under state assessment, you see the usual suspects for then proficient in advance on our state standardized exams, which are PSSAs in grades 3 to 8, and keystone exams in the high school years, and meeting growth expectations. And here in Pennsylvania, we use something called the Pennsylvania value-added assessment system. Many states use that, including Tennessee, who's coming up next. Both of those things are also ESSA accountability measures. The next measure, presented advanced on PSSA and keystone, is not an ESSA accountability measure, but we think it's important, and some of you may have seen in the past couple of weeks, some discussion in both the education and the popular press about the excellence stats and how in the past few years, schools and education systems have focused on the bottom tier of kids, which is certainly valid, but not necessarily valid to the exclusion of the top tier of kids and how are we moving kids from proficient to advanced? How are we taking the kids that are ready to move on to more rigor and ensuring that they get the challenges that they need? So presented advanced measure stats. And of course, all of these measures would be disaggregated by subsidies. On-track measures, English language proficiency and ESSA accountability factor, chronic absenteeism are one of our new state-selected indicators for ESSA accountability. This third one, grade three reading and grade seven math, is a voluntary indicator. LEAs get to decide if they want to report this data. And this is to give them the opportunity if they're using a different assessment. Not to use the standardized test, but if they're using an additional different assessment for grade three reading and grade seven math, we wanted to give them the opportunity to demonstrate that, to show that data on the public facing school and LEA report card. So that's what that is. And of course, why did we choose grade three and grade seven? In those two subject areas, well, research shows that reading on grade level at grade three is a gateway indicator. Kids who are not reading on grade level are going to struggle down the road. So that's a place to focus. And similarly with grade seven math, kids who've mastered grade seven math are positioned to go on and take the more advanced mathematical concepts through algebra. The next chapter, college and career measures. Graduation rate, of course, is an ESSA accountability measure. One of our equity strategies regarding graduation rate is that we are adding in the fifth year cohort in addition to the fourth year cohort. So that allows a school or an LEA to demonstrate, show data that has afforded students a little bit more time to graduate. We wanted to use the greater of fourth or fifth, but USDE was very stickler for the statutory language that said fourth. They did allow us to average the two rates. So our data will be, for accountability at least, will be an average of the four year cohort and the fifth year cohort. Our career standards benchmark, that is our other student success and school quality indicator. And again, this is a reporting of how many students have acquired certain evidences of activity. So this is really a prod to schools and districts to implement curricular activities that deliver and align with subsequent career, education and work standards. We actually have those standards, and we've had them for a long time, but there was no accountability related to them. So we weren't following after schools and districts to see how well they were delivering this important content. So that's what this is. This is a way to hold them accountable. And while there's been a little grumbling, we're already collecting this data this year, and while there's been a little grumbling just about what constitutes the data that we're going to collect, by and large, superintendents and school boards and teachers are very excited about this prod to add this career exploration activity as a requirement into the school year. Many states are using some sort of career readiness benchmark, but Pennsylvania, as far as we know, is the only state to push the data collection down into the elementary year. There are certainly career exploration activities that can start as young as kindergarten, and we think that that's important, and so this is the indicator that addresses that. Industry-based learning is a new indicator that shows good access to several different kinds of industry-based learning, including high-value industry certificates, but also workplace experiences and internships and that sort of thing. Post-secondary transition to school, military, or work. ESSA requires an accounting of post-secondary transition to school, but we've added military or work as well. A little bit of a data challenge. Military is not hard, but work is, especially when our Department of Education uses a Pennsylvania secure ID and the Department of Labor and Industry uses a social. So that's been a challenge, but we're working on that and we hope to be successful at being able to report post-secondary transition to work. And finally, under this chapter, is access to rigorous courses of study, and that's AP, IB, and dual enrollment opportunities. Again, the opportunity there is to encourage districts and schools to make more of those opportunities available because, you know, the idea that transparency will promote more of these initiatives that we think are important. Karen will look at the report card on rigorous courses of study, for example, and say, whoa, wait a minute. Why does my high school only have six AP courses? But, you know, down the road or elsewhere in the district, there are more, or even other districts have more. What's going on? And why are my schools not affording my kids those opportunities? So this next slide is actually the same slide showing you the future-ready indicators, but highlighting the indicators that are accountability indicators as well, the ones that we use for annual meaningful differentiation and identification of schools that need improvement. So this just highlights for you which how ESSA overlaps with our future-ready report card but how our report card goes a little farther than the ESSA requirement. And, of course, those of you sharp-eyed out there will realize that there are also some ESSA reporting requirements that are not included here on the future-ready indicator. And we will have those on a linked ESSA report card. This is a very important concept. We will be presenting the future-ready index as a dashboard rather than giving values to each of the indicators and summing them up into a single score, which is what our previous report card did. And what we found with the previous report card on a scale of 1 to 100 is that communities, school boards, newspapers didn't look beyond the 85, or the 92.3, or the 97.6. And very competitive, but based on the summative score, not competitive based on access to high rigor or a number of kids who went on to post-secondary education or training or a focus on how individual subgroups were doing. And we felt very strongly that using the dashboard maximized the transparency of performance on individual measures and certainly performance of subgroups on individual measures. A summative score, as it says in the bullet under there, actually met poor subgroup performance. The particular district is doing well, but they have a couple of subgroups that may or may not have very many kids, but those subgroups are not performing well. Nobody is even going to pay attention to that if they are sort of distracted by a single summative score or an overall grade of B or A. We think that this helps treat the accountability system as a tool for continuous improvement. You are putting in front of your community on a regular basis the individual data points rather than, again, hiding poor performance with a single summative score. So we're one of only a few states that have done this. We received a fair amount of pushback. Interestingly, not from the field. The pushback came more from the General Assembly and some advocacy groups. But the field was very happy to have a dashboard format, and they are looking for help in communicating it to their constituencies. It's confusing. It's harder to master than a single summative score. But we think that the end result is important enough to go through that work. So the next of the big three of our equity strategies is how we're using data and how we're mixing and evaluating our data for the purposes of annual meaningful differentiation and identification of schools that need improvement. So this is just repetition of what we've just seen before. The first four indicators are required by ESSA, achieved on our test scores, academic progress using our growth system, graduation rate, and EL proficiency. The new indicators that were chosen by Pennsylvania, again, are the career readiness benchmark and chronic absenteeism. So how do we put all of those these indicators here into what I call the methodology box and shake up all these different indicators to identify schools that need improvement? So this is our favorite scatter plot chart. Every Title I school is on this chart, or obviously will be. So the axes here are proficiency and growth. So if you end up, you live at Title I school, end up in the lower left quadrant, low proficiency and low growth, you move to the next step. If you're in one of the other three, I don't know if you can see my arrow, but if you're in one of the other three quadrants for the purposes of identification as a CSI school, you can sit down. So again, only the schools that fall into the quadrant of low proficiency and low growth move to the next step. Here's the next step. First, we add in the two substantially weighted indicators and that definition is in the statute and it's high school graduation and progress in moving English learners to proficiency. If you are in step two, which means you're low growth, low proficiency, and you have either one of these, you will be identified as a CSI school, a full and needed improvement. If you have neither of those, and in other words you're doing okay with these two indicators, then you move to the next part B of step two, which is the school quality student success indicators of chronic absenteeism and career readiness. You have to have both of those. And the reason for that is that's how we have to make the first two substantially weighted. Again, this differentiation was required by the department. All right, that's pretty confusing. So in our plan and in our presentations, we offer what I call the Christmas tree chart for obvious reasons. So this, on the left-hand side of the chart, you'll see examples of full considerations. These are not real schools, they're just types, like a K to 5 school and the English language subgroup needs the N size. And our N size is 20. So obviously you don't even look at EL progress if the N size for EL doesn't need the N size. So they're doing for EL, which means they're doing okay and they don't have a graduation rate because they're K to 5 school. So we don't need to look at substantially weighted indicators. We move to school quality student success. They're okay on chronic absenteeism, but not career readiness. You need two there, so they're not CSI. All right, I'm not going to go through all of the Christmas tree chart. It's just a way for schools to kind of see, you know, find their configuration and if they are low growth and low performance, how we would calculate whether or not they're a CSI school. Okay? All right, before I get to Secretary of Superintendent's Academy, I'm going to go back here. So we can't run these numbers yet. Of course, everybody in the state, advocacy groups and the unions and the schools themselves have to know if they're going to be identified as a CSI school. Well, we can't tell them yet because much of the data, the indicators, is only just coming in now. So we're not able to identify low growth and low performance and we're not able to identify who fits where in the other indicators either. And oh, by the way, since ultimately we are looking for only 5% of the bottom Title I schools, we don't know exactly where the axes are yet. We have to fiddle with them so that when we apply the data, we generate ultimately 5% of the Title I school. So that's a little hard for people to understand but that's where we are and we will work the data over the summer and our expectation is that sometime in the fall, one will release the data in the form of the Future Ready PA Index but we will also then be able to, a little bit later, release the identity of the schools that are targeted for CSI and of course also targeted for CSI. Which, as I'm assuming most people on this call know, will apply the same system to subgroups and any school with a subgroup that would meet the CSI requirements would be tagged with the TSI label. Okay, I can't see your faces. I can't see whether you're confused but I'm hoping you're following along and now we'll go to the Superintendent's Academy. So this is a strategy that also started before this. And this strategy sticks into the professional development that helps leaders be equipped to deliver equitable programs and focus on strategies to improve equity in their buildings especially for buildings that have high percentages of high-poverty children. So the goal is to engage the superintendent in the work of improving achievement, particularly where the challenges of poverty are significant barriers. It's a two-year cohort-based program. Obviously cohort-based means we bring them together on a regular basis and they work together and they learn from each other and some of them even develop their, as the next bullet talks about, their action learning projects. And these are specific projects that each superintendent or sometimes they coalesce into groups work on together, very specific to address a specific issue in their school or community. So we'll see some examples of that in a moment. 73 participants completed the two years of cohort one, excuse me, just recently in May 2018, cohort two began in September 2017 so they're completing their first year and cohort three is being planned, has been approved and they found some funding in the couch cushions, I think, to support it. Other states have taken a look and have come to see what we're doing. We are in partnership with the National Institute of Leadership doing this work. And here, let's take a quick look at some of the, some of the ALTS, as they're called, action learning plans that the folks in cohort one develop. So the first one is a system of professional learning communities across districts. So here, as I said earlier, we have 500 districts in Pennsylvania. In some places the districts are county-wide. Maryland, for example, but we're not county-wide. In the county I live in, for example, there are 13 districts. In Philadelphia, conversely, Philadelphia is its own county and is a single district. So we have a wide variety of configurations. So this small group of multiple districts is working together to develop a system of learning communities across the district to achieve job-invited professional development. Another little group in a county is establishing a county-wide first-day-ready principal credential for their own little credential so that among those districts they can work together to apply the requirements that they feel are important for post-certification but pre-employment candidates to be building principals. Another single charter school leader has a project to transform her school into a high-performing STEM academy working through a community partnership model. Another outfit is for a school leader to work with families and community partners to ensure, and here's a specific issue, to ensure that all of her students are reading on grade level by age eight. And finally, the last example here is to eliminate the grade and age-level determinants for access to high-rigor mass forcework. That's a great equity strategy because, again, as we talked earlier about high-performing kids, there are many biases against minority children and poor children as to whether they're capable of high-rigor forcework. And so this is at least one step to looking at the student rather than to checking off boxes to see whether students should be eligible for high-level mass forcework in elementary school or even taking algebra on an accelerated basis in middle school. So, as I said, we've gotten some very high marks for this from our participants, and I'm hoping that we're going to figure out a strategy for evaluation. I think it will be hard to do objective evaluation, you know, in terms of measuring whether test scores or things increase following participation in the academy or implementation of the action learning plan, but the softer evaluations that we're getting from participants have been very good. So that's the end of my presentation, and I'm going to put the link to Pennsylvania's education website in the chat box, but I encourage you to reach out to us if you have questions or would like more information. I certainly recommend you to the website where you can see a lot more detail about all of our different strategies. And I thank you and our two hosts, again, for providing the opportunity for me to present you today. You bet. Thank you so much, Beth. That was really interesting. There's so much going on, and I can tell that there's a foment in the chat box or lots of questions, and I promise that we've reserved some time at the end of today's call to address as many of those questions as we can. But thank you so much for sharing. Great. Thank you. I am now going to turn things over to Paul Fleming from the Tennessee Department of Education about his state's equity philosophy and sort of how it's embedded in its Leaders for Equity playbook. Before I hand over the mic, though, I am going to move over into the presentation section, a file share pod, where you can download the Tennessee Leaders for Equity playbook as well as today's presentation slide deck. So all you do is go over there and select the file you want, and then download. All right, Paul, it's all yours. Take it away. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you, Kay Lynn and Carmen and Beth, and for everyone being on the webinar this afternoon. Like Beth and Pennsylvania, we have a lot happening in Tennessee regarding ESSA and also equity, more importantly, perhaps, around accountability. But I wanted to focus for Tennessee to focus on leadership. You know, principals have the second biggest influence on in-school equipment only surpassed by teachers. And so I wanted to just walk through a little bit of our approach in Tennessee that encapsulates a lot of the ESSA and state strategic plan priorities in Tennessee, but also do the lens of leadership. One thing that's not on the slides is, Kay Lynn references, we are actually using our Title 2A, 3% set aside for nine regional pipeline models for aspiring leaders with an equity focus. And we're excited that that's going to train about 160 principals a year for aspiring leaders through the Title 2A ESSA funds for Tennessee. And we've formed a Transformation Alliance that actually is the platform for all nine of these regional pipeline models to connect to and receive support from the state as they build out their multi-year pipeline models. So I think that's one key piece that ESSA has really afforded the opportunity to align to equity because we are interested in making sure in these pipeline regional models of districts that they think about equity in the placement of principals in schools in terms of best fit and the serving the needs of our most vulnerable students. I wanted just to start with a slide because I think like Pennsylvania and a lot of states, there are similar demographics. So we actually track our high school graduates where they go after high school in Tennessee. And you can see here from our class of 2014, and I particularly relate to this because I'm a high school principal here in Nashville before joining the state. And you can see that for this cohort about a third do not go into any type of post-secondary program. No industry certification, no four-year, no two-year, no technical college. But we also have about 40% going on the four-year 24% on two-year. And then you can see, though, for our economically disadvantaged students that are not having an opportunity when we talk about opportunity gaps for any type of post-secondary. Here's the problem. They are making $10,000 annually per year. And that is pretty much in real terms the challenge when we think about wanting, like Beth said, to have post-secondary pathways that actually start in elementary. In order to get to post-secondary in a way that's possible. So in Tennessee, you try to kind of put a flag at the back of the stand. This is our vision that we will be, you know, six years to find my friend where we only have one chart or focus on all students, all moving in a significant direction into four years. I'm going to interrupt Paul and remind folks that if they're not speaking, we'd really appreciate it if you would mute your phone so that we can hear the speakers. Thank you so much. We do appreciate it. Sure. All right, Paul, back to you. Yeah, sure. So you can see that, you know, this is where we're heading is, is the real stakes of providing all students with some significant post-secondary pathways that Beth had also laid out. And so these are some of our challenges in Tennessee, right? How do we really equip teachers with the knowledge and support? Because the goal line has changed. We know it's no longer about high school graduation. And how do we embed then, as Carmen mentioned in the beginning, this powerful notion of equity into the DNA of every district and every school to reach every student? And I believe that's the difference that we need to think differently about our systems and about our strategies and our support tools so we're not replicating what has happened in the past that creates equality, but not equity. And so as you can see in our challenges, one of the things we'll talk about is the Leaders for Equity playbook that tries to meet some different strategies to reach the outcomes of impacting all students with that. So it's been covered before, but we believe in Tennessee, it's a student-centered concept when we talk about equity that addresses systematically student needs. And again, we're talking about systems and moving from the effort to a systems approach. All students have access and opportunities for closing these opportunity gaps, especially with some of our under-served subgroups. As I mentioned, that economic reality of making $10,000 a year is pretty sober. In Tennessee, we had a strategic plan in 2015 that predated our asset plan. And as you can see, it's really important to our model to say that we want districts and schools to exemplify those excellence and equity so that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills. And so that's really impacting everything we do from a vision standpoint when equity is not just an add-on. I think that's the other piece that needs to be thought about carefully for district schools and states are how do we have equity be actually systematically operationalized as opposed to an add-on program as well. And just to quickly show you, we have six kinds of strategic priorities in Tennessee. These are our six, and equity is really threaded all the way across that continuum. Standards, accountability and assessment, early foundations, high school, all students before it and district power. So this idea of... Well, I haven't texted yet, so I'll text now. The priorities that are there. There's the leaders. In the comment section, so that it's possible to... So that's what I'm doing. I think we're still getting some background if folks can mute the important things. Thank you. I'm doing the webinar that I was practicing today. So we also have this idea of how are we supporting equity, recognizing that some main students have off-school factors that are often difficult to find. So we know that what are the in-school factors around public schooling are critical towards leveraging equitable student outcomes. And that's really key. So we see that really all states, districts and schools can focus on equity through goal-setting, right through these clear expectations for leaders and teachers through important policies and through funding priorities. As I think Carmen mentioned at the beginning to think about what does that really look like to provide equitable resources for all students that often disrupt the notion that... And that's where our playbook, as I'll mention in a moment, is trying to capitalize on some of those strategies. So when we're looking at school leaders, we believe school leaders are really the bent the gatekeeper for what happens in schools. And the idea that school leaders have the opportunity to ensure, right, high outcomes, creating inclusive multicultural school environments by disrupting some of these practices and also cultivating unique gifts, talents and interests of all students. And that's a lot on a principle, but we think that if we have to train them differently and put equity at the forefront, that we will make this happen in a way that hasn't been done before. So what is it to share this resource? This was a year-long project at the Wallis Foundation. And we have 10 state teams that came together. We were one of those state teams. And I would say just a couple things to preface it. One, we believe this playbook is applicable, not just in Tennessee, because if you look at these seven commitments, as Beth mentioned, like Pennsylvania, we share those first five in our accountability plan, but we also believe number six and seven, for example, are also competencies and community allies, even though they're not in accountability, are equally important for creating equitable outcomes for all students. And we also think that the playbook is a way to capture in one place, almost the Walmart approach, right, through one source a reference for parents, for community members, for school board members, for district leaders and principals, ideas and strategies across these seven commitments. So our theory of action, as you can see, is that we believe that if they take action and make these commitments to one or more of these areas, then there will be positive, significant shifts related to equity. You can see, again, these first five are in both our strategic plan and our ESSA plan, and are very impactful for how we believe districts and schools can operate. The playbook is structured so that there are actions for each one of those commitments at four levels, the school level, the district level, or school leader level, the district leader level, the school board level, and also the community leader level as well. We also have a definition because we believe if the leaders need to think about equity, we all need to be on the same page. And so the idea is working to eliminate these achievement gaps to ensure success for all students by also identifying and addressing personal and institutional bias and barriers. And there's a section in the playbook around really the equity shifts that have to happen around mindsets that need to be thought of and discussed before taking action. And so for each one of those commitments, there's an actual misconception around this area, an actual equity shift about what happens when you make that shift and then research to back up, and I'll show you in a moment what that looks like for each one of those areas because those mindset shifts, we believe, are important when we're thinking around equity as well. So the playbook, you know, has developed over a year and we're seeing it as ultimately it's a flexible support tool in a way that addresses current challenges and not to put more ornaments on the Christmas tree, so to speak. We're not talking about adding programs. We're talking about how you analyze your data at the district level or a state level or a school level and then really hone in on one or more of these equity commitments and think about the actions that are most applicable to you. Also knowing that you need to have these conversations around the equity shifts that are in laid out in that section, be thinking about using these selectively so that they're not taken on all at once and really think about how are they being informed by school data, district data. So again, it's not an add-on approach which is there. So this is just one example. So decreasing chronic absenteeism, believe it, across the country is certainly now a very impactful area of focus. One of the school leader actions is to establish this kind of school-wide system for the early identification prevention of above-average absenteeism. There's also a community action listed thinking about how do you enlist support by community resources, especially around areas like clothing that might keep students from attending school or supplies that they need. We also then put the research into each area. This is a pretty compelling piece if you look at that. Even for sixth graders, attending school more than 90% of the time increased the high school-on-time graduation point. So this point of there are in-school factors that are controllable around each one of these seven areas. Another one that's touched on this with the ESSA plan in Pennsylvania, we are intent on all of the early post-secondary opportunities that students that have access to it, if you see the research at the bottom, that we know low-income students are actually on a much greater chance of succeeding in post-secondary when they have access and opportunity to take a dual enrollment, a dual credit course and AP course in the high school setting. And so this was another commitment I just wanted to highlight around what are opportunities for districts to pursue agreements. We've even had some really innovative rural districts now inviting their community colleges to actually come and teach on campus at the high school rather than sending the students to the community college and making that happen in a way that's very different than the status quo. But we also wanted to see here school board members as well having their own set of actions to think about funding and putting the stake in the ground about making a community commitment to the idea of these school board or these actions around episodes. We call episodes early post-secondary opportunities. So we hope that it's a resource so far we are using with superintendents to train them on principles. In fact, the National Urban League is requesting the playbook for each one of their chapters around the country. So we see multiple uses and again I want to reiterate the even though this is Tennessee data we are hopeful that this can be used across settings, right? Settings in different states and districts across the country because we believe that these areas are important to focus on and in those corresponding actions as well. I would say just to end, we're also in Tennessee fortunate to be able to focus on three areas of the principal pipeline. One is training new aspiring leaders that I mentioned in the beginning of my talk second around recruiting and retention bonuses for turnaround school leaders and then third, really providing opportunities for current rural principals to have an opportunity to come together and be forming a network of a rural network for professional learning. So even though this is fairly focused on leadership we believe that this is an important part of our ESA and equity plan in Tennessee is to really leverage school leaders to drive equity. As I mentioned, they are also the gatekeepers in their schools. So I'm going to turn it back to Caitlin because I believe at this point I want to have a second. It's interesting to hear from folks on different areas of focus this time. So thank you. Thank you so much, Paul. That was great. We really appreciate the thoughtfulness of the philosophy and points that you shared. So at this point we have a number of questions that have already been posted in the chat box. So let's see. I will go through some of them. Denise has said, how do parents assess the dashboard presentation? Most of them are very confusing. There was some agreement for Arnold as well. So Beth, maybe you can talk to us about some of the strategies that Pennsylvania is taking to make the dashboard information more easier to understand, more intuitive, that sort of thing. Well, we're very cognizant of that issue. And we've had a number of stakeholder activities with parents, focus groups, and that sort of thing to try and, first of all, in the first instance, create what the pages look like and how they flow to make those easier to understand. I think there is going to be work to do, both for the department and individual LEAs in schools, to take steps to help their families and communities understand the story that the report cards are telling. So for example, if a particular principal wanted to write a one-page or two-page memo that calls attention to both the good news revealed by the test scores as well as acknowledges the challenges that might be revealed by data. So I think that we will do what we can to help, maybe by offering templates that schools and districts can use in a shorter form to kind of summarize and call attention to what is in the data and help people look at it. It's going to be a challenge, but as I said earlier, I don't think the answer to the complexity of the presentation is to eliminate the complexity and just have a single summative school or a grade. The goal is to help folks to see the data that they're most interested in, and that data will change depending on what your constituency is and how old your child is and why you're looking at the data. Are you a school board member? Are you a taxpayer? Are you looking to move into the district? Are you looking to advocate in front of your principal or school board for ways to spend money? So there's a lot of learning to do, and I think that virtually everybody in the array of constituencies has a role to play in helping folks understand all of this data. Thanks, Beth. There's a related question. Again, it's about the role of parents, and I think this is posed for Paul, PD for leaders in the Leader Playbook. Does it include parents? Is there a way to link parents into equity strategies? Yeah, that's a great question. We're coming out in a couple different ways. I think that's an ongoing accountability working group that includes principals and superintendents, but also parents on that working group so that when we are like Pennsylvania creating our dashboard and in school level and district level accountability reports, parents at the elementary, middle, and high school are getting say into what that looks like and what is more easily readable and understandable. And I think that's really helped in our redesign of our dashboard and also on our public-facing board cards in every school and every district to really have parent input. So that's gone a long way. We also had a lot of parents on our parent groups and parent focus groups on our asset plan feedback groups with that. On the leadership side, we don't have parents formally involved in, you know, so far in the PD other than they mentioned the training of these principals now. All these nine regional pipeline programs that we've funded through Title IIA have to be embedded in their training of these aspiring principals the notion of parent networks, parent partnerships, family partnerships as part of the training, if that makes sense. So we don't like have an advisory partner around leadership, but through the requirements of accessing the Title IIA funds these nine regional pipeline models have to be thinking around parent engagement and community analytics like we mentioned in the playbook as part of their training for the aspiring principals. The playbook will also be required for these regional pipeline, principal pipeline models as well to be used as a training tool which addresses that kind of community and family engagement piece. Great. Thanks so much. It looks like you're... Go ahead. I had some additional comments about family engagement. Pennsylvania is one of a small number of states that is working in a community of practice facilitated by CCSSO. The ultimate goal for this group is to develop a family engagement framework, K to 12, that could be a resource for schools and districts about all of the different opportunities and ways for schools to engage families. And that sounds like a very big subject and it is. And we certainly don't want to create a document that then it's going to just sit on the shelf and not be useful to everyone. But I think there is good work going on about bias and how schools are not welcoming to families and there's a lot of work that we're doing particularly in our school... the development of our school improvement model that brings families to the table as they go through their needs assessment and develop their school improvement plan responsive to the needs assessment. So that's only one place but that's a very important place to make sure that families and parents are engaged. Our community school model does have state work going on to support and provide an opportunity for collaboration of the various community school models that are starting to spring up around the state. I think that one of the things about family and parent engagement is that under ESSA it's not an add-on, it's not voluntary. We need to change and are working to change the paradigm so that parents and families are always invited to participate and have a seat at the table rather than that being a choice that you get to make. So I think that is infused in our ESSA plan and it's challenging but I think that it is starting to become the norm rather than the exception. Thanks, Beth. At this point we still have a little bit of time. We do want to share a few action items with you but we have a bit more time so if you have any questions and would like to ask them aloud, please feel free. Have I used enough wait time? Looks like it. In any case, please feel free to continue asking questions in the chat box if you'd rather not speak up but we'll go ahead and move on then to the next slide with Carmen who will share some action items with us for state, district schools and teachers. Thank you, Caitlin. Thank you, Paul and Beth as well for your presentation. So just to kind of wrap it all up into some nice action items, how can we use ESSA to reinforce equity? Many of these strategies you heard today from Beth and Paul in terms of what's going on in their respective states. But for SCAs, LEAs and school administrators, counteracting wrestling equality and unequal resource allocation by directing the use of the different title funds and creating programs and pathways for students, educators and leaders developing Grow Your Own initiative when it comes to recruiting teachers and retaining educators to ensure that local talent remains in hard to staff areas. A review of school and district policies for equity. Many times we're not aware that the outcome that we're seeing, whether it be with disproportionality and discipline or with any other number of inequities that we see in outcomes, that a lot of times those come from gaps in understanding and policy. So we're moving some of those ambiguities and policies and reviewing those and making sure that everyone has the same understanding for student success. That equitable accountability goal for all students and for the different subgroups of students create family engagement frameworks. We just heard the work that the CCSSO is doing and that many states are doing that Pennsylvania is doing and Tennessee is doing. But making sure that families and parents are included in the work that's happening around ESSA and equity. And then for educators in your classrooms employing a student-centered approach where students are active speakers of information and not just passive receivers. Create a positive classroom climate where students feel related, they feel like they belong, which leads to feeling competent and autonomy and motivation and engagement and all of a sudden outcomes, positive outcomes that we all want to see. Providing opportunities for all students to learn by giving students intellectually challenging assignments. Using instructional materials that consider multiple cultural and linguistic perspectives. Monitoring the performance of students and different subgroups of students and doing something and acting when inequities start to cruise out. And then communicate with families regularly, not just when there's an issue but when there are positive things to report and just trying to everyday work towards developing those relationships, positive relationships with families. Thank you very much, Carmen. Carmen is now going to tell you about a really cool event that's coming up and I'm going to press the link to the registration in the chat box. So Carmen, you want to tell us a little bit about this equity break? Yes, yes I do. So on July 18th, the Center for Education and Equity at MAC along with the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights will be hosting our very first Brexis Institute entitled Start Your Day Right, Build District Capacity to Stop Racial Harassment and Bullying. It will be held at Central University on July 18th from 8.30 to 1. We will have a keynote address by Dr. Richard Milner who is a professor at University of Pittsburgh. He's also the author of Start Where You Are but Don't Stay There and Racing to Class and we'll have some breakout sessions where different district superintendents will be will be discussing some of the challenges and successes that they've had around this particular issue. The registration link is there and also Katelyn just posted it in the chat box and space is limited so we're asking everyone to register by July 2nd and for more information go to the link and read more about it and also register. We'd love to see you. Thanks, Karen. It looks like a really interesting event. I also want to let you know that included in the PowerPoint which you can download in the download file to the top left of your screen. There's also contact information for the CEE and for the ARC. So we want to thank you very much for joining us today and thank you to our presenters. We really have learned so much and covered so much ground and we could take a few more hours to ask some of this stuff out but please know that if you want to get in touch with us we're available. Both of our organizations are here to provide technical assistance to states and districts so please feel free to reach out and also thank you very much both to Beth and Paul for sharing the details of your equity work in your state. It's very informative, interesting work and it will be exciting to see where it goes over the years. I also wanted to let you know that today's recording will be posted to the ARC YouTube site and you'll be able to find it on the ARC website. We'll also provide that link to the Center for Education Equity as well and we'll be sending you a brief evaluation survey via email shortly. Again, thank you so much for joining us today. Have a good afternoon.