 Good morning or afternoon, depending on where you are, I'd like to welcome you to this one hour webinar hosted by the Learning Policy Institute and the National Urban League. Again, my name is Martens Rock. I'm a policy and outreach advisor at the Learning Policy Institute, and I'll be moderating today's webinar. I want to let the audience know that this webinar is open to the public and is being recorded. The recording will be emailed to you in a few days and available at the link just shared in the chat. We'd also like to announce that we've tentatively scheduled our next webinar in this series, Around Teacher Shortages, for October 17th at 3pm Eastern Time. Please sign up for our mailing list to receive a notification or check our website's upcoming events page in a few weeks. As for today, we'd like to talk more about equity opportunities within ESSA and how we're engaging our local partners in ensuring equity is real for our students. Today, we'll begin with a presentation by Suzy Feliz, Vice President and Vice President for Policy and Legislative Affairs at the National Urban League Washington Bureau, who will provide some framing around ESSA requirements and opportunities, as well as the role of the National Urban League and civil rights groups are playing. We'll then hear from Jessica Kardeshan, Director of Federal Policy and the Director of the Washington D.C. Office, and Steven Castillo, Policy Advisor, both at the Learning Policy Institute, who will present a recent report on how districts and schools can take advantage of high leverage equity measures in the state accountability systems to close gaps in educational opportunities and outcomes. While Cater Williams, Deputy Director for the Partners for Each and Every Child, will speak to how they've meaningfully engaged stakeholders in gap closing and improvement. And, to Nicholas, President and CEO of the Knoxville Area Urban League, will discuss the development of an equity playbook geared to ensuring equitable outcomes for all our students. And finally, we'll have some time to respond to questions we've received from our audience. We encourage you to submit your questions throughout the presentation in the chat box at the lower right hand of your screen. Please make sure all participants are selected from the drop-down menu to ensure we can see your questions. And without further ado, we'll go ahead and hear from Suzy Feliz, Vice President of Policy and Legislative Affairs at the National Urban League. Suzy, the floor is all yours. Thanks, Martin. Hi, everyone. I am going to take the next few moments to provide a brief refresher on the requirements in ESSA and the levers that provide opportunities for states to advance equity during implementation. And then I'll close by sharing some of what the National Urban League has been doing to advance equity and excellence in education. So, since 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been the federal civil rights law in education. The law was designed to ensure a federal guarantee to a quality education regardless of race, income, religion, or zip code. And during the years leading up to the passage of ESSA, the National Urban League and several partners on this call were part of a diverse coalition of roughly 46 civil rights and education equity organizations that fought hard to ensure educational and civil rights protections for vulnerable children were prioritized in the reauthorized ESEA. While ESSA does maintain the civil rights legacy of this federal law by providing tools to advance education equity for historically underserved students, we're concerned that the law did roll back federal oversight authority and instead gave some of that authority back to states, which means states are now responsible for providing and protecting education opportunities for historically disadvantaged children. And since history has shown that states have not been good stewards of civil rights, we must remain vigilant and holding them along with school districts accountable for upholding the spirit and letter of the law. So, since the bill was signed into law in December of 2015, the National Urban League and several of our partners have worked hard to engage states as critical friends and partners at every level of implementation. So, what does the law require? The law requires, first of all, that states create a robust and meaningful accountability system to hold schools accountable for the progress of all students. As part of their accountability plan, states will set long term goals, measure progress towards those goals, identify schools not meeting the goals, and create plans to improve schools that are not serving all students. These goals have to be set for all students, as well as students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, English learners and low income students. And after setting the goals, each state must rate their schools based on how they perform on the goals they set and the other measures in the school rating system for all students and for each group of students. And then finally, the state requires the identification of schools for support and improvement. And a new requirement, which is the in-depth reporting of student performance on assessments, graduation rates, and school climate to the public and parents by all students and individual groups of students. And that data must be understandable, easily accessible, and timely and provided in a variety of languages and formats. So what are some of the opportunities to advance equity through ESSA? We've identified a few. I'm just going to go through a few with you today. Resource equity is one opportunity. So ESSA creates an opportunity for states and districts to flood resources, financial and otherwise, into the spaces that need them the most. The law requires that states identify three categories of support for support and improvement, including comprehensive support and improvement schools, which are those in the lowest 5% of title one schools in the state and all high schools with graduation rates below 67%. Targeted support and improvement schools, those schools that are consistently underperforming as defined by the state. And then additional targeted support and improvement schools where one or more groups of students is performing so low that they would be identified as a comprehensive support and improvement school if they were their own schools. So these schools identified for improvement must write a school improvement plan in collaboration with local and community stakeholders, which identifies and addresses resource inequities at the local level. And these resource inequities can include disparities in district level funding and budgeting, teacher quality, safe and healthy school facilities, access to advanced courses and access to technology and the internet. And as I mentioned under our requirements section for the first time, states are required now to report to the Department of Education and publish on these state and district report cards. They're per people expenditures and access to advanced courses. The law is also innovative in that it requires a new level of stakeholder engagement in the development of state plans. So it requires in particular meaningful consultation with variety of stakeholders, including parents, families and communities in the development of state plans, title one plans, school improvement plans, report cards and other major decisions during implementation. So this provides opportunities for advocates to do several things. We can request a school wide or district wide meeting to discuss how report cards are being developed. We can request meetings to discuss how district school improvement plan and processes are going to take place and to inform those processes. We can also ask our school district and schools how federal, state and local funds are being distributed. And if they're inequitable, we can advocate for a way to student funding system, just as an example. So stakeholder engagement will enable us to really be able to influence the strategy being used to ensure that all children have a high quality education. And then there's the high quality fifth indicator, which is the indicator for school quality and success. So this provides an opportunity for states to include within their accountability system measure that measures academic in addition to academic achievement, graduation rates and English language proficiency, a measure that can drive equity by measuring chronic absenteeism, suspension rates, college and career readiness and school climate, just to name a few of the types of school quality and success indicators that we believe can provide an opportunity to advance equity. So what is the National Urban League up to these days? We've been engaged in various efforts to advance equity and education. Our equity and excellence project is one that we launched in 2010 and is where we explicitly support local, state and national advocacy engagement and education reform efforts throughout the entire Urban League Affiliate Movement and in collaboration with local, state and national partners. So the EEP project began with eight Urban League affiliates in two states, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. And now the portfolio includes 27 Urban League affiliates funded across 21 states, including our very own Knoxville Urban League and we're glad Phyllis Nichols is on today's webinar with us. These reform efforts are focused around seven key areas that we have listed here that are highly and tightly related to the historic mission of the National Urban League. And we really believe improvements in any one of these seven areas would help some students across the entire education spectrum. However, we can we can help many more students by intentionally and meaningfully combining reform approaches to systematically address the complex problems that students, parents and communities continue to face. We also launched in January of this year, the No Ceilings on Success Campaign in partnership with TV One, which is the nation's largest black owned multimedia company. And with the No Ceilings on Success Campaign, we're working the whole states accountable to their plans for achieving educational equity under ESSA. The No Ceilings on Success title is derived from the concept of breaking glass ceilings that prevent individuals from reaching their highest potential. And this work really builds on the work of the Urban League's Excellence in Equity Project by equipping parents, teachers, students and communities with the knowledge to remove the barriers that prevent every student from achieving academic excellence. And then finally our team is in the process of reviewing state plans with an equity lens according to those seven focus areas and a few others to identify best practices nationally and opportunities that were taken and perhaps those that were missed in this first set of state plans. And we're really hoping that our analysis will help us not just provide some insight into how states are using the levers, the equity levers and the law to advance opportunities for disadvantaged students, but to also help us set the agenda for further equity advancements through implementation and perhaps even the next round of reauthorization. So I'll stop there and hand it back over to Martin. Thank you. Well now, thank you for providing that context. It was really helpful, particularly as we're heading into hearing from Steven and Jessica, who will talk a little bit more about the paper and tools that they have created to assist local stakeholders. Steven and Jessica, I'll hand it over to you now. Great. Thank you. And thank you, Susie. And as Susie mentioned under ESSA, there's likely to be a lot of information available for educators, parents, community members and advocates at the local level to inform school improvement plans. So now the hard work of ESSA implementation begins and it's really important that those at the local level have the information they need to make the best decisions. So Steven and I are going to share some ideas on how you can use the information that is available to you at the local level to ensure that you're selecting the right school improvement efforts that are evidence-based and addressing underlying issues that might lead to low performance on a particular indicator. So all states to varying degrees are using multiple measures in their accountability and improvement systems and depending on the extent to which they incorporate them, they can provide a more comprehensive and nuanced set of data that is meaningfully connected to student success and can, when it's provided alongside well-chosen resources, as Susie mentioned, help drive continuous improvement across all schools. To this end, LPI looked at five indicators that reflect a student's opportunity to learn and that we think can provide information that's critical to school improvement efforts. These include student suspension rates, different measures of school climate, chronic absenteeism rates, extended year graduation rates, and indicators of college and career readiness. States are using indicators or measures of these indicators for different purposes in their system. Some are using them for accountability purposes, which we mean they're part of, they're one of the factors that determine whether a school is identified for comprehensive or targeted support. Others are using the information to inform school improvement efforts, so have nothing to do with whether the school is identified or not. And others are providing additional resources or technical assistance related to these measures. So we're seeing a variation across states in terms of how they're using them. We'll go through each of these five indicators. So we'll start with student suspension rates and we know that students who are suspended from school become further disengaged and are less likely to graduate. We also know that research shows that students of color and students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended compared to their peers and most often for nonviolent behaviors and more subjective offenses. We also know that exclusionary disciplinary practices are ineffective according to the research, therefore reducing their use is an important part of school improvement efforts. All states under ESSA are required to report on rates of in-school and out-of-school suspension, so this information will be available at the local and school level. In addition, nine states are including this measure in their accountability system to identify schools. At the local level, there are a number of questions that you can ask your school or district to ensure that this information is being used effectively to drive continuous school improvement. As previously mentioned, these slides will be available at the end of the webinar, so we won't go through every bullet on them and they're also included in our LPI report, which we will provide links to. But for example, just highlight one of them is that asking whether your state or district is tracking multiple suspensions, so are certain students getting one or more suspensions? What are the average length of those suspensions and for what reason are those students suspended? And do those answers vary depending on student subgroup? That will give you at the local level a more accurate picture of how students are experiencing suspensions and the type of intervention or remedy that you need. So for example, a school that has a small number of classrooms that have a high number of student suspensions, the intervention will be very different than a school where it's a school-wide issue versus a classroom level issue. It's also important to ask whether your school or district in response to poor performance on this indicator is going to implement an evidence-based strategy or a set of strategies like those included here, such as training on implicit bias for educators and the removal of zero talent policies to address these issues. One thing to also note as we look at these indicators, not only can they reveal schools that are struggling in terms of performing well on them, but it can also identify schools that have been able to close gaps or improve performance and have those schools serve as models. We also will provide a number of evidence-based resources that we think are of high value at the local level that can help inform the interventions and strategies. And so here's a number of them that we think might be of interest. And I will turn it over now to Steven to talk about school climate. And we also know that creating a positive school climate is critical to student and educator well-being and success. States are approaching assessing school climate in different ways. For example, eight states use student surveys to measure school climate in their accountability and improvement systems. Six of these states are also using data from these surveys to inform their school improvement efforts. Some additional states are providing technical assistance that includes evidence-based strategies for improving school climate. In addition, all states are required to report on rates of in-school and out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, school-related arrests, referrals to law enforcement, and incidences of school violence, including bullying and harassment. This data will be available at the local level to help assess school climate. There are a number of questions that should be asked about state and district efforts to measure and improve school climate. For example, how does the district or school plan to use professional development funding under Title II, school improvement funding under Title I, and student support and academic enrichment funding under Title IV of ESSA to align and support these efforts? At the state level, one area of support is how districts and schools can effectively analyze and respond to school climate data. At the local level, you can drive school improvement by partnering with community-based organizations and sharing best practices. While surveys can reveal schools that are struggling, they can also identify schools where things are working well to model after. As schools and communities work to identify the appropriate intervention or strategy, these are resources which could be considered. Next, we looked at chronic absenteeism, because we know an average 15% of students are chronically absent, and these students are less likely to succeed academically and graduate from high school. All states are required to report rates of chronic absenteeism, and 37 states are using this measure for accountability or improvement purposes. To ensure that this information is accurate and effectively used at the local level, it is important to ask whether your state has a uniform definition that allows for easier data comparison and analysis, including having a consistent definition of partial day absence and how it counts towards overall attendance. Another question to ask is how your state or district uses chronic absenteeism data to find and address patterns of student absences. At the local level, you can use chronic absenteeism information to drive school improvement by partnering with community-based organizations to support students and using professional development to provide teachers with strategies that support attendance. As schools and communities work to identify the appropriate intervention or strategies, these are resources on chronic absenteeism that could be considered. Another important piece of information is the extended year graduation rate, which when recognized can provide an incentive for schools to keep youth with challenges that prevent them from graduating in four years. 35 states at the District of Columbia are using this measure in their accountability and improvement systems. With extended year graduation rates, the work to keep students on track must begin well before students enter high school. It is important to ask how your state or district is supporting and measuring students making the transition from eighth to ninth grade so that these students aren't lost within the system. Also, make sure your state is compliant with ESSA requirements in the ways listed here to ensure the accuracy of that information. There are also a number of strategies to support students on their road to graduation, including creating advisory systems and small learning communities to increase a student's sense of belonging and the support provided to that student. As schools and communities work to identify the appropriate intervention or strategy, here are resources that can be referenced to implement in the extended year graduation rate, and I'll pass it back to Jessica. Great. Thank you, Steven. And finally, states are including a number of measures to increase student access to educational opportunities that prepare them for college and career. And if well done, these opportunities, these efforts can increase student opportunities. However, if not, they can perpetuate student tracking and narrow student options. 39 states in the District of Columbia are using additional college and career ready measures in their accountability and improvement systems. This is in addition to graduation rates and student achievement. To prevent against tracking, these are questions that can be asked at the state or local level. We know that many schools have to cancel advanced courses because they don't have teachers licensed to teach those subjects. So it's important to ask what your state or local efforts are in order to attract and retain a well prepared and highly skilled educator workforce. Also, as the school and districts report student success and advanced coursework, it shouldn't just report enrolled student success, but also reflect which students aren't enrolled in those courses to see who's being left out of those opportunities. To answer these questions, the answer to these questions should reflect a commitment by the district and the state to invest in expanding course opportunities and state and local investments in teachers. And as Martens mentioned earlier, we'll be doing a follow up webinar that will really dig deep into addressing teacher shortages that will provide some more information on these types of strategies. And as schools and communities work to identify the appropriate intervention and strategies, we've identified some evidence based resources that we hope will be useful to those efforts. All of this information, including state specific information, so you can see where your state is on each of these indicators can be found on LPI's website that will be made available at the end of this webinar. And with that, we will turn it back to Martens. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Steven and Jessica for that presentation. Very helpful. Just another quick reminder to our audience to ask questions or engage in discussion. Please use the chat box in the right of your screen and select all partners from the drop down again to submit some questions if you have them. Now I'd like to introduce our next presenter, Cato Williams, Deputy Director of Partners for Each and Every Child. Cato, the floor is yours. Thanks so much, Martens. Good afternoon, everyone. We have been focused so far on this webinar on equity and ESSA, obviously. Hopefully you've been listening to that. Susie talked a bit about some of the key equity levers in the law. Jessica and Steven went a bit deeper to address the school improvement planning process and related evidence based practices that can inform local planning efforts. And I am going to attempt to kind of bring some of those ideas together but speak from a slightly different but definitely related angle that Susie actually touched on. And that's the idea of using meaningful stakeholder engagement in policy and practice as a lever to advance equity and excellence in our education system. So what does ESSA say about engagement and why does it actually matter? ESSA actually requires that each state district and school consult with an array of stakeholders on issues ranging from how to best disperse federal funds to how to support schools that serve struggling or high needs students. The specific consultation requirements actually vary across the program, but the focus on engagement across ESSA is absolutely consistent. And this gives states and districts a chance to really commit to engagement with all stakeholders in an ongoing and meaningful way. Engaging stakeholders is not just required under the law, but it really is a strong best practice to effectively improve schools. And we'll talk about best practices in a few. But the idea here is that making decisions on ED policy in an inclusive and transparent way really leads to better decisions and encourages stakeholders to contribute and become true partners in achieving the goals of their state and local communities. And it's really not brain science. Communities will support improvement strategies that they actually help to develop. So partnerships with outside stakeholders, which would include parents and philanthropy and educators and community-based organizations and others really will only serve to build local capacity to implement innovative and ambitious strategies from meeting the needs of all students. So what are some basic here in the law in terms of what it says specifically about engagement? Well, it's important to remember that the basic agreement related to engagement at the heart of ESSA is that more flexibility has been given in exchange for more explicit requirements for stakeholder engagement. So when we think about the who and we refer to stakeholder engagement kind of generally, but the law really does articulate specific requirements as to who the stakeholders must be at a minimum. For example, parents, school administrators, sometimes families, possibly business leaders in certain contexts. When we think about the what, ESSA specifically calls out the topics where engagement needs to happen, some of which you've heard already to this point. Those include consultation obviously on the development of the state ESSA plan and any subsequent amendments, but also school improvement planning and also family engagement strategies and many other areas. The law also identifies different levels of engagement. So we see consultation reference. We see meaningful consultation reference. We see partnership reference. So when we think about the when in the context of school improvement to actually receive money and support, LEAs must actually partner with parents and others to develop and implement comprehensive support and improvement plans. So we want to really think about this as a short and long term game. There are a number of short term requirements under the law that are coming up, some of which you've heard already that we should all be attentive to with regard to stakeholder engagement. For example, identifying schools for improvement and engaging in school improvement planning report cards. Susie talked a lot about data and data accessibility and reporting. There's going to be a wealth of information that was not previously available to the public disaggregated data disaggregated by subgroup in a number of areas. It's going to include this idea of per pupil funding and what funding looks like at the school level. Major major advocacy tool and then of course any necessary amendments to the state plan that could actually become an upcoming issue after the election, but we won't actually go there today. But there are also long term benefits and a real long term game in terms of how we think about this to really getting stakeholder engagement right. Our main idea as an organization here is that if you build a system that works well for the communities that have historically had the toughest time participating and face the highest barriers to their participation, then you have built a system that really works best for everyone. So I said I would go back to some of these best practices. Our organization partners for each and every child has developed a set of promising practices that we believe demonstrate meaningful engagement among broad and diverse groups of stakeholders. And that are likely to really result in ed policies that support and advance at equity and excellence. So we can kind of think of them as a framework for best practices for meaningfully engaging a range of stakeholders at the state and local level. I like to think of this as sort of the platinum standard for engagement. This is just a quick summary that I'll go through, but on the next slide, you'll see a link to our website where we've actually flushed out all five of the promising practices areas. So the first one, reaching the unreached, making sure that those folks who are most underrepresented and underserved are actually at the table and have a voice at the table. Transparency is the second one, the idea of showing your work on engagement. Sticking with it, again, this is a long game. We really need to approach this with a continuous improvement frame, making sure that the resources are allocated to really do engagement right and with fidelity. A fourth one, maximizing your resources. How often do we think that we are the only ones who can do engage in a particular effort? Here we really want to think and be thoughtful and strategic about how to leverage community resources, partners who are the trusted voices in the field who can also support engagement efforts. And then the idea of doubling down and looking at parallel processes, looking at how other government associations and organizations are engaging, making sure that you're communicating and aligning some of those efforts. This is all very, very important. So finally, resources. I mentioned earlier, we've actually developed a number of resources related to meaningful engagement for the field in an effort to help build capacity in this area. The resources for the most part tend to focus from a substantive place on that school improvement angle and space. And so the first two that I have here on this slide, meaningful local engagement under ESSA, was a project with CCSSO and a number of states and national partners. Really trying to support district and school leaders and administrators and understanding the who, what, when, why, how of engagement, especially when we think about needs assessment processes, root cause analyses, and so on and so forth. The third resource that I have listed here, Engage for Education Equity, is something that we are incredibly proud of. It was, was and is and continues to be an endeavor with the Dignity in Schools campaign and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. And this is a toolkit targeting that parent family advocate organizer audience in particular to support local engagement around local planning efforts that are happening. And so really how to for parents, families, community members with really practical resources to support and empower those groups. The Promising Practices Framework is something that I just referenced and that is just again the link to the more flushed out version of that framework that I shared with you earlier. Partners for each and every child.org backflash engagement is where you can find a wealth of additional resources related to engagement related to equity in order to advance equity and excellence in these areas, both produced by ourselves as an organization but also very importantly with our partners in the field. And I think that's it for me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Katie. That was great. I'm sharing a lot of those helpful resources and the Promising Practices. So now we'll transition into our last presenter of today, Phyllis Nichols, who is the president and CEO of the Knoxville area, Urban League Phyllis. Good afternoon and thank you for having us. I want to thank Martins and all those who are engaged in this very powerful work. The Urban League is first and foremost the civil rights organization and ESSA is the civil rights law and so our involvement with ESSA began with writing the Tennessee law, which Tennessee likes to do things a little different. We call it Tennessee's succeeds. So equity is the threat of ESSA and we believe that if implemented with fidelity will will certainly help to eliminate some of the historic achievement gaps that we have had. So one of the things that we have worked to define equity in Tennessee is we had folks who came with evolving perspectives and I am sure that the stakeholders and those who are involved in our webinar today have seen many graphics about equality and equity. And we need to one of the things we learned in Tennessee is that there was not continuity on what we were talking about when we came together to define equity. And so we began with that definition on equality and equity and exactly where we were on that. So we went further than that because one of the things that we have found is that there's also reality with that and that as we have found that as more resources have have come within our district, those who have or getting more. And the reality is that our disadvantaged students, especially our students of color, where the whole was even getting less. So we began looking at stuff through liberation, meaning that and if you look at the graphic, not increasing boxes. But what we are working on is removing barriers, not creating an equity system, but a liberation system where there's empowerment and an opening of opportunity for all of our students. Tennessee has worked to remove some of those barriers through laws and I think that there's been many references to in school and out of school suspension and all those. And so we have in order to remove barriers. Some of those are public policy things that have been in place, but also law. So I just wanted to very quickly show how public policy has been some of the barriers that we've had to remove. Our vision in creating the Tennessee leaders for equity papers was to establish some guiding principles. And for that, we had to create a mind shift change that that would make sure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to embark on a successful path. And my paper's got shifted here, sorry. And what we, what we meant by that in the, in the playbook, when we, I wanted to make sure that everybody understands all those who came together to create the equity playbook. This was designed to be shared with all of the districts in the state of Tennessee. We have 147 school districts. We had 38 educator prep program who came and are going to be using the equity playbook. Now, what this is, is a framework to assist leaders in how to monitor equity commitments in their community. And what we're, what I want to, to share with you today, and we've got the, you can download with it is that this is a tool kit that not only is for highly trained school leaders, but it's for our district leaders. It's for school boards, and it's for community allies. We all understand and support that the, that our principles, the cultural environment for the schools. But our cultural environment is also supported by the community. And we want, we want to our community and our culture to be reflected in the schools. And so what we have decided in the state of Tennessee, along with, along with our department of it is that equity, that we're going to have to have some equity shifts in culture, and that that requires some mind shift. And so the playbook actually takes people through some mind shift. And we talked about the decreasing chronic absenteeism. The playbook actually goes through one misconception and I'll give one, and we are hoping that everybody will download this, but one misconception was that at risk families value school less and therefore they don't attend school regularly. Well, actually, we know that research tells us that when low income elementary students don't attend, there's, there's lots of other reasons around it. So attended school more than 90% of the time, I think someone else has already mentioned how that affects school. But there are other reasons and we know that that it could be, we have a lot of health issues, and when community organizations are engaged with the school, then we can help to support the school. So one of the things that the Urban League has brought in other community organizations and working with the school, including business communities is that we are able to support our school. And we know that in the, in Tennessee, our definition of equity is that in the field of education, it means that every student has access to effective teachers, but they also have access to resources, experiences, and some rigor that they need to be effective. And community can help bring that. And that's the role of community organizations, organizations like the Urban League and other civil rights organizations that are available. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Martin. Great. Thank you for all that helpful on the ground context. Now, we'd like to begin our discussion and address some of the questions that we've received from the audience. So, Phyllis, actually, I want to address the first question to you. Can we talk a little bit more? I know you mentioned school boards, but we got a question that came in specifically asking how the school boards were engaged in your playbook and just the role that they play that you've found. So, this is how we engaged our school board. We had ESSA boot camp and we brought together a variety of stakeholders. We had, we had both teachers, parents, school board, other elected officials for an all day boot camp. And we did ESSA learning because it was important that we not do edu speak to folks who may not understand accountability and some of the terms of accountability. So, we had folks from all of our stakeholders group for boot camp. What we found is that our school board was very much engaged because they didn't have the opportunity or had not availed themselves about learning about ESSA law, especially when it came to how schools would be graded, how schools would be, whether it would be A to F and also the accountability measures of schools. We found that some of our teachers knew a lot more than our schools. Again, when the funding came and how funding would be going to school, a lot of our school boards lack that information. And so they appreciated attending our boot camps and we have those every summer so that it is available for school board members, teachers and other district leaders. Fantastic. Great. No, that was really helpful. So, Kata, I was wondering along the lines of, you know, stakeholder engagement. I'm wondering, you got a question from a parent advocacy group wondering the level of families, parents and community groups in the effort and equity efforts that you found in the work that you've been doing currently. Great. Thank you for that question. So there's certainly a very important role for families to play at both the state and local levels, in particular in the context of some of the areas I mentioned earlier, like identifying schools for improvement and engaging in the actual school planning process at the local levels, like looking at report cards and any necessary amendments to the state plan. In terms of getting a little bit more specific, though, we think about school improvement. Parents and families can do things like share your stories with other families and find common ground, inform the goals that are being developed at the local level, thinking about what success looks like for your child, trying to help set priority for student supports and programs, especially using some of those excellent evidence-based best practices that Jessica and Stephen shared earlier, giving feedback to your school, volunteering. There are a wealth of things that can be done on that front. When we think about report cards and data reporting and the opportunities there, when you look at these new report cards, try to think about, as a parent or family member, what the story is that the data is trying to tell us about the students in the schools, if there's information on the report card that shows that your school is doing well in some areas, not so well in others. If the information on the report card actually matches what you've seen in the school personally and whether or not you feel like your school needs to make improvements, whether or not your school has actually been identified for support and improvement. So those are just a few of the different ways that parents and families can get involved. This is giving me an opportunity to plug or re-plug and gauge for education equity. In addition to the 50-plus page toolkit that is downloadable as one whole document and individual sections, we also worked very hard with our partners to develop English and Spanish versions of parent and student supplements that detail some of the information that I just shared. In addition, in the next week or so, we're going to be releasing a worksheet to support organizers, parents, and families as they look through their school's report card. It's designed to be used in groups, ideally with a facilitator along with the toolkit information on school report cards and needs assessments. And you can find all of that in the links that I provided. Great. Thank you so much. And we definitely appreciate the documents being accessible by language. And we found that that has been an issue that we've seen before. So thank you for that. And the resources that you shared. Jessica and Steven, we had a question around what states tend to be meeting on some of the issues as you've dived into the equity measures. So what states tend to be faring a little bit better in those efforts in, you know, taking a look at all of those equity measures that you referenced before in your presentation? Yeah, in the report, we looked at three states for each indicator. And so only four states are using all five equity measures for either accountability or improvement. So there's a lot of work to be done on these issues. But some states that stand out for extended year graduation rates, New Mexico is using four, five and six year graduation rates, putting a primacy on the four year rate and providing support to their schools to be able to use that measure. Ohio is using some of its title for funds to implement school climate surveys in a way that's unique from other states. And also on chronic absenteeism, Connecticut has been doing a lot of work before as on measuring this indicator and setting up data systems to create a tiered model so that if a student misses 10% of the school year, they'll get some intervention. But if they're missing 10 to 20% of the school year, they'll get an even higher support from their school and community. So I would definitely look to the report, depending on what indicator you want to measure. Right. And one thing also to note is that there's a lot of state efforts that are happening that were not included in their ESSA plans, but also states did make commitments in their ESSA plan. It's really important at the local level that community members hold their state accountable for the promises that they made in their ESSA plan in terms of the supports that they indicated that they would provide to districts and schools. Great. Thank you both. Really appreciate that. And Susie, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how the National Urban League and some of the partners that you're working with are supporting your local affiliates and other partners on the ground. And if there are any other partnership stories that you can tell outside of course you are working with Phyllis down in Tennessee. Sure. So I mentioned in my opening that we have a project or a program that we call the National Equity and Excellence Project where we provide support to 27 Urban League affiliates across 21 states. And we've provided this support in a variety of ways. For instance, a number of our affiliates have led or organized convenings in their communities to bring diverse stakeholders to the table during the first few months of the laws implementation to kind of, you know, explain to parents, families, and community members what the law requires and what that means for the community's engagement. And we would provide a lot of the policy analysis to help affiliates interpret the provisions within the law that they can kind of digest and explain in layman's terms to their constituents. And then we would also help sort of ghostwrite for a lot of our affiliates who provided testimony to their state departments of education regarding their ESSA plans or, you know, during the last year and a half or so in the years prior where state legislatures would propose bills in education that would ultimately impact some of the important equity provisions. We would ghostwrite testimony for affiliates or talking points for them to use in their conversations with the media or with state and local influencers. And through our national civil rights and education reform and advocacy partners, we've helped strengthen or stand up some of these local coalitions that are very diverse across multiple sectors in K through 12, higher ed, and the workforce. And just to sort of highlight a couple of, I would say, successes, local stories. Our New York Urban League affiliates were able to leverage the partnership that they have with the Education Trust in New York in coalition with other local affiliates, like our NAACP chapter, New York, and our local Unitos U.S. affiliates and chapters of other national partners to draft and advance the equity-focused priorities in their state as a plan. And then our various affiliate leaders in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Ohio have also been working hand in glove with their state and district superintendents to look at Title II investments from an equity lens in a way that ensures that low-income students and students of color are taught by teachers and led by school and district leaders who have access to high-quality professional development to turn around success. And then, of course, we have Phyllis Nichols, our NAACP Phil Urban League president and CEO, who's one of our key leaders in this work towards equity and excellence. And we're real happy she joined us today. Thanks again. No, thank you. I appreciate that. And we're starting to run out of time. So I'd like to thank our panelists. We'd like to thank Suzy and Steven, Jessica, Kata, and Phyllis for your time and for all these great resources. I really appreciate all of that and just this helpful discussion and answering some of the questions from the audience. And we'd like to thank you, the audience, for submitting your questions and taking the time to listen to the discussion here today. Another quick reminder that we'll be holding a webinar on teacher shortages on October 17. And we invite you to sign up for our mailing list to receive a notification for more information. And as we've mentioned a couple of times during the webinar, we'll also be providing a lot of these resources online. And we'll be emailing that to everyone who's been registered, but also we'll include those slides and all the resources on this webinar's events page. And we'll share that link as well. And finally, we'd like to let you know that a survey will appear in your web browser when this webinar ends. It'll just take a few minutes to complete. So if you have the time, we'd love you to get your feedback. So again, we'd like to thank our panelists and the audience for tuning in today. And we'll check in with you all next month for our next webinar around teacher shortages. Thanks again, everyone.