Everything You Need to Know About the Every Student Succeeds Act

(2017; Updated June 2023) | Useful to: Policy makers and educators becoming acquainted with federal policy, and parents seeking to learn the areas in which their children’s education may benefit from ESSA.

On December 10, 2015, President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a legislation that aimed to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and replace the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).  In broad strokes, ESSA provides support to high schools where one-third or more of students do not graduate, as well as schools with groups of traditionally undeserved students who consistently demonstrate low performance.  Unlike with NCLB, states, districts, and schools will now decide what support and interventions are implemented, providing them with a great degree of flexibility and responsibility.

The Alliance for Excellent Education published Everything You Need to Know About the Every Student Succeeds Act, which summarizes the main points of ESSA and enumerates what ESSA aims to do and how it aims to do it.  To accomplish this, the Alliance has created a series of small, contained materials—both in print and in video form—that provides concise but comprehensive analyses of several key areas within ESSA.  With each item in the series, they have also provided a short fact sheet.

You can access the article, with its videos and fact sheets, at: https://all4ed.org/policy/essa/