In The News: HCM's Elizabeth Ross Quoted in Education Week

Hitting ESSA’s Elusive Targets on School Accountability

By Andrew Ujifusa

Education Week

Of Note: When Elizabeth Ross, the director of K-12 state policy at the consulting firm HCM Strategists, was working on a report published in November on school improvement work under ESSA and checked what state education department websites said about their school improvement practices, some of the sites hadn’t been updated since before ESSA passed.

HCM’s report, one of the more recent surveys covering ESSA implementation, found that at the time, just 17 states had enough public information about the topic for the group’s report to consider.

“With some states, we got the sense that they were still hiding the data,” Ross said.

Among positive trends, Ross and her team identified Louisiana’s efforts to create a statewide school improvement strategy focused on curriculum and teachers; Colorado’s “streamlined” application to help districts get services and funding for improvement work; and Tennessee’s soup-to-nuts approach in helping districts conduct a needs assessment, create priorities, and set goals.

“We’re trusting that things are going well. But we know that a lot of things are happening behind the scenes,” Ross said.