Kentucky still struggling to comply with federal ESSA

Education Week reports that Kentucky is one of 17 states that still have not submitted acceptable plans to implement the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and will now get more time to do so.

As EdWeek puts it:

“State departments and the boards that oversee them have been grappling with how best to comply with the federal law.”

Of course, there is an interesting constitutional question about why Kentucky has to march to any federal drumbeat where education is concerned, but so far, the state has been willing to overlook its rights in a quest to grab the attached federal funding involved, and I don’t see that trend to go for the money changing.

Still, complying with the ESSA creates sometimes awkward problems because federal laws get out of date with reality quickly but don’t get changed quickly to meet those new situations.

For example, Kentucky is in the process of revising its state assessments but the US Department of Education is still asking our educators to explain how the old ones meet federal requirements. Talk about a waste of time.

In January, the US Department of Education sent a letter requiring us to further explain how some KPREP tests met new ESSA requirements.

But, as you can read here, the things we are required to comment about are being phased out. We are wasting staff time answering questions about problems that will soon just be history.

That said, I must note that US Ed did raise some questions about the suitability of apparently soon to change KPREP tests. We have voiced similar concerns in the past. So, not everything from Washington is totally off base, either.