Study of Post-Pandemic Federal Accountability and Key Drivers of Identification of Low-Performing Schools

Federal law has long required states to identify and support their low-performing schools, with the goal of ensuring that all students have access to a high-quality education. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) sought to address several perceived shortcomings of its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), including a reliance on a limited range of measures and prescriptive methods for evaluating school performance. Specifically, ESSA expanded accountability measures beyond test scores in reading and math and granted states substantial flexibility in determining how to define and measure school performance. Building off another IES study that examines how many and what types of schools were identified for Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) immediately following the passage of ESSA and after the restart to accountability following the pandemic in 2022-23, this study will more closely examine each state's accountability system to assess whether specific measures of performance are driving which schools get identified for CSI status. The result will provide a national picture of the ways in which states' design decisions may or may not have led to the kind of accountability systems that policymakers expected, and whether there were any unintended consequences for equity, which is of particular interest following the pandemic.