Metacognition in Literacy
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Policy & Legislation
Every Student Succeeds Act
ESSA includes provisions that will help to ensure success for students and schools. Below are just a few. The law:
- Advances equity by upholding critical protections for America's disadvantaged and high-need students.
- Requires—for the first time—that all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers.
- Ensures that vital information is provided to educators, families, students, and communities through annual statewide assessments that measure students' progress toward those high standards.
- Helps to support and grow local innovations—including evidence-based and place-based interventions developed by local leaders and educators—consistent with our Investing in Innovation and Promise Neighborhoods
- Sustains and expands this administration's historic investments in increasing access to high-quality preschool.
- Maintains an expectation that there will be accountability and action to effect positive change in our lowest-performing schools, where groups of students are not making progress, and where graduation rates are low over extended periods of time.
No Child Left Behind
Under the NCLB law, states must test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. And they must report the results, for both the student population as a whole and for particular “subgroups” of students, including English-learners and students in special education, racial minorities, and children from low-income families.
States were required to bring all students to the “proficient level” on state tests by the 2013-14 school year, although each state got to decide, individually, just what “proficiency” should look like, and which tests to use. (In early 2015, the deadline had passed, but no states had gotten all 100 percent of its students over the proficiency bar.)
Under the law, schools are kept on track toward their goals through a mechanism known as “adequate yearly progress” or AYP. If a school misses its state’s annual achievement targets for two years or more, either for all students or for a particular subgroup, it is identified as not “making AYP” and is subject to a cascade of increasingly serious sanctions.
States were required to bring all students to the “proficient level” on state tests by the 2013-14 school year, although each state got to decide, individually, just what “proficiency” should look like, and which tests to use. (In early 2015, the deadline had passed, but no states had gotten all 100 percent of its students over the proficiency bar.)
Under the law, schools are kept on track toward their goals through a mechanism known as “adequate yearly progress” or AYP. If a school misses its state’s annual achievement targets for two years or more, either for all students or for a particular subgroup, it is identified as not “making AYP” and is subject to a cascade of increasingly serious sanctions.
Title One
Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended (ESEA) provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic standards. Federal funds are currently allocated through four statutory formulas that are based primarily on census poverty estimates and the cost of education in each state.
- Basic Grants provide funds to LEAs in which the number of children counted in the formula is at least 10 and exceeds 2 percent of an LEA's school-age population.
- Concentration Grants flow to LEAs where the number of formula children exceeds 6,500 or 15 percent of the total school-age population.
- Targeted Grants are based on the same data used for Basic and Concentration Grants except that the data are weighted so that LEAs with higher numbers or higher percentages of children from low-income families receive more funds. Targeted Grants flow to LEAs where the number of schoolchildren counted in the formula (without application of the formula weights) is at least 10 and at least 5 percent of the LEA's school-age population.
- Education Finance Incentive Grants (EFIG) distribute funds to states based on factors that measure:
- a state's effort to provide financial support for education compared to its relative wealth as measured by its per capita income; and
- the degree to which education expenditures among LEAs within the state are equalized.
Response to Intervention
RTI is a systematic way of connecting instructional components that are already in place. It integrates assessment data and resources efficiently to provide more support options for every type of learner.
RTI does
RTI does
- Develop a systematic way of identifying student strengths and weaknesses.
- Reduce the time students wait to receive necessary instruction and intervention.
- Require schools to ensure that underachievement is not due to a lack of appropriate instruction.
- Require close monitoring and documentation of student responses to research-based instruction in general education classrooms, so schools are less likely to label students too quickly.
- Require that general and special education classrooms share responsibilities to ensure that all students can receive additional support using a seamless instructional system.
- Require the use of research-validated practices in core classroom instruction and supplemental intervention services.
- Apply only to students who qualify for special education.
- Allow students to wallow in failure until they meet a qualification score.
- Focus more on compliance to forms and procedures than on student results. It does promote procedures that get the right services to the right students at the first signs of trouble.
- Ignore the bias of assessment instruments that over-identify students who lack prior knowledge due to environmental and cultural differences that are easily misinterpreted as a learning disability.
- Simply refer, test, and label students when they underperform in general education classrooms without proving that the problem is not the fault of the curriculum or the instruction.