In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the nation’s K-12 education law. ESSA includes several policy changes, including funding preschool and optimizing children’s developmental and academic trajectories by supporting the alignment of early learning programs and the K-12 system. ESSA declares that K-12 funding, such as Title I, II, III, can be used to fund preschool and early learning initiatives.
The California State Board of Education (SBE) and the California Department of Education (CDE) have the task of developing California’s ESSA state plan, which will explain how California will meet the federal statutory requirements under ESSA while aligning with the goals of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The final California ESSA plan is due on September 18, 2017 to the U.S. Department of Education
Input on the Draft California State ESSA Plan is due to the California Department of Education on June 30, 2017. The input from the ECE field is critical if the State Plan is to include Early Care and Education with specifics on Dual Language Learners (DLLs). California has the opportunity to be innovative and to build a school system aligned with existing research, to create a more efficient transition process between ECE to early elementary, to address the social-emotional and development needs of DLLs, and to leverage TK in order to bridge the ECE and TK-12 systems. The recommendations (hot link recommendations) are outlined by the four specific title components (Title I – Title IV) included in the current draft of the ESSA State Plan. The recommendations were aggregated from several different convening and focus groups over the last several months.
Please click on the recommendations to forward to CDE. Copy the recommendations you want to forward to CDE. Then open the ESSA Survey (hot link ESSA Survey).
You will need to complete the initial questions about yourself and then can scroll through the pages on the survey till to get to the sections indicated with the recommendations you want to paste. Just cut and paste the recommendations into the survey. There are only 9 more days to provide input. Share this Action Alert with others but please respond today! Thank You!