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CAPE Offers Insight into the Every Student Succeeds Act for Private Schools

Schools can get a free, interactive PDF publication that explains how ESSA may impact them.

CAPE Outlook cover image

The Council for American Private Education (CAPE) has released a free, interactive PDF publication that offers private schools in the United States information on the ways the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) impacts them. “Private Schools and the Every Child Succeeds Act” will be updated online “as the U.S. Department of Education develops guidance and regulations in coming months and years.”

“For each program in ESSA that relates to private schools, the guide presents the program’s purpose(s), authorized funding levels, and private school provisions. For the most part, the guide incorporates the language of the statute, deviating for the sake of clarity, brevity, coherence, convenience, or consistency,” says the guide in its introduction. Among the programs impacted by the new law include some aspects of basic programing, the education of English language learners and migratory children, and teacher training and recruitment.

Private Schools and the Every Student Succeeds Act PDF coverIn addition to offering the 22-page publication, CAPE offers a synopsis of the new law it the January issue of CAPE Outlook. The article notes, “ESSA includes important provisions championed by the private school community to improve equitable services to private school students and teachers. For example, under Title I, which provides assistance to school districts to help high-need students do well in school, a school district now has to calculate funds for services to private school students based on its total Title I allocation, without excluding certain expenditures for other purposes, which it was allowed to do in the past.”

US president Barack Obama signed ESSA into law on December 10, effectively ending the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed in 2002. ESSA narrows the US federal government's role in elementary and secondary education. It retains the annual standardized testing requirements of No Child Left Behind but shifts the federal accountability provisions to states.

Christian Schools International is a member of CAPE.

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