Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today announced that six states won her approval to participate in the differentiated accountability pilot project. The lucky states are Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio. Here’s the department’s press release.
“The plans these states submitted speak to the fact that many were among the first to embrace data-based decision making and accountability,” Spellings said, according to remarks prepared for her to give at the Education Commission of the States’ conference in Austin, Texas.
You can read all of the state applications at the Department of Education’s Web site or Chad Aldeman’s summary of applications submitted by the 17 states that wanted to participate in the program.
Although Spellings lauded the six states in the program, she wasn’t happy that more states didn’t submit plans worthy of her approval.
“I’m also discouraged that more states didn’t take this as an opportunity to take more dramatic action to improve schools that have not met reasonable goals for multiple years running,” she said. “We need more states to be pioneers in advancing positive change.”
