The New Jersey Department of Education presented an overview of the 2024 Every Student Succeeds Act accountability process in an advisory issued in October 2024.
It outlined the accountability process for fall 2024 followed the framework described in New Jersey’s 2017 ESSA State Plan. At that time, the proposed amendments to the ESSA State Plan had not yet been finalized or submitted to the U.S. Department of Education for approval. However, New Jersey submitted its amended 2024 ESSA State Plan to the USDOE on Dec. 9, 2024.
A new broadcast provides an update on the 2024 accountability process.
The annual targets outlined in the proposed 2024 ESSA State Plan were revised and re-developed with the input of stakeholders to ensure that the schools identified for targeted support and improvement for the 2025-2026 school year are those with student groups in the most need of support. As a result, the NJDOE will use the academic achievement, graduation rate, and progress toward English language proficiency targets from the proposed 2024 ESSA State Plan as the targets for the 2023-2024 school year.
These targets for the 2023-2024 school year will inform which schools are identified for and will exit from targeted support and improvement for the 2025-2026 school year. These annual targets are different from the targets that were shared with local education agencies in the 2024 ESSA Profiles on October 30. The NJDOE is currently implementing only the changes to long-term goals and annual targets for the 2024 process. The NJDOE will provide updates on the implementation timeline for any additional changes as they become available.
Get full details, including how the amended plan outlines changes to the methodology used to establish long-term goals and annual targets, a link to a spreadsheet showing the current and amended targets for each school and LEA on the NJDOE Accountability webpage under 2024 Accountability Data in the School & District Accountability section of the page, and updated 2024 ESSA profiles that can be accessed through the ESSA Data folder in Homeroom by referring to the advisory.
As noted in the advisory, LEA and school administrators will need to log into the ESSA Data folder to access the profiles. The data in the 2024 ESSA Profiles continues to remain embargoed for internal LEA review only. Therefore, the information contained in the profiles may not be shared with the media or public until it is released by the NJDOE through the 2023-2024 School Performance Reports.
The ESSA Companion Guide that is available under resources in the ESSA Homeroom folder has also been updated with information about the amended targets and how they were calculated.
For any questions, contact the NJDOE’s Office of Performance Management via email.