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State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister is encouraging all interested Oklahomans to read and offer feedback on the latest draft of a comprehensive state plan that lays out a vision for K-12 public education in Oklahoma.

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, state education agencies are required to submit a consolidated plan for common education regarding the use of federal education dollars. The ESSA transfers the bulk of education policy and decision-making back to state and local control. Over the past year, the Oklahoma State Department of Education has solicited feedback from communities statewide to inform and contextualize Oklahoma’s Consolidated State Plan. That input resulted in a number of changes from the initial draft of the plan, which OSDE posted in November 2016.

The eight-year plan outlines six measurable goals to address immediate needs and lingering challenges in public education. Taken together, the goals are devised to help foster an Oklahoma public education system and workforce that is nationally competitive. They include:

• Scoring above the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in all subjects for fourth and eighth grade
• Reducing the need for emergency certified teachers by 95 percent
• Placement among the top 10 states for students graduating in the four-, five- and six-year cohort
• Enabling 100 percent of students in grades 6-12 to have an Individual Career Academic Plan, impacting 335,000 students
• Aligning early childhood education and learning foundations to ensure that at least 75 percent of students are “ready to read” upon kindergarten entry, affecting 39,000 new kindergartners each year
• Reducing by 50 percent the need for math remediation after high school

New to the second draft are a number of elements in response to Oklahoma-specific challenges. These include:

• A focus on chronic absenteeism as the nonacademic indicator in the state’s new accountability system
• Risk analysis implementation for OSDE to impact teacher effectiveness
• A system of tiered interventions for the lowest-performing schools
• More rigorous evidence-based interventions like instructional leadership development, school calendar requirements and school improvement teams for chronically under-performing schools
• High-quality child nutrition programs to support student learning
• Support for districts with high English learner populations

Public comment on the second draft of the state plan may be emailed to ESSAfeedback@sde.ok.gov  by June 30. The final plan must be submitted to the U.S. Department of Education by Sept. 18.