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Federal Flash: Education Department releases Perkins CTE Guide for states

We have a short flash for you today with an update on a new resource with information on racial inequities in schools, as well as the Department of Education’s process to implement the recently reauthorized Carl D Perkins Career and Technical Education Act.

The Department of Education issued a draft state plan guide
Earlier this week, the Department issued a draft state plan guide. When the guide is finalized, states will be able to use it when submitting their plans under the new law. The Department is accepting input on the guide until December 24, 2018. If you would like to send in feedback, you can do so by going to www.regulations.gov and entering the docket ID: ED-2018-ICCD-0108.

The draft plan guide gives states two options for submitting their plans. States can either submit a transition plan that would just apply to Fiscal Year 2019 – in other words, the 2018-2019 school year – and then submit a full Perkins plan the following year. Or, states can submit a full five-year plan now that would apply from 2019 through 2023. Regardless of which option states choose, they will not have to submit performance goals, referred to in the law as “state determined levels of performance,” until 2020.

We think that most states are likely to submit a transition plan rather than the full 5-year Perkins plan. This makes sense because the law requires quite a bit of stakeholder engagement, and it wouldn’t be possible to meaningfully engage stakeholders and submit a full plan by next spring when the plans will be due. Still, the Department’s draft guide calls upon states to include important information in the transition plan. For example, states will need to describe:

Again, you can download the draft state guide and review it.

ProPublica released Miseducation a new resource with information on racial inequalities in the nation’s schools and districts

ProPublica released a terrific new resource with information on racial inequalities in the nation’s schools and districts called Miseducation. The new website, includes information on disparities in discipline, access to rigorous coursework, segregation, and more.  The interactive website, which ProPublica debuted in an in-depth analysis with the New York Times draws from data made available through the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection and provides information on 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 districts.

This blog post represents a slightly edited transcript of the October 26 episode of Federal Flash, the Alliance for Excellent Education’s five-minute (or less!) video series on important developments in education policy in Washington, DC. The video version is embedded below. For an alert when the next episode of Federal Flash is available, email at alliance@all4ed.org.