Overview
Strengths
- Maine has an innovative vision of a proficiency-based, student-centered system that supports personalized learning and empowered students who take charge of their own learning. And the state’s charge is clear: By 2030, 90 percent of Maine’s students will graduate college and career ready.
- Maine’s requirement for all schools to develop a school-improvement plan and link it to key principles of school success is a strong approach to needs assessment and planning at the school level. The integration of a multitiered system of support approach, differentiated student interventions, and monitoring by schools has real promise.
- Maine plans to identify for targeted support schools that fall in the bottom 5 percent of each subgroup. Although the state has not yet provided data on the implications of this proposal, it seems like a reasonable approach to targeting resources for low-performing subgroups.
Weaknesses
- Much of Maine’s plan is still incomplete, including final accountability indicators and weighting and more complete description of its school identification plan.
- Although Maine’s long-term priorities appear strong, it missed opportunities to embed those throughout its ESSA plan. For example, the school-improvement system and planning process for schools in need of supports doesn’t align with the state’s expressed priorities, such as learner-centered instruction, comprehensive community/school supports, equitable funding, and new technologies.
- It is also unclear how Maine’s vision of a proficiency-based assessment system will be implemented statewide and how that will factor into school accountability.
- If the state intends for 90 percent of students to be college- and career-ready, it would make sense for Maine to include an indicator of college and career readiness in its accountability system.
- Overall, each section of the plan reads as discrete and not aligned to the state’s articulated priorities in a meaningful, integrated way.