Skip to main content
OpenSchoolData

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

The 2015 federal education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, shifting accountability authority to states while maintaining requirements for annual testing, subgroup reporting, and intervention in the lowest-performing schools.

Reviewed by OpenSchoolData Editorial Team

How It Works

ESSA was signed into law in December 2015 and took effect in the 2017-2018 school year. It represented a significant shift from the federal-heavy approach of No Child Left Behind to a more state-centered model. Under ESSA, each state submits an accountability plan that must include five indicators: academic achievement (proficiency rates), academic progress (a growth measure for elementary and middle schools), graduation rates (for high schools), English language proficiency progress for English Learners, and at least one indicator of school quality or student success. States choose their own indicators for the fifth category, chronic absenteeism is the most common choice, followed by school climate surveys, access to advanced coursework, and college and career readiness measures. ESSA requires states to identify the bottom 5% of schools for Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) at least once every three years, and schools with consistently underperforming subgroups for Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI). Identified schools must develop evidence-based improvement plans. Unlike NCLB, ESSA does not prescribe specific consequences for identified schools, giving states and districts more flexibility in how they intervene. This flexibility has been both praised (for allowing context-specific solutions) and criticized (for potentially weakening accountability). OpenSchoolData presents federal data in a consistent format that works alongside state ESSA systems, giving parents a nationally comparable view of school data that does not depend on which state they live in.

Related Terms

  • School Accountability, The system by which schools and districts are held responsible for student outcomes, including state ratings, improvement plans, and potential interventions for chronically low-performing schools.
  • Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), A now-obsolete federal accountability measure under No Child Left Behind that required schools to meet annual proficiency targets or face escalating consequences, replaced by state-designed systems under ESSA.
  • Proficiency Rate, The percentage of students at a school who meet or exceed grade-level standards on state-mandated standardized tests in reading and math.
  • National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), The primary federal agency for collecting, analyzing, and reporting education data in the United States, housed within the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.

Explore School Data

Search SchoolsMost Improved SchoolsAll Glossary Terms

Real federal data: NCES CCD enrollment (2022), EDFacts proficiency rates (2020, district-level), EDFacts graduation rates (2019, district-level).

About This Definition

This definition is part of the OpenSchoolData Education Glossary, 33 terms explaining how school performance data works in the United States. All definitions are written in plain language for parents, educators, journalists, and researchers.

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is one of the U.S. K-12 school outcomes and enrollment concepts that recurs across this site. The definition above is the technical answer; the paragraphs below add the practical context for how the concept connects to the NCES Common Core of Data and EDFacts data behind every per-entity page on the site.

In the NCES Common Core of Data and EDFacts data, this concept shapes one or more of the fields that drive the per-entity grades and rankings on this site. The methodology page describes which fields feed into which output; this glossary entry documents the underlying term.

Source: NCES Common Core of Data, 2026.