Making Sense of it All: How to Incorporate Stakeholder Feedback Into Your State’s ESSA Plan

Making Sense Of It All title page

As states move forward on the development of their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, incorporating the best of the feedback received from stakeholders along the way is a critical step in the process. All states are required by law to meaningfully engage with a wide array of stakeholders as they develop their plans to ensure that new policies and procedures truly reflect the needs of all students, regardless of their ethnicity, poverty level or zip code. Once the online surveys, public forums and focus groups are over, it’s up to the state ESSA leads to make sense of the hundreds of ideas, suggestions, questions and comments they’ve received and use the key themes that emerge to inform the details of the plan.

The guidance in this resource is broken into the five basic steps of an ongoing engagement cycle (as illustrated at right), and is meant to help states do two things simultaneously: (1) incorporate the best of the feedback they receive from their stakeholders in a way that strengthens and refines their ESSA strategy; and (2) ensure stakeholders know they were heard and can recognize their imprint on the state’s plan.


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