Educational equity and civil rights organizations joint public comment on Oklahoma’s draft request for a waiver from Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requirements
September 09, 2025 by EdTrust 
Submitted to: Oklahoma State Department of Education
Re: Waiver from Federal Peer Review Requirements Under ESSA Section 8401
Date: September 8, 2025
We, the undersigned education and civil right organizations, submit this public comment regarding the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s (OSDE) request for a waiver from requirements for statewide academic assessments required under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While we support innovation in educational assessment, this waiver request raises significant concerns about education equity, transparency, and accountability that undermine the integrity of state assessments, the foundation of accountability systems designed to identify and support the lowest-performing schools in the state and ensure all students have access to high-quality learning opportunities. Below, we outline our key concerns with OSDE’s request to seek broad flexibility from federal assessment requirements in Section 1111(b)(2) of ESSA and related regulations, followed by suggestions for alternatives to the current waiver proposal.
Since 1994, ESEA has required that all students statewide take the same standards-aligned assessments, and these assessments have been required annually in grades 3-8 and once in high school since 2001. This requirement ensures comparable data on student achievement is available across the state—data that can be used by parents, educators, school and district leaders, and state officials. This comparable data enables states to accurately identify schools with the most need to provide them with the additional resources needed to improve. It allows districts to understand which students need additional support to meet their full potential. Critically, it allows for disaggregated reporting of results by student groups so education leaders can identify and track opportunity gaps across student groups and so parents and families have reliable, consistent, and accurate information about whether their child is meeting grade-level expectations in core subjects.
Prior to these federal requirements, school districts could just administer tests of their choosing, which often systematically excluded large groups of students, such as students with disabilities, from assessments. This patchwork of standards and assessments and the exclusion of many students meant policymakers, school and district leaders, educators, parents, students, and community members had incomplete and often misleading data on how schools were serving all students, allowing systemic gaps in student learning to be ignored and remain unaddressed. OSDE’s proposal threatens to send the state back in time more than 30 years by enabling districts to administer “benchmark assessments,” which may not be the same statewide, or the Classic Learning Test (CLT) in place of a common and comparable assessment. Administering different assessments would undermine the transparency of academic achievement information provided to families, who would no longer be able to compare how their school is serving their child and their schoolmates compared to other communities and schools. OSDE also fails to sufficiently demonstrate how administering these assessments would improve student achievement, as there would no longer be a common yardstick by which all Oklahoma students’ academic performance is measured.
By seeking to waive the section 1111(b)(2) requirements of ESSA, OSDE is also asking to ignore the requirement that state assessments be aligned to rigorous state academic content and achievement standards and that this alignment be validated by federal peer review. Holding all students to the same, high academic expectations is a bedrock of federal education policy. Prior to this requirement, groups of students like students with disabilities and English learners were categorically held to lower expectations than their peers. Administering assessment aligned to these grade-level standards is essential to ensure states and districts are fulfilling their commitment to ensure all students can access and are taught the grade-level knowledge and skills needed to be prepared for success after high school. If the assessments OSDE is proposing to use in its waiver request, like the unnamed benchmarks assessments and the CLT, are not required to be aligned to the state standards, OSDE risks failing to identify which students around the state are not meeting the state’s expectations, potentially robbing them of the additional supports and resources they need to meet grade-level standards before it is too late. When state and local leaders, educators and families lack accurate data on whether students are meeting standards, they lose the ability to effectively meet their needs. It is nonsensical for OSDE’s to claim that administering assessments that are not aligned to state academic content and achievement standards will help improve student academic achievement on those same standards. Further, administering assessments that do not provide parents with information on their child’s performance against grade-level expectations will deny them essential data they can use to advocate on behalf of their child; OSDE’s request doesn’t maintain transparency for parents and families, it leaves them blind to whether their student is on-track academically or not.
Oklahoma’s critique of the peer review system as “monopolistic” and “outdated” oversimplifies a process designed to ensure assessment quality and equity. Federal peer review exists to verify the assessments used for federal accountability meet technical standards that protect all students, particularly those from groups who may be disproportionately affected by inadequately validated instruments. OSDE’s draft waiver provides no evidence that the proposed benchmark assessments or CLT meet the validity and reliability standards required for measuring student proficiency against Oklahoma’s grade-level standards, nor that they were even developed with Oklahoma’s standards in mind. Additionally, while CLT may meet the definition of “nationally recognized high school assessment” in 34 CFR § 200.3(d), these assessments must also undergo peer review to ensure their alignment to state standards, along with other requirements around technical quality and accessibility, particularly as the results will be used in school accountability systems. Oklahoma has already completed this process for ACT, and OSDE doesn’t present clear arguments for why CLT should not undergo the same process.
In its current form, this waiver would also eliminate accessibility and accommodations requirements for students with disabilities and English learners, including requirements pertaining to alternate assessments for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities and English language proficiency. These requirements are essential to ensuring these students are able to fully demonstrate what they know and can do. While OSDE provides general assurances about compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and ESSA inclusion requirements, the waiver lacks specific evidence demonstrating how these protections will be maintained. The proposal does not address how the state will ensure that benchmarks assessments or CLT provide valid and reliable data for students with disabilities and English learners, what specific accommodations will be available, or how potential impacts on vulnerable student groups will be monitored and addressed.
Moreover, the waiver request makes no mention of OSDE’s plans for alternate assessments for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities aligned to alternate academic achievement standards or measuring English learners’ progress (ELP) toward proficiency in English. Requirements for alternate assessments ensure that all students with disabilities are getting access to the supports they need to demonstrate their knowledge. The 1% cap for students taking the alternative assessment ensures students with disabilities aren’t inappropriately or systematically held to lower standards, yet OSDE’s waiver request (if approved) would apparently remove this safeguard as well, as it is included in ESEA section 1111(b)(2)(D). Similarly, ELP assessment requirements exist to protect English learners’ access to instruction to build proficiency in the English language, which is essential for accessing and mastering academic content across all subject areas. OSDE provides no details regarding its plans to continue administering statewide ELP assessments or whether these requirements too would also be waived (i.e., requirements in ESEA section 1111(b)(2)(F)). OSDE provides no justification for how removing the requirements to assess English language proficiency statewide, nor the requirement to provide for alternate assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities, would improve the academic achievement of these student groups or improve the quality of information their families receive about their students’ progress in school.
It is essential that Oklahoma continue to provide these important assessment guardrails for students with disabilities and English learners. Any eventual waiver request submitted to the U.S. Department of Education should clearly articulate how assessments, accommodations, and other protections for students with disabilities and English learners will be maintained.
The proposed request would also effectively eliminate two key requirements for reporting the results of assessments: individual student reports and disaggregated results at the school, district, and state level. Each of these requirements are essential for understanding and supporting the needs of all students.
Individual student reports provide parents and educators with the data they need to work collectively to meet the needs of individual students. Without these detailed results, families would lack any information about how students are performing against grade-level standards and would instead have to rely on data from assessments that may not be aligned to the state’s standards and classroom grades that typically are calculated using information beyond academic performance including classroom participation and assignment completion–which, while important–may obscure academic challenges students are having that require additional supports. OSDE’s proposed waiver would leave parents in the dark about whether their child is making the progress needed to be successful after high school.
As noted earlier, reporting disaggregated data is essential for identifying and tracking systemic inequities in outcomes by student groups over time. Without it, the performance of student groups will go back to being hidden from the policymakers and the public, and as a result will likely go unaddressed. While the waiver request makes a passing mention of continuing to report disaggregated data, it does not provide a clear plan for doing so, nor assurances that the data will continue to be available for all federally required groups in section 1111(b)(2), including students from each major racial and ethnic group, students by gender, students who are from low-income backgrounds compared to those who are not, students who are English learners compared to those who are proficient in the English language, students who have and do not have a disability, military-connected students, students experiencing homelessness, and students in foster care. And if the state were to implement its plan for using various benchmark assessments across the state while being exempt from peer-review requirements, any disaggregated reporting would likely not allow for valid comparisons of data across the state. Such valid comparisons are essential for effectively and fairly distributing resources to meet the needs of all students.
In addition to the concerns above, OSDE’s current waiver request fails to meet several requirements outlined for waivers in ESSA section 8401. In particular, the state does not provide any specific information about “how the waiving of such requirements will advance student academic achievement” or “how schools will continue to provide assistance to the same populations served by programs for which waivers are requested,” particularly students with disabilities and English learners. Additionally, the request for a five-year waiver goes beyond the statutory limit of four years.
Educational assessment serves a key role in ensuring equitable opportunities for all students. Oklahoma’s desire to modernize its assessment system is understandable, but this must occur through transparent, evidence-based processes that maintain robust protections for all students. This waiver request lacks the specificity, evidence base, and safeguards necessary to justify such broad exemption from federal oversight.
Alternate approach: If OSDE is truly interested in providing educators with real-time feedback via benchmark assessments throughout the year, the state could pursue this in several ways without the need for a waiver request. For instance, OSDE could develop a statewide through-year assessment, an approach being piloted by about a dozen states across the country, that provides instructionally relevant data for educators during the school year while still providing comparable end-of-year data on how students are performing against state standards. The state could also provide a menu of high-quality, validated interim assessments districts can choose to use throughout the year to monitor progress, while still administering a statewide summative assessment.
Relatedly, the proposed waiver request correctly points out that federal peer review practices don’t currently reflect recent innovations in assessment. However, several states are currently undergoing, or will soon begin, the peer review process with through-year assessments. The evidence and data submitted by these states will likely allow U.S. Department of Education staff to provide robust support to OSDE staff, as well as update peer review guidance and documents to incorporate evidence states using these newer approaches can submit.
Rather than abandoning oversight entirely, Oklahoma should work with the U.S. Department of Education to implement targeted improvements to peer review, such as updating guidance to accommodate emerging technologies, expanding the reviewer pool to include those familiar with innovative assessments, and clarifying timeframes for the review process. Doing so would allow Oklahoma and other states to pursue innovation in assessment, while still ensuring alignment to rigorous state standards.
We urge OSDE to withdraw its current waiver request and maintain its commitment to assessing all students against rigorous state standards–and providing accommodations so all students, regardless of disability or language status, can demonstrate what they know and can do–and reporting out these results. OSDE can then work with the U.S. Department of Education on peer review improvements, to address legitimate concerns around responsiveness to innovation and more consistent guidance for reviewers.
Sincerely,
All4Ed
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates
Data Quality Campaign
Diverse Charter Schools Coalition
EdTrust
Education Reform Now
Families in Schools
National Center for Learning Disabilities
National Parents Union
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
UnidosUS
