Connecticut State Department of Education’s Implementation of Selected Components of Connecticut’s Statewide Accountability System

The objective of our audit was to determine whether Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) implemented selected components of its statewide accountability system in accordance with Connecticut’s approved Every Student Succeeds Act State plan and any approved amendments. The selected components were (1) indicators used to measure student academic achievement and school success, (2) annual meaningful differentiation, and (3) identification of schools needing additional support. We evaluated CSDE’s processes for implementing selected components of Connecticut’s statewide accountability system for school year 2021–2022. We found that CSDE implemented two (student academic achievement and school success indicators and annual meaningful differentiation) of the three selected components of the statewide accountability system and provided additional funding and support services to local educational agencies with identified schools in accordance with Connecticut’s approved State plan and CSDE’s policies and procedures. However, its implementation of certain aspects of the third selected component (identification of low-performing schools) of the accountability system deviated from the plan. As a result, CSDE did not identify all schools for comprehensive support and improvement that it should have identified in the fall of 2022. Additionally, CSDE did not always identify or correctly identify the student subgroups needing additional targeted support and improvement in accordance with Connecticut’s approved State plan, which it attributed to a system coding error for additional targeted support and improvement. We recommended that CSDE amend Connecticut’s State plan by updating its procedures for identifying schools for CSI to ensure they align with the procedures in CSDE’s “Using Accountability Results to Guide Improvement” and the definition of a school identified for CSI in the ESEA and provide support to the five Title I schools that should have been identified for CSI. We also recommend that the Department verify that CSDE implemented corrective actions to fix the system coding error to ensure that it correctly identifies student subgroups needing ATSI in the future.