After the Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law on December 10, 2015, every state in the nation was on the hook to establish a plan for increasing student achievement. In response, the Collaborative for Student Success launched Promise to Practice, a report and interactive website that provided an accountability mechanism to ensure states were implementing their ESSA plans with fidelity.

During our our years as part of the HCM Strategists team, we worked with the Collaborative to speak with officials in every state education agency in the country and analyzed available documents to determine whether states were on track to implement their plans. We isolated high flyers and troubling trends across the country to bring awareness to whether states were meeting their obligations for their public school students