Ohio's Consolidated State Plan under ESSA, and the April 2026 School Improvement amendment

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Ohio’s Consolidated State Plan submitted to the U.S. Department of Education under the Every Student Succeeds Act; and Ohio Amendments to Approved ESSA Plan, April 2026, a redlined amendment request covering School Improvement from page 43 of the approved plan. Type. Primary source — the state’s own plan as submitted to a federal agency. Location. education.ohio.gov/Topics/Every-Student-Succeeds-Act-ESSA resolves. The April 2026 amendment PDF was supplied to this repository directly; its canonical URL was not located, and a guessed getattachment path under the topic page returns 404.

Status. Not retrieved, not committed, not digest-pinned. No connector fetches it and nothing in crates/ reads it. Everything below is read from the supplied document, which is why the claims resting on it are tagged as claims about what the document says rather than about what is in force.

And the amendment is a request. It states that it “is coordinated with Ohio’s Waiver request”, and nothing in it evidences approval by the U.S. Department of Education. A reader must not treat the redlined provisions as operative.

What it contains # ↑ Contents

The methodology by which Ohio identifies schools for federal improvement status, the criteria for leaving it, and what the state does to schools that do not:

• CSI — Comprehensive Support and Improvement. The lowest-performing 5% of Title I served schools on the Ohio School Report Card overall rating; for schools with fewer than three rated components, the lowest 5% by chronic absenteeism; public high schools with a federal graduation rate at or below 67%; and schools that have not exited ATSI within three years.
• TSI — one or more subgroups consistently in the bottom 2% of their subgroup rank order, with a 2.5-star-or-lower subgroup rating.
• ATSI — one or more subgroups at or below the CSI identification threshold score.

Identification is building-level, on a numerical overall rating that is rank-ordered. CSI and ATSI are identified every three years; the next CSI cycle is 2027-2028.

Why a funding corpus holds it at all # ↑ Contents

Because two of its provisions are fiscal. Among the more rigorous interventions proposed for CSI schools that miss exit criteria within three years is “annual approval of expenditure of all federal funds by the Department including but not limited to Title IA, IDEA, Noncompetitive School Improvement Funds (1003)”, and the amendment turns §f — previously “Not applicable” — into a district-level regime whose last item is “approval by the Department of expenditure plans for federal funds including Title I A, Title II, Title III, Title IV, and IDEA funds.”

That is a state gate on federal money, conditioned on academic performance. The corpus’s Title I and IDEA Part B nodes described those channels’ restrictions in terms of supplement-not-supplant and said nothing about it.

Caveats # ↑ Contents

• Mostly out of scope, and the proportion matters. This is an accountability document. The overwhelming majority of it — identification methodology, exit criteria, technical assistance, evidence tiers — bears on a domain this corpus does not model. Only the expenditure-approval provisions are funding facts.
• The grain does not match. CSI, TSI and ATSI attach to buildings. This corpus’s level of analysis is the education agency in a fiscal period, and nothing here joins to it without a building-to-district roll-up the repository does not have.
• The same rating pays and punishes. The Ohio School Report Card overall rating drives the FSFP performance supplement, which is money, and CSI/ATSI identification, which is sanction. One measure, two functions, and the corpus currently models only the first.
• Three of the proposed interventions are transfers out of the district sector. Conversion to a charter school operated by an approved school management organization, merger with a school operated by one, and closure. Those are funding events routed through the community-school channel the corpus cannot model at all — the same hole the deduction calculator stub records.
• Most of the redline is tense. Roughly a third of the marked changes convert will be to are or were, rewriting 2017 aspiration into present tense. Reading the red as change overstates what moved.
• The direction of the substantive changes is one-way. Three insertions of “at least” before the 5% threshold plus a new sentence permitting identification beyond it, alongside a sixteen-item intervention ladder that did not previously exist. Wider net, harder consequences.