EdLaw
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA as amended; 20 U.S.C. §6301 et seq.)
The 2015 reauthorisation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 — the framework statute for federal K-12 funding (Title I formula funds, Title IV student-support and academic-enrichment grants, and the rest). It binds states and districts as funding conditions rather than regulating vendors; its commercial significance for EdTech is the evidence-based definition that federally funded purchasing is scored against.
Applicability to EdTech
- The evidence tiers live in §7801(21): an activity, strategy or intervention is "evidence-based" when it demonstrates a statistically significant effect based on strong evidence (well-designed and well-implemented experimental study), moderate evidence (quasi-experimental), or promising evidence (correlational with statistical controls) — or, for the fourth tier, demonstrates a rationale based on high-quality research with ongoing evaluation (§7801(21)(A)). "What ESSA tier is your product?" in a US RFP is asking which limb a vendor's efficacy research satisfies.
- Some funding streams restrict spending to the upper tiers (school-improvement funds are the commonly cited example); the general definition itself does not rank purchases — the restriction, where it exists, sits in the individual programme provision, none of which are extracted here yet.
- Other §7801 definitions recur in procurement paperwork: "technology" (§7801(50)), "professional development" (§7801(42)), "local educational agency" (§7801(30)).
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| PURPOSE.md | 20 U.S.C. §6301 — Title I statement of purpose |
| DEFINITIONS.md | §7801 — ESEA general definitions incl. the evidence tiers |
Scope note: programme-specific spending rules that mandate particular tiers (e.g. Title I §1003 school improvement) can be added when a specific funding stream question arises.
Key obligations at a glance
- None on vendors directly — ESSA governs how districts may spend federal funds; the vendor-facing artefact is evidence documentation matched to the §7801(21) tiers.
Enforcement
US Department of Education programme administration (funding conditions, monitoring, audit); no vendor-facing enforcement.
Licence
The corpus reproduces 20 U.S.C. §§ 6301 and 7801 verbatim from the govinfo.gov United States Code, 2024 edition, published by the Government Publishing Office. It is a work of the United States Government. 17 U.S.C. § 105(a) (govinfo, United States Code 2024 edition, title 17 § 105, read 2026-10-01) provides: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."
The Government Publishing Office's Public Domain & Copyright Notice (govinfo.gov/about/policies, read 2026-10-01) adds: "By virtue of the foregoing, public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction. However, Government publications may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner." It also says that "whenever a work is published consisting predominantly of work of the U.S. Government, the copyright notice (if any) must identify those parts of the work in which copyright is claimed per 17 U.S.C. § 403."
Conditions: none attach to the text itself. The one formal point is § 403: if the public pages ever carry a copyright notice, it must identify the parts in which copyright is claimed (the corpus's own curation) and not cover the reproduced federal text. The corpus names the source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).
Related
- FERPA / PPRA — the privacy conditions that ride along with the same federal funds
- IDEA — the special-education funding statute alongside ESEA