To be sure, the main education headline from the legislative sessions this year was that about $1 billion extra will be spent on K-12 education in 2013-15. A number of reform bills were also enacted, though, including:

• E2SSB 5329 establishes a process “to assign responsibility to the superintendent of public instruction to intervene in persistently lowest-achieving schools that have failed to improve despite required action.” It requires the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to identify “challenged schools in need of improvement and a subset of such schools that are persistently lowest-achieving schools in the state” and the State Board of Education to propose rules establishing an accountability framework for challenged schools. (The 2013-15 budget provides $10.3 million for grants to persistently lowest-achieving schools.)

• ESSB 5491 establishes indicators of the health of the educational system, including the percentage of students showing the characteristics of entering kindergartners in areas identified by the Washington kindergarten inventory of developing skills, the percentage of students meeting the fourth grade reading assessment and eighth grade math assessment standards, the four-year high school graduation rate, the percentage of high school graduates who are enrolled in further education or training or are employed at the second and fourth quarters after graduation, and the percentage of students enrolled in remedial courses in college. The State Board of Education must report on these indicators every two years, and “If the educational system is not on target to meet the performance goals on any individual indicator, the report must recommend evidence-based reforms intended to improve student achievement in that area.”

• EHB 1450 requires OSPI to implement the Common Core English language arts and math assessments beginning in school year 2014-15. These assessments must be used to show that students meet state standards beginning with 2019 graduates.

• SHB 1472 makes AP computer science courses equivalent to high school math or science classes.

• ESSHB 1872 establishes a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education innovation alliance, made up of representatives from STEM businesses, business and labor organizations, nonprofits, school districts, higher education institutions and educators. The alliance must “develop a STEM education report card . . . to monitor progress in increasing learning opportunities and aligning strategic plans and activities in order to prepare students for STEM-related jobs and
  careers, with the longer-term goal of improving educational, workforce, and economic outcomes in STEM.”