LITTLE ROCK — Seventeen Arkansas school districts received an A while nine others scored F's in a new study by the Arkansas Policy Foundation.
The report's top-performing districts - including Fayetteville, Bentonville, Conway, Bryant, Searcy, Lake Hamilton, Valley View and Parkers Chapel - are located all over the state.
The Forrest City, Dermott, Augusta, Helena-West Helena, Turrell, Earle, Hughes, Dollarway, and Hermitage districts each received an F.
Another 14 districts received D grades. All three districts in Pulaski County received C's. A majority of the 245 school districts that existed in 2007-08 received B's and C's.
The Little Rock-based foundation, which advocates for improvements in state tax laws and education, recommends that low-scoring districts be restructured and, if possible, school-choice options be offered to the families living in those troubled districts.
"Students and parents in failing districts deserve additional options," the foundation recommended. "One way to address this need is to encourage institutions of higher learning to operate charter schools and receive per-pupil funding [that is] currently distributed to failing districts."
Greg Kaza, the foundation's executive director, applauded efforts by the state Department of Education to intervene in low-performing districts as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
"Being an economic research group, our bias would be to inject some sort of competition," Kaza said, "whether it be [independently operated] charter schools or allowing private schools to operate [with tax-funded vouchers] or even going beyond that by allowing a limited experiment with a tax-credit system."
A tax-credit system, Kaza said, would enable an individual or entity to receive tax breaks in return for financial contributions to a scholarship fund or to private schools so that a student in a poor-performing public school system could enroll at a higher-achieving school.
The Arkansas Policy Foundation has graded the state's public school districts in each of four consecutive years. The latest analysis, done by Michael Scoles - a faculty member at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway - is based largely on the scores that ninth-graders earned on the math and reading sections of the Stanford Achievement Test, 10th edition, in the spring of 2008. In previous years, the foundation graded school districts using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Arkansas stopped using the Iowa test after the 2006-07 school year.
One component of the formula that is new this year attempts to take into account the socioeconomic characteristics of the students, Kaza said.
That was done by using the scores earned by first-graders on the Stanford Achievement Test to predict what those first-graders would score as ninth-graders. The predicted ninth-grade scores were compared with the actual ninth-grade test results - be they higher or lower - to produce an "adjusted grade." The adjusted grade was included in the calculation of the district's overall grade.
"The assumption was that the relative contribution of external factors rather than [classroom instruction] is greatest at the earliest grades," Scoles wrote in the report. "Therefore, 1st-grade performance could be used as a single indicator of the advantages and disadvantages that exist outside of the school setting, and are present simultaneously at other grade levels."
The study highlights the socioeconomic differences in the districts earning A's and the districts earning F's.
"Compared to the best districts, the poorest-performing districts have approximately double the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced [price] lunches, double the percentage of single-parent households, and half the percentage of adults in a minimum of a 4-year bachelor's degree. The percentage of adults with at least a high school education was also directly related to district performance," Scoles wrote.
School districts that earned an A or A- reported that their average percentage of students eligible for subsidized school meals because of low family income ranged from 43 to 48 percent of enrollment. That compared with a 95 percent eligibility rate in the school districts that received Fs.
Similarly, the school districts earning an A or A- reported that 10 percent of their children come from single-parent households, compared with 19 percent in the F districts. Eighty-one to 87 percent of adults have a high school education in the A and A- districts, compared with 68 percent in the F districts.
Even with the Arkansas Policy Foundation's attempt to consider socioeconomic factors, Ray Nassar, superintendent of the Hughes School District - one of the nine districts to receive an F - said demographics cause him to discount efforts to grade school systems.
"I think it is so unfair to compare schools in the Delta with other schools. You are comparing apples to oranges," he said, citing the low socioeconomic status of some children in Hughes and other communities along the Mississippi River.
"I invite them to come here and go home with some of these kids in the evening and see how many are living together in one house and living with one parent. And usually the parent is a grandmother or grandfather."
Regardless of the foundation study, Nassar said his district is undergoing substantial restructuring - at least partly at the insistence of the Arkansas Department of Education.
The Hughes district is on probation for state accreditation violations. And both its elementary and high schools have been on the state's list of schools needing improvement for at least six years because of chronically low scores on state Benchmark and End-of-Course exams.
The principals at both the elementary and high schools have been removed, Nassar said, and replaced by one person who will manage both schools. Additionally, the Education Department recently appointed Karen Sullards, a retired principal in the Pulaski County Special School District, to be school improvement director in Hughes. As such, she is monitoring the district's efforts to train staff, adhere to the America's Choice school improvement model and meet state accreditation standards.
"I'm really glad we got her," Nassar said of Sullards.
Sullards is one of an estimated 20 improvement directors and specialists now in the process of being hired by academically troubled districts at the direction of the state Education Department. Many of the districts earning F's from the policy foundation are the same districts with schools that have lingered for years on the state list of academically troubled schools and, as a result, are candidates for the specialists and directors.
State officials say that the use of improvement directors and specialists is a practical way to force school improvement that is short of the state taking over a district.
"There are proponents of state takeover that say fire everybody and start over," Diana Julian, the state's interim commissioner of education, said last week. "Well, that's a lot easier said than done, particularly in those economically depressed areas of the state. First of all the [new] teachers and administrators aren't there. You would have to recruit them and we've found it is extremely difficult to recruit to those areas that need high-quality people the most. We really think that school improvement needs to happen at the local school with the people who are already there involved."
The Arkansas Policy Foundation study, including the grades for each of the state's school districts, is available on the foundation's Web site: www.arkansaspolicyfoundation.org.
Arkansas, Pages 15, 19 on 08/23/2009