LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Education on Tuesday named the state’s 48 lowest-achieving schools, requiring them to follow strict requirements from the state to improve.
If the schools don’t improve, the department could put their districts in jeopardy of state takeover or other sanctions.
The “Needs Improvement Priority Schools,” as the department labels them, include seven in the Little Rock School District, three in the Pulaski County Special district, and two in North Little Rock.
Some of the others are in Fort Smith, Helena-West Helena, Pine Bluff, Blytheville, Hot Springs and Forrest City. One open-enrollment charter school is on the list, as are some alternative schools, including one in Fort Smith and another in Springdale.
The academically struggling schools — including Hall, McClellan and Fair high schools in Little Rock, and Wilbur Mills University Studies and Jacksonville High in Pulaski County Special — will have to develop and carry out priority improvement plans under the direction of school improvement specialists.
Principals and teachers judged to be ineffective will be moved out of those schools.
The state Education Department on Tuesday also labeled another 109 schools as “focus” schools that must narrow achievement gaps between the students who are in subgroups typically at greatest risk of school failure — special education students, low-income students and non-native English language learning students — and students not in those groups.
Those focus schools, including Little Rock’s Central High, Pulaski Heights and Dunbar middle schools and seven of the city’s elementary schools, will be subject to state directives and monitoring, but to a lesser degree than the priority schools.
Other schools on the focus list include nine North Little Rock schools, three Pulaski County Special schools, and eight schools in Springdale, including both high schools.
Fayetteville, Jonesboro and El Dorado high schools are also on the focus list.
The Education Department named the priority schools and “Needs Improvement Focus Schools” less than a week after the U.S. Department of Education approved the state’s request for a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and endorsed the state’s alternative school accountability plan.
“It’s a totally new accountability system, but I think it is a fair way of holding schools accountable,” Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said Tuesday about the plan and the labeled schools.
Kimbrell said he is telling the state’s superintendents, “Don’t look at this as a negative but look at it as a positive.”
He added: “What we are creating now is ambitious but achievable. We have the opportunity to close the gaps that exist, focus resources and keep everything moving in an upward trajectory.”
As a result of the state’s new plan, the state’s more than 1,000 schools no longer face a 2013-14 deadline for all students to score at grade level on state Benchmark and End-of-Course exams, as required by the federal law.
The state’s newly approved 159-page accountability plan calls, instead, for schools to reduce by half the difference between the percentage of their students who scored at proficient on state tests in 2011 and the 100 percent proficiency mark by 2017.
Proficiency is considered grade-level work.
For example, if 76 percent of students scored at proficient on the state tests in 2011, then there is a 24-point gap between that and 100 percent proficient. The school would have to reduce by half the 24-point gap by 2017. That would be a 12-point gain, which would have to be achieved at a rate of at least 2 percentage points a year.
The requirement to reduce the gap by half applies to the overall student body as well as to subgroups of students, including the expanded subgroup made up of students most at risk of failing in schools — the special education students, low-income students and non-native English language-learning students.
The plan refers to that super-subgroup as the Targeted Achievement Gap Group.
Schools will fall into two classifications in the new plan — Achieving and Needs Improvement.
Achieving schools are those that meet their annual achievement, academic growth and graduation requirements, which will vary by school depending on the proficiency gaps. Schools labeled as Needs Improvement are those that don’t make the prescribed annual gains.
The priority and focus schools fall within that broader category of schools needing to improve.
Kimbrell said Tuesday that Education Department staff will begin meeting with school and school district leaders this month to explain the plan and its ramifications.
“This first year is an important year. We have a lot of work ahead of us,” he said.
The three-year average math and literacy performance for the 48 priority schools ranged from 7.9 percent to 47.7 percent of students scoring at proficient levels — fewer than half of students — on the state Benchmark and End of Course exams.
Eight pages of the state’s accountability plan describe the strategies that will be used in priority schools to improve.
The schools will be analyzed to determine their needs and those findings will be incorporated into the development of a three-year improvement plan. Each of the schools will be able to use federal Title I funds to carry out its plan with the approval from the Education Department.
Additionally, schools will have to commit to collaborating for three or more years with an external provider, such as an educational management consulting company. That provider’s work will be monitored by the state Education Department.
Additionally, the effectiveness of principals and teachers will be assessed and their contracts not renewed if they are not benefiting students. Effective teachers will be provided incentives to stay at the priority school, the state plan says.
“The district in which the schools are located must make the school a priority in serving those children and closing the achievement gap and getting the children to a level of achievement that is acceptable,” Kimbrell said. “It also requires that we as a state must also make the school a priority. We can’t sit back and let generations of kids go through failing schools. We’ll be asking the schools to develop priority improvement plans that have a very tight schedule of implementation. Those plans will be developed with a lot of guidance from us.”
Priority schools, as well as focus schools, will lose their label once they meet their annual achievement requirements for two years.
However, priority schools that are released from the priority classification must retain the use of the strategies for three years.
Schools that don’t meet the achievement requirements in two years could be placing their entire school systems in jeopardy of state takeover or other sanctions.
On Monday, the Arkansas Board of Education will consider proposed rules that would authorize actions against a district in which one or more of its schools remains a priority school.
If the board gives preliminary approval to the rules, the rules will then go out for public review and comment before the board votes on whether to give final approval.
Jerry Guess, the state-appointed superintendent of the Pulaski County Special district, which has schools on both the priority and focus lists, said Tuesday evening that he was anxious to understand the new accountability plan.
“We are already studying what to do,” Guess said. “We are already making improvements in how effective we are going to be this coming year,” he said, noting that if schools stay on the focus and priority lists the entire district is at risk.
“You can imagine we are going to focus sharply on those schools,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/04/2012