Far more schools miss goals; not crisis, state chief says

The number of Arkansas schools categorized by the state as needing improvement rose to nearly 800 this year, an increase of about 200 since last year, according to the state Department of Education’s annual accountability report released Tuesday.

The 793 schools are labeled as “Needs Improvement” because they fell short of their prescribed achievement targets on state Benchmark and End-of-Course exams and on their high school graduation goals.

Of the more than 1,000 public schools evaluated in the report, 137 are categorized as “Achieving” schools this year, down from 336 “Achieving” schools last year.

Some of the achieving schools include seven of the Little Rock School District’s nearly 50 schools, two schools in the North Little Rock district and one school in the Pulaski County Special district. The report showed one school in Cabot; two in Conway; five in Bentonville; seven in Fort Smith; eight in Springdale; three in Texarkana; three in De Queen; and two in the Marvell-Elaine School District as achieving.

At a news conference about the accountability system, Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell defended the high number of “Needs Improvement” schools, saying that many are high-performing but are finding it difficult to meet achievement targets that call for greater than 80 percent or 85 percent of their students to achieve at proficient levels on the state math and literacy tests. Students who score at proficient levels are considered to be achieving at their grade levels.

“These are not failing schools,” said Kimbrell. “These are not schools failing their children.

“We are pushing so hard, and we are getting so much more out of our schools and our teachers,” he said, adding that to call the schools failures would take away from those efforts.

Those efforts include the implementation of new national standards in math and English-language arts, he said. Arkansas teachers are teaching from those new standards, but schools test students using state exams based on old state standards that are being phased out.

Kimbrell said the state’s school accountability system, now in place for a second year, is shining a brighter light within schools on the performance of students who are at risk of school failure because of family poverty, disabilities or the fact they are non-native English language learners.

There are no sanctions levied by the state against the “Needs Improvement” schools.

Arkansas’ current accountability system was approved by the U.S. Department of Education in June 2012 as a waiver to the achievement requirements in the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The federal law called for 100 percent of students to score at proficient, or grade level, by the end of this school year on state math and literacy tests.

The U.S. Department of Education offered states the opportunity to apply for waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act when Congress and the president failed to reauthorize the 2002 law. The state’s new system establishes what state leaders said are reachable achievement targets that are tailored to each school.

The Arkansas waiver plan calls for each school, over several years, to reduce by half the gap between the percentages of students scoring at proficient or advanced on state tests in 2011 and what would be 100 percent proficiency. That has to be done in equal increments each year until the achievement goal is reached in the 2016-17 school year.

For example, if 76 percent of students achieved at proficient levels in literacy in 2011, the school - 24 points away from 100 percent proficient - would have to improve 12 points by 2016-17. That would have to be done at a rate of at least 2 percentage points a year.

The requirement to reduce the achievement gap by half applies to the overall student body and to combined subgroups made up of low-income students, students with disabilities and students who are learning English as a second language. Schools can be labeled as needing improvement when just one group in that combined subgroup doesn’t meet achievement requirements.

Schools can be labeled as achieving if they fall short of the achievement targets but show a rate of growth that puts students on course to be proficient by the eighth grade.

In past years, schools that were labeled as needing to improve faced sanctions. Those penalties under the No Child Left Behind Act included allowing students to transfer to higher-performing schools, paying for private tutoring services for students, and replacing the principal and/or teaching staff. The state’s newer school accountability system, instituted last year, does not levy sanctions.

In addition to 793 schools labeled as needing improvement and the 137 achieving schools, there are two additional categories of schools that need improvement and receive additional resources. Those are “priority” schools identified last year as the 5 percent lowest-achieving schools in the state, and “focus” schools that had the greatest achievement gap between all students in a school and the subpopulation of students who are poor, are special-education students or are English-language learners.

Kimbrell said Tuesday that the numbers of schools in those priority and focus categories declined. Those schools have to meet their achievement or growth goals in two consecutive years to be removed from the priority or focus categories.

Priority schools in particular are required to employ school-improvement consultants as well as work with state Education Department specialists to develop and carry out improvement plans. Those schools that don’t raise student achievement over time put their districts in jeopardy of being classified by the state as academically distressed and subject to state takeover.

Four schools moved out of the priority category this year and into the achieving category. Those are Boone Park Elementary in the North Little Rock School District, Wilson Elementary in the Little Rock School District, Lafayette County High and Marvell-Elaine High.

The state Education Department website lists a total of 42 remaining “priority” schools. That conflicts with the total 35 schools identified as “priority” schools at Monday’s state Board of Education meeting. Education Department officials were working to clarify the count Tuesday night. Some of the “priority” schools have either closed or their grade structure reorganized, leading to the different count.

There were 109 focus-improvement schools identified last year. Kimbrell said Tuesday that the number has improved to 87 schools.

The Education Department will in the coming days identify among the “Achieving” schools those that qualify to be exemplary because their overall student bodies and their subgroups met achievement and growth targets in both math and literacy.

Schools or districts with achieving and exemplary labels are rewarded with less state intervention in their operations, while focus and priority-improvement schools face greater state involvement.

Gary Newton, chief executive officer of Arkansas Learns, which is an advocacy organization for school choice, attended Kimbrell’s afternoon news conference.

In an interview afterward, Newton questioned the value of the state accountability system to parents who are “starved for something that makes sense so they can make reasonable decisions about where to educate their kids.”

“If three-quarters of the schools are in one category,” Newton said, “it’s very difficult to see how those categories benefit parents and their decision-making.”

Schools that are generally high-performing and schools that are lower-performing are all grouped together into the same “Needs Improvement” category for failing to meet their achievement targets.

“The classification puts undue criticism on those that are performing and takes the heat off those that aren’t, because they can point and say, ‘We are in the same category as such and such who is doing well,’” Newton said.