The Arkansas Board of Education on Monday repealed its rules for assigning A-F letter grades to more than 1,000 public schools so it could alter a provision in those rules for grading alternative education campuses.
The revised proposal, tentatively approved at a special teleconference meeting, will now be the subject of a soon-to-be-scheduled public hearing. The Education Board is expected to consider final approval of the revised rules in early 2015 after the public hearing.
The letter grades are required by Act 696 of 2013 and are meant to be easier for parents and other community members to understand. The grades will replace the older, little-noticed state practice of rating schools on a scale of 1-5 on annual school report cards.
The annual report cards are put online in April, Lori Freno, an attorney for the Arkansas Department of Education, said Monday. The effort to adjust the section of the rules on alternative education schools is not expected to delay the annual school report cards, Freno said.
The new letter grades, which will not carry any penalties or rewards for the schools, take into account school results on state-required student tests; any year-to-year gains that are made by the school on the state tests; the size of achievement gaps among student groups at a school; and, if applicable, a school's graduation rate. The formula also takes into account any differences in graduation rates among student subgroups at a school.
The Education Board in October approved letter-grade rules that exempted alternative education schools that have their own state-assigned local education agency, or LEA, number from receiving letter grades. The board's decision was meant to prevent further stigmatizing of the alternative schools and their students, who are often low-achieving for the reasons that resulted in their alternative school placements.
Alternative education schools are operated by school districts to serve students who have not been successful in their regular schools for reasons such as chronic absenteeism or misbehavior.
In some cases, students are assigned by a district to alternative schools on a short-term basis but return to their regular schools and are considered all along to be students in the regular schools.
Six districts -- Hot Springs, Beebe, Cabot, Fort Smith, North Little Rock and Texarkana -- operate alternative education campuses that have their own local education agency numbers. The students can be permanently assigned to those schools through their graduations.
Education Department staff had suggested that the rules be revised to give school districts the choice of assigning their alternative education students back to the regular schools for the purpose of calculating letter grades or accepting letter grades for their alternative schools.
Board member Jay Barth of Little Rock said he preferred "a one-size-fits-all approach" and getting rid of the opt-out proposal by the department staff.
The Education Board voted 5-1 to require school districts to include the alternative education students in the calculation of the letter grades for the students' regular attendance-zone schools.
The requirement will result in a change for the six school systems that operate alternative schools with local education agency numbers, Arkansas Education Commissioner Tony Wood said. The achievement levels of students in the alternative schools would be added into the grade calculations for the regular schools in those districts.
State Education Board member Vicki Saviers of Little Rock asked how open-enrollment, independently run charter schools that target and serve a high percentage of alternative education students would be affected by the letter-grading system.
Those schools, such as the School for Integrated Academics & Technologies in Little Rock and Premier High School of Little Rock, are one-campus systems. They do not have an accompanying traditional or regular school with which to partner for grading purposes.
Freno said there has been no decision on how to address those types of independently run charter schools.
"The rules will be going out for public comment," Freno said. "At that point, anyone who has an opinion on how those schools should be treated could certainly speak up, and that would be brought up before this board before any decision is made."
State Education Board Chairman Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock said the problem is that the state law on grading schools doesn't include any language about the alternative education schools, and he suggested that the omission might be best addressed in the 2015 legislative session.
The formula for calculating the letter grades was developed by the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Office of Innovation for Education in consultation with the Education Department staff, leaders of administrator and teacher organizations, and representatives of philanthropic groups.
Arkansas is joining at least 14 other states in using A-F letter grades, according to a 2013 report by the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. Florida, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina are some of the other states that apply letter grades to schools.
The Arkansas system can be used only once before it will have to be significantly revamped. That's because the Benchmark and End-of-Course exams -- on which the grading system is based -- are being replaced this school year with a new testing system, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exams.
Metro on 12/02/2014