A total of 125 of Arkansas' approximately 1,050 public schools -- or 12% -- improved their state accountability scores in the 2020-21 school year compared with the 2018-19 school year that preceded the covid-19 pandemic.
Among those with improved scores are Baker Elementary in the Pulaski County Special School District, Warren Dupree Elementary in the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District, Poyen Elementary in the Poyen district, Hellstern Middle School in Springdale, three elementary schools in Fort Smith, three schools in El Dorado and six in Bentonville.
The Arkansas Department of Education's Division of Elementary and Secondary Education posted the 2020-21 school accountability reports, including the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, index scores, to the agency's website Friday.
Absent this year are accompanying A-F letter grades for the schools based on the ESSA numerical scores. Act 89 of 2021 waived the letter-grade requirement for one year. In 2019, a total of 169 schools received A grades and 38 scored F's.
The accountability scores will now be used by state education leaders to identify the top 10% of highest-scoring schools and top 10% of schools with the greatest academic growth for monetary awards that in the past have totaled about $7 million.
State officials said this week that they were not surprised that the school accountability scores fell for almost 90% of the schools in the wake of the global pandemic.
"There is no doubt that it has been a challenging year-and-a-half in education," Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key said Friday in a statement announcing the accountability data. "Arkansas students and educators have faced unprecedented circumstances, but they have risen above them all and continued learning," he said.
"The results released today reflect some highlights and positive movement among some school districts," Key said, "and because of that, we know student learning can and will persist despite the circumstances. While we know there is still work to do, today, as always, I am proud of our educators and students who faced the pandemic head-on and rose above its challenges."
The reports include scores for subgroups of students in each school, including racial and ethnic groups, impoverished students, and those who have disabilities or are non-native English-language learners.
The numeric scores, which are on a scale of 1 to 100, depend in large part on the results from the state-required ACT Aspire exams given in third through 10th grades last spring. Those tests occurred near the end of a school year in which educators had scrambled to simultaneously teach students in-person and online.
The Aspire test results, reported this summer, showed declines in achievement at every tested grade and in every subject area, with the largest drops in math.
State education leaders are encouraging schools and districts to use the ESSA score reports to adjust their school-level improvement plans and their resource allocations.
"It's a time for communication and not comparison," Arkansas Deputy Education Commissioner Stacy Smith said of the scores this week. "It's time for us to really dig in and find out what worked and what didn't and making sure we are talking about that."
Smith noted that districts have received federal covid-19 relief funds, including the American Rescue Plan money, of which at least 20% must be set aside to address learning loss.
"That literally is the floor," Smith told the Arkansas Board of Education. "A lot of our schools need to be looking at the funds they are receiving and making sure that they are using those funds -- well above 20 percent -- to identify where their kids lost and how they are going to fill in that hole. Their district support plans and their school improvement plans should be reflecting that."
Smith said the state is using its own allocation of federal covid-relief money to tackle achievement gaps. That includes partnering with the Arkansas Out-of-School Network to provide after-school and summer programs across the state.
"Again, everything is about how do we address any type of loss our students had in the last year and a half," she said.
Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville's Office for Education Policy, said Friday that parents should not be surprised by the school score declines given the link to the Aspire results.
"Statewide, only 4.4% of schools in the state saw an increase in student achievement from 2018-19, the last time the test was administered," McKenzie said.
State education leaders reported Friday that about half of the state's schools -- 531 -- earned a separately calculated "value added growth score" of 80 or better.
"The value-added growth scores are, in my opinion, the best evidence of how well a school is educating its students," McKenzie said.
"These scores measure how well a student performed based on how well they were expected to perform given their prior achievement on the ACT Aspire. If a student met the growth, he or she receives a score of 80. Students who did not increase their academic achievement as much as expected receive a score below 80, while students who increased their achievement more than typical receive a score higher than 80. These are averaged at the school level.
"The especially great thing about the value-added growth score this year is that it is immune to the statewide academic declines in student achievement from pre-covid testing," she said.
Even if most students declined in achievement, average growth is still assigned 80 points, even if it was a decline from the previous year's performance.
"So if students declined, but not as much as other similar students, the school is rewarded with a high growth score for that student," McKenzie said, adding that "this helps us because we can compare growth scores across time to determine which schools are making significant progress in student learning."
Arkansas' annual school accountability data is required by the federal Every School Succeeds Act of 2015.
The states received federal government waivers of the student testing requirements at the end of 2019-20 because of the pandemic that began in this country in March 2020.
In Arkansas, campuses closed for on-site instruction in mid-March 2020 and efforts were made through the end of that school year to provide instruction virtually and/or through packets of paper lessons.
In the 2020-21 school year, in contrast to many other states, all Arkansas public schools provided on-site instruction the entire year.
However, about 20% of the state's 470,000 public school students opted for online lessons from home. Even for those on campus, there were times when outbreaks of covid-19 or exposure to the virus caused a class, grade, school or district to temporarily shift to online instruction.
Arkansas did not seek a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education for the 2020-21 Aspire testing, nor did it seek a waiver of the federal requirement that at least 95% of eligible students at a school participate in the testing.
Some parents objected to having their students participate in testing that had to be done in school-supervised settings rather than at students' homes.
Statewide, 97% of eligible Arkansas students took the Aspire tests last spring.
However, not all schools reached the 95% requirement, and their Every Student Succeeds Act scores have been lowered as a result. The state reports show both the score earned for the school and the lower score for failing to reach the 95% threshold.
Only the adjusted ESSA School score is used for accountability purposes.
Although the Every Student Succeeds Act score relies heavily on the Aspire test results, it also includes high school graduation rates and college entrance exam results if applicable to a school, progress by students who are English language learners, and indicators of school quality and student success. Those quality and success indicators include student attendance, science achievement and gains, numbers of students reading at their grade level, and community service by students.
Each school's data can be found on the state's My School Info website: myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov. After searching for a particular school, click on the school's name and then the "Reports" tab and then the "ESSA" School Index tab.