LITTLE ROCK — Significant changes must be made to a state policy to allow the Arkansas Board of Education to intervene or even take over some of the state’s poorest performing school districts, Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said Sunday.
Even a dramatic raising of the bar would leave some schools out of reach, he said.
Kimbrell made the remarks at a state board work session set to discuss revising standards for academic distress, a classification that allows the state to sanction or take control of districts that fail to meet an academic standard set by the board.
Under the current standard, no districts perform poorly enough to receive the label - even some that could benefit from state intervention, Kimbrell said.
“One size does not fit all and one remedy will not fit all schools,” he said. “We need to make a rule and say, ‘If you’re going to land on this list, you need to get busy doing some things.’ ”
Kimbrell plans to use input from board members and groups that include the Arkansas Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, to help structure a proposed revision to the academicdistress rule, which he will bring to the board in December.
The current rule defines an academically-distressed school district as one in which 75 percent or more of students score at belowbasic levels on the state Benchmark and End-of-Course exams.
Below basic is the lowest of the four achievement levels on the state tests, with the other three being basic, proficient and advanced. Students who score proficient or advanced are considered “at grade level.”
But if the classification was applied when as few as 40 percent of a district’s students score below basic,only one district - a charter school - would qualify, said Jeremy Lasiter, an attorney for the Education Department. He would not identify the school.
Board members suggested basing the academic-distress rule on below-basic and basic test scores, rather than focusing the measure on exclusively below-basic students.
“If even just 25 percent of elementary school students score below basic, that ought to raise a ginormous red flag,” board member Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville said.
Only charter schools would qualify using a combination of basic and below-basic scores in the measure unless the board sets the threshold at 40 percent, Lasiter said.
Board members also suggested putting an entire district under academic distress when one of its schools orgrade levels - defined as elementary, middle and high school - fail to meet the standard the board sets.
They suggested using a district’s ability to raise test scores of individual poorlyperforming students as a factor in the new formula.
Kimbrell agreed that it would be important to give academic leaders time to adjust to and understand the revision before it would be applied.
The academic distress rule is defined in Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-425, which authorizes the state board to define and identify academically-distressed districts and then requires the districts to correct deficiencies or face being taken over by the state.
That could result in the removal of a superintendent, the dismissal of a school board and, in some cases, annexing the district to a higher-performing system - much in the way that school districts identified by the state as being in “fiscal distress” are managed.
Under the fiscal-distress rule, which is much more frequently applied, the state has up to two years to correct financial issues in the districts it takes over.
Board members worried that would not be a sufficient amount of time to address academic issues, particularlythose related to poverty or poor family circumstances.
“We’re coming in with a BB gun when what we really need is a bazooka,” board member Joe Black of Newport and Helena-West Helena said.
The law would allow the board to extend state control of an academically-distressed district beyond the two-year period, Lasiter said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 09/12/2011