LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Education is seeking a waiver to the federal No Child Left Behind Act by offering an alternative plan in which each public school would have customized achievement goals for both its overall student body and student subgroups that are traditionally at greater risk of school failure.
The proposed plan, introduced to the Arkansas Board of Education at meetings Sunday and Monday and due at the U.S. Department of Education by Feb. 28, comes just two years before the federal law requires 100 percent of students - regardless of their language, disability and poverty barriers - to achieve at their grade level on state math and literacy exams.
The U.S. Department of Education last year offered states the opportunity to seek one-year waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act provision calling for all students to score at proficient levels on state tests by 2013-14. The request for waivers came with the proviso that the waiver plans be at least as rigorous as the existing requirement.
The draft plan that calls for schools to make yearly achievement and graduation gains in each of the next six years “sheds a light on every student,” Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said, and presents a “great opportunity for our state to move education ahead.”
The plan “informs the parents in a much simpler fashion as to how effective their schools are in meeting the needs of all children.”
But Education Board member Vicki Saviers of Little Rock didn’t see the draft plan as rigorous enough and said the state should put greater demands on school districts and school boards for the improvement of chronically low performing schools where children have languished for years.
“Now is our opportunity to do something really meaningful for these kids,” Saviers said, adding that other states have proposed “literally taking those schools out of the districts and placing them in what they are calling achievement districts.”
“We need to get someone’s attention here,” she said.
Once Arkansas’ plan is submitted to the federal education agency, state and federal officials will work together to come to a mutual agreement, Kimbrell said.
The Arkansas proposal calls for each school to reduce by half - within six years - its gap between the current percentage of students who score at proficient levels on Benchmark and End-of-Course exams and 100 percent proficient.
If a school in 2011 had 76 percent of its students scoring at proficient in literacy, for example, its proficiency “gap” of 24 points would be divided by 2 to produce the 12 percentage points it must achieve in 2-percentage point increments each year until the 2016-17 school year.
Denise Airola, a research specialist for the Arkansas Leadership Academy, which assisted the state Education Department in developing the waiver proposal, said the plan calls for schools with lower percentages of proficient students to make greater annual gains within the same time frame.
Airola called the proposed achievement goals “ambitious but achievable,” unlike the law’s current 100 percent requirement. Each school would be held accountable for the achievement of not only its overall student body but also for a subgroup of at least 40 students who are either receiving special education services, are not native English language speakers and/or are from low-income families as determined by eligibility for federally subsidized school meals.
Currently, a school must have at least 40 students in any one of the categories of special education, non-native English language speakers, poor children, or Hispanic, black or white students before it is held responsible for the achievement level of the specific subgroup.
If the subgroup does not meet annual achievement requirements, the school is labeled as needing improvement and penalized even if the overall student body meets the achievement goals. But if the subgroup population is smaller than 40, the students in that subgroup are included only in the overall student body.
Of Arkansas’ 1,070 schools, 96 percent have special education students, Airola said, but only 16 percent of those schools has 40 or more special education students.
Similarly, 80 percent of schools have black students but only 33 percent have at least 40.
In contrast, 90 percent of Arkansas schools would have 40 or more students in the targeted achievement gap group - the combination of special education, poor and limited English-speaking students.
By combining those three categories of students into one group, Airola said, more Arkansas schools will be held accountable for the achievement levels of at-risk student subgroups than they are now.
That “super subgroup” of students as it has been called in waiver plans in other states is termed the “targeted achievement gap group” in the Arkansas plan.
In addition to schools being held responsible for improving the percentages of students achieving and making gains by specific amounts over six years, high schools would be held accountable for systematically improving graduation rates over the same time period.
The proposed waiver plan reduces the number of labels given to schools from 16 to 5, Airola said.
Schools that might be labeled as “meeting standards” or needing “whole school intensive improvement” would be designated as exemplary, achieving, not achieving, in need of focused intervention or priority schools in need of systemic change.
Focused schools would be the 10 percent of schools that have the greatest gaps in achievement levels between the highest and lowest performing subgroups of students, or have low-achieving subgroups or low high school graduation rates.
Priority schools would be about 52 Arkansas schools - primarily schools that receive federal Title I funds because of high percentages of poor students - that are at the bottom 5 percent of schools in terms of achievement over time.
Those lowest performing priority schools would have to develop three-year “priority intervention plans” and must not only work closely with the Department of Education but also commit to working for three years with an external organization, such as a charter management organization or an external management organization, that would assist the school in improving leadership, ensuring teacher effectiveness, adjusting the instructional time and using data.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/14/2012