About one-third of Arkansas' 1,055 public schools have received letter grades of D or F for the 2021-22 school year based on multiple factors, including the results of the ACT Aspire exams given last spring.
A total of 32% of the schools -- about 338 -- are receiving D's and F's compared with 19% of schools in 2019, the last year that the state applied letter grades to campuses before the global covid-19 pandemic that disrupted education in Arkansas and across the nation starting in March 2020.
On the other end of the grading spectrum, the number of Arkansas schools receiving a top letter grade of A is 85, or 8% of the total. The 8% is half of the 16% that received A grades in 2019.
The percentage of schools receiving B grades went from 30% in 2019 to 20% this year.
Meanwhile, the C-graded schools increased from 35% in 2019 to 40% in 2022.
The Arkansas Board of Education, Arkansas Department of Education staff and the state's Every Student Succeeds Act Steering Committee are planning to give a report to the public at 1 p.m. today from the Arch Ford Education Service Cooperative in Plumerville on the 2022 letter grades and the Every Student Succeeds Act scores on which the grades are calculated.
The event is open to the public and will be available via livestream at https://youtu.be/nLd8dPUCZ_4.
The Every Student Succeeds Act scores and the letter grades were posted Tuesday on the Education Department's My School Info website at the statewide "Reports" link.
That link is https://bit.ly/3G04jqJ.
The posting was publicized by the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville's Office for Education Policy, which put together its own spreadsheet of the school by school data.
That information is available here: https://bit.ly/3fNhbFY.
The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to hold schools and school districts accountable for student achievement.
In Arkansas, each school receives an "ESSA index score" composed of the results from the ACT Aspire tests given in grades three through 10 every spring.
Also included in the ESSA score calculations are student attendance, the percentage of students reading at grade level, and science achievement. At the high school level, graduation rates, enrollment in advanced courses and community service are also factors in the ESSA score calculations.
Kimberly Mundell, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the letter grades aren't the "be all and end all" of the accountability system, that there is much student data to be mined in the system.
Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the Office for Education Policy, noted the decline in top grades for the schools in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic. In Arkansas, schools were closed to in-person instruction in March 2020 through the end of the school year. Schools were reopened for on-site instruction beginning in August 2020, although about 20% of students participated in online learning from their homes for at least part of the 2020-21 school year.
"The pandemic shock to student achievement provides a good opportunity to think about how ESSA scores and associated letter grades are assigned and if they are indicating quality the way we would hope to be," McKenzie said.
While McKenzie said she is a proponent of A to F letter grades for schools because they are easy for the general public to understand, she said changes to the existing system are in order.
She suggested that schools be given two grades -- one based on achievement and the other based on improvement, or growth, in achievement.
As it stands, the achievement level of a school overpowers the year-to-year improvement in student achievement, McKenzie said, even through achievement growth signals that a school is doing a good job with its students.
McKenzie highlighted E-Stem Charter Middle School in Little Rock for achieving the highest level of growth in the state, but only receiving a C letter grade.
It's not that the school isn't doing a good job, McKenzie said, but it is serving a disproportionately higher population of students from low-income families who may not have all the resources for their children that more affluent families have for their school-aged children.
Among the schools receiving D's and F's in the state are 20 F's and five D's applied to schools in the Little Rock School District. Six schools in the capital city system received A's and B's, and six others received C's.
Superintendent Jermall Wright said Tuesday night that the district will host a news conference at 11:30 a.m. today to respond to the ESSA scores and letter grades.
"We are and will be undergoing many changes in the LRSD to impact school performance and district effectiveness," Wright said Tuesday evening.
The district's School Board in recent months has approved plans for after school tutoring, for restructuring its alternative learning programs to improve graduation rates and provided teachers with higher salaries and retention payments as a way to retain and recruit teachers.