Judge focuses on achievement gap

Intervenors question district’s effort to level field for Black, white pupils

A federal judge responsible for deciding whether the Pulaski County Special School District is entitled to be released from court monitoring of its desegregation efforts asked on Thursday how much weight he should give to the achievement gap between black and white students.

U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr., on the third day of a multiweek hearing, referred to earlier testimony about state-mandated ACT Aspire exams on which the district’s white students have typically scored about 20 percentage points higher than Black students. One district leader testified that the district has experienced spikes and valleys in the scores but is making “tremendous improvement.”

Marshall asked school district attorneys for statistical tables that show the test results over time.

“I’m wondering how that can be true if that graphing is not done,” Marshall said of Assistant Superintendent Janice Warren’s earlier report of student progress.

Marshall said that even if it is a given that the ACT Aspire exams are important to see what is happening in the district, he questioned how the information should be used in deciding the district’s unitary status.

“Do you agree that under

the law as it now stands, those results are not determinative of the district’s good-faith efforts to close the gap?” he asked Austin Porter Jr., an attorney for the district’s Black students, who are known as the McClendon intervenors.

The intervenors are challenging the 12,000-student district’s assertions that it has met the requirements of its desegregation plan, Plan 2000, on student achievement, student discipline, condition of facilities and self-monitoring of desegregation efforts. District leaders are arguing in the hearing this week that the district has substantially complied in good faith with its desegregation mandates and deserves to be released from the 37-year-old lawsuit.

“I don’t know that actually I agree,” Porter responded to the judge’s question.

“It’s our position that the district has not even made good-faith compliance in trying to eliminate that gap. The results bear that out,” he said, adding that the “district has had plenty of time to reduce that gap but that gap remains and it remains at the expense of African-American students.”

Earlier, Porter had compared the Pulaski County district to a dandelion puff.

“At the first blush it may look good … then all of sudden the petals fall away,” he said.

The district’s desegregation obligations include meeting education goals contained in what is called the Ross plan.

One of the Ross plan goals is “to decrease the performance gap between white students and African-American students through the systematic design/selection and implementation of intervention programs that provide effective remediation and/or adaptation to individual or group needs.”

The judge said the McClendon intervenors changed his word of “determinative” to “indicative.”

Marshall said he understood the intervenors’ position to be that even if the law doesn’t require fixing the problem — the achievement gap — the lack of a fix or of meaningful progress toward a fix is indicative of a lack of good-faith effort.

In response to questions from school district attorney Devin Bates, Warren and Superintendent Charles McNulty told the judge that student results on end-ofyear exams such as the ACT Aspire can vary because of changes in the state-required tests.

When tests change, adjustments have to be made in the curriculum and instruction to align to the new end-of-year tests, and that can take at least two or three years, said Warren, who is the district’s assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services.

The state has required the ACT Aspire exam in math, literacy and science since the spring of 2016, although it wasn’t given this spring because schools were closed in mid-March to on-campus instruction during the pandemic lockdowns.

McNulty said that he thought the district would have seen an improvement in the results of Black students based on improvements seen earlier in the school year, especially in the southeast section of the district that has a relatively higher percentage of Black students.

The state required the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC test, in the 2014-15 school year and before that required the Benchmark and end-ofcourse exams.

If the district had refused to conform to state changes in the testing program, it would have been in violation of state directives, she said.

In response to questions from Porter, Warren said that math facts and other academic skills remain the same when tests change. She also told Porter that it is the district’s responsibility to make the instructional adjustments to align with the state-required tests.

McNulty, who has been superintendent of the district since July 2018, told the judge that the majority of the district’s multiple initiatives to improve academic achievement work together as a system.

Teachers work in professional learning communities to design lessons on which students are tested using biweekly tests or “common formative assessments” with questions pulled from a bank of test questions. Index cards bearing the names of students are moved from spot to spot on a school data wall to better track the student’s progress on the taught lessons, based on the results from the common tests. Students then take the Northwest Education Agency’s Measure of Academic Progress, three times a year in preparation for the Aspire tests.

Other initiatives such as services to dyslexic students, Advancement Via Individual Determination college preparation and teacher training on the science of how students learn to read, feed into the system, McNulty said.

The superintendent testified that the current racial achievement gap is “unacceptable,” but he also said that there have been areas of improvement in student achievement, as reflected by higher A-F letter grades given to some schools from the state.

McNulty said that if the district is declared unitary, the academic achievement of Black students will remain “the highest priority.”

Alesia Smith, deputy superintendent of learning services, was called for the third time in three days to the stand Thursday afternoon to introduce the district’s school-by-school program evaluation for 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Marshall, who said at one point that he felt he was in a forest of education acronyms, asked Smith if there had been a systematic evaluation of academic initiatives before Smith’s employment in the district.

Smith said she was unaware of any and that the program evaluation format is one that she and others — including technology specialists — developed.