Expert: Desegregation not all tied to test scores

LITTLE ROCK — Student performance on state- required tests in the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District is not a deciding factor on whether the district has met its desegregation obligations, a federal court expert testified Thursday.

Asked by attorney Scott Richardson if “bad results mean non-compliance,” Margie Powell, who has been a court-appointed desegregation adviser to Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. since 2014, said “no,” and added that the 2019 results for Black and white students were “not great.”

Earlier, Jacksonville High Principal LaGail Biggs had testified that 88% of Black ninth-graders scored below grade level on the ACT Aspire reading test, which was last given in April 2019, while 55% of white students did the same.

In math, 91% of Black ninth- graders and 75% of white students scored below the desired “ready” or “exceeds ready” levels.

Powell also said Thursday that in preparing a November 2019 report to the judge on academics she found no evidence that any of the Jacksonville district’s curriculum, classes or instructional practices were denied to Black students. She said she saw no intentional discrimination by the district against Black students and detected no negative effects on Black students from implicit racial bias.

Powell and Biggs were among four people to take the stand Thursday on the fourth day of a hearing on whether the 4,000-student Jacksonville district has met its desegregation obligations, and can be declared unitary and released from further court monitoring of its operations.

Marshall is conducting the hearing during which district representatives are arguing that the school system has met its desegregation Plan 2000 requirements on academics, student discipline, incentives for staff and self-monitoring of desegregation efforts.

Richardson’s case has centered in part on the argument that poverty is more of an impediment to student achievement than student race.

Attorneys for the McClendon intervenors, who are the Black students in the district, contend that the district has fallen short of its desegregation commitments and that initiatives now in place to meet the obligations are too new to be judged for effectiveness.

Austin Porter Jr., an attorney for the intervenors who will present his case to the judge next week, has suggested in his cross examination of the district officials that implicit racial bias and stereotyping are barriers to Black students in the district.

Porter questioned whether Powell investigated the district for implicit racial bias. While Powell said most people have biases of some kind, she didn’t seek those out in the Jacksonville district because there is no provision about that in the desegregation Plan 2000.

Powell did agree with Porter that district initiatives such as Response to Interventions, Advancement Via Individual Determination, Measure of Academic Progress tests, and the Ford Next Generation Learning model for college and career preparation are new and will take some time to show results.

Biggs said about 70% of the students at her school are from low income families, and that poverty can be a factor in student learning and achievement.

“I have found that poverty doesn’t know color,” Biggs said, but added that more of the school’s Black students are from poor families.

Shana Loring — principal at Murrell Taylor Elementary School, director of the district’s Advancement Via Individual Determination program to promote college- going, and former director of the kindergarten-through-12th-grade curriculum — said in response to questions that she had seen bias in some white teachers. She said she had attempted to coach them and prepare improvement plans for them.

Loring said implicit bias can bleed into instructional practices and affect the rigor of instruction, the selection of teaching materials and the ability to build relationships with students and their parents.

Asked to give a wish list for her school, Loring called for smaller class sizes of no more than 12, the employment of a math specialist, and more experience and expertise in the teaching staff.