Criteria set for district in LR to exit state control
Arkansas Department of Education leaders on Friday unveiled a set of characteristics and criteria that the Little Rock School District and its schools will be expected to demonstrate to be eligible for release from five years of state control in early 2020.
In part, the eight schools in the Little Rock district that have F grades must show student achievement growth on the upcoming ACT Aspire tests as compared with the 2017 test results.
Additionally, the total number of students scoring in the “close,” “ready” and “exceeds” categories of achievement on the Aspire tests in math and English/ language arts at each of those eight schools must surpass the total number of students in the lowest, “in need of support,” category.
None of the district’s eight F schools met that requirement this past school year on the Aspire’s English/language arts tests. Four of eight schools did so in math.
The district’s eight state-rated F schools are Bale, Romine, Stephens and Washington elementaries; Cloverdale Middle; and J.A. Fair, Hall and McClellan high schools.
There are other exit criteria as well. At stake is the district’s release from state control and the election of a local school board to set policy for the district of more than 20,000 students.
State laws says a school district can operate under state authority for five years, at which point the state Education Board must either release the district, reconstitute it or consolidate with other districts. That five years expires for Little Rock in January 2020.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key and Mike Hernandez, who
is the state superintendent for the Office of Coordinated Support and Service, walked members of the state Board of Education through what they called qualitative and quantitative criteria to be exhibited by the Little Rock district in advance of any release of the district from state authority.
Key noted that the Education Board members have been asking for measures of success for the district.
The resulting criteria, he said, are meant to answer questions of “How do we know if there is a first down? And how do we get a touchdown?”
The Education Board in January 2015 voted 5-4 to assume control of the Little Rock district because six of the district’s 48 schools at the time had chronically low scores on state-required tests and were labeled as academically distressed. A majority of students at those schools had scored below proficient on the math and literacy tests over multiple years.
The accountability system and the state testing program have since changed. Little Rock is now classified as a Level 5 district, needing intensive support.
Arkansas Code Annotated 6-15-2917 says that if the public school district has not demonstrated to the state board and the Department of Education that it meets the criteria to exit Level 5 within five years of the state takeover, “the state board shall annex, consolidate, or reconstitute the public school district.”
“The qualitative criteria are the conditions, the behaviors, the actions that we believe will demonstrate that the district is ready to exit and is no longer in need of intensive support,” Key told the Education Board.
“Beyond qualitative, we have quantitative criteria that are based on our current ACT Aspire and the measures we’ve established,” Key said, adding that the quantitative measures — test results — are meant to show whether the qualitative measures are having an impact on student performance, achievement and growth.
Similar but uniquely tailored exit criteria would be used for other districts under state control, Hernandez and Key said. Those currently are the Dollarway,
Earle and Pine
Bluff school districts, which were taken over by the state and their school boards removed or stripped of power because of academic and/or fiscal problems.
There are five qualitative characteristics or practices that include the use of collaborative teacher teams to address curriculum and instruction issues, and the use of monitoring to check on the consistent use of “predominant instructional practices.”
Other qualitative indicators are ongoing teacher evaluations, adherence to state and district standards for curriculum and testing, and the management of fiscal, operational and technological resources in a way that supports teachers and promotes student achievement.
Each of the qualitative measures is paired with several indicators that can be used to assess success of the practice.
The measures applying to the district’s F-graded schools generated the most discussion.
In regard to demonstrating achievement growth, the plan calls for every school to reach a growth score of 80 or better in the overall numerical score required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
The overall numerical score for a school includes scores for achievement and school quality as well as for achievement growth, which compares student achievement to the previous year.
A score of 80 or better in achievement growth means that a student or a whole school demonstrated the same growth or more growth than the student or the whole school did the previous year.
Only one of the district’s F schools — Hall High — did that on the 2018 Aspire exams, earning an 80.22. The other schools had growth scores that ranged from 74.98 at Romine Elementary to 77.58 at McClellan High.
Education Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne was complimentary of the exit plan and its use of a measure in which students are asked to do better than they did in the previous year. If they made three months of growth in the past year, then three months or better would produce the desired 80 score, she said.
“This growth quantitative is really right on point,” Zook said. “It discounts any problem with socioeconomics or race. It just says how did you do last year and how did you do this year.”
The other numerical criteria in the exit plan calls for the F-graded schools to produce more students scoring at “close,” “ready” and “exceeds” on the state-required exams than there are students scoring at the “need support” level.
At Hall, for example, there were 344 students who scored at the needs support level in English/language arts compared with 95 students at the other three levels in 2018. None of the eight schools met the criteria in English/ language arts. Romine, Bale, Stephens and Washington met the standard this past year on the math test.
Education Board Chairman Jay Barth of Little Rock had concerns about the timing for the exit criteria plan, noting that the district and schools have only one test administration — in
April — to meet the criteria.
“The odds are very long,” Barth said. “The criteria are logical but the goal is almost impossible to achieve in a short time,” he said.
“It’s not perfect,” Key responded, but he also noted that there was a transition in the state’s accountability system and testing program and that the new accountability requirements offer more flexibility than in the past.
Previously a hard and fast 49.5 percent of students had to reach a proficient score on state math and literacy tests in each of three consecutive years to avoid an academic-distress label.
Hernandez offered assurances that “all hands will be on deck” from the Education Department to help Level 5 and fiscally distressed districts.
Key said the old practice of taking over a district, removing the school board and relying solely on a state-appointed superintendent to fix a district’s problems is a model that has not worked well.
The results of this year’s student testing — including the growth scores for the schools — will be known in the fall, at which time he and his staff will work with the Education Board to determine next steps for the Little Rock district. Those steps could stop short of a full return to local control but instead classify the district as a Level 4 system in which it would continue to receive strong support from the state Education Department staff but with a locally elected school board.