NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Local schools have generally succeeded in educating waves of immigrants in Northwest Arkansas despite challenges, educators and experts say. Still, records show test scores lag in public schools with the largest minority student populations.
The area’s school districts have experienced a rapid growth in the number of minority students, especially in Springdale and Rogers, since the mid-1990s. The Hispanic population in both towns exceeds 30 percent, or about double the national average, according to U.S. census figures.
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Three elementary schools in Springdale and one in Rogers have minority populations more than 80 percent. Springdale has six secondary schools with minority populations greater than 50 percent. All Rogers middle schools are almost half minority.
The transition has been marked by language barriers and achievement gaps as officials adjust to the diverse classrooms, said educators, students and parents.
“I think they’ve coped pretty well with changes that in other places have really screwed up public schools,” said Bob Maranto, a University of Arkansas education professor.
No Child Left Behind
Northwest Arkansas’ Hispanic students, who constitute the region’s largest minority population, are less likely to score proficient or advanced on state tests in math and literacy, according to data from the National Office for Research, Measurement and Evaluation Systems. The office is an educational statistics center based at the University of Arkansas.
For example, 68.4 percent of all Rogers students in 2009 scored proficient or advanced on the 11th-grade literacy test, compared to 45.1 percent of Hispanic students. In Springdale, the numbers were 58.7 percent for the general student population and 35.5 percent for Hispanic students.
Larger achievement gaps exist for students from low-income families and students with limited English proficiency, the data shows.
The state Department of Education placed Rogers High School in school improvement this year and placed Rogers Heritage High School on alert this year for failing to make adequate yearly progress in Hispanic literacy scores. Both schools also failed to make adequate progress on general-population literacy scores and low-income literacy scores, records show.
Each year under the federal No Child Left Behind act, public schools are required to increase the percentage of students who score proficient or better on math and literacy tests. The goal is to have all students test proficient or better by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.
Arkansas places schools that do not make the required progress on alert for the first year, then in school improvement in subsequent years. School improvement can include stricter state control and additional programs to help students.
On almost all tests at schools in Rogers and Springdale last year, more Hispanic and other minority students than required met the goals set by the state for all students to make what’s known as adequate yearly progress. This is the state-mandated annual improvement in test scores.
Eighteen of the Springdale’s schools made adequate yearly progress for 2010 under the federal No Child Left Behind education law. This included elementary schools with large minority populations, such as Jones, Bayyari and Parson Hills.
Of Arkansas’ 1,075 public schools, 41 percent made adequate yearly progress for the 2009-2010 school year, according to a news release from the Arkansas Department of Education.
Standardized Tests
Many factors can drag down a minority’s performance as a group on standardized tests, educators said.
Minority students are more likely to be from low-income families, which means they’re less likely to have grown up with books in the house and other early educational opportunities, experts said. Their families tend to move more frequently, making it difficult to settle into a school’s routines.
The biggest challenge, educators said, is minority students in Northwest Arkansas schools are more likely to have grown up speaking a language other than English. That means they have to struggle with a foreign language on top of the regular academic challenges of homework and tests.
Chris Goering, a University of Arkansas College of Education professor, said the testing system in the state, especially as it applies to students learning English, is flawed. He described a hypothetical situation in which an English-speaking American student with no knowledge of German would be sent to Germany. After two years, the student would have to take all the same tests as the German students, in German, and that student’s performance would be used to measure the quality of the school.
“That just doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to be a good idea,” Goering said.
Under federal law, students classified as having limited English proficiency must be counted in schools’ math tests immediately and on literacy tests after 12 months of enrollment, said Julie Johnson Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Education.
Lourdes Rodriguez, an eighth-grader at Oakdale Middle School, said she came to Rogers from Baja California, Mexico. She started school as a third-grader at Grace Hill Elementary School. When she arrived at school, she spoke no English.
“I came in, and people were talking in English and pointing at me,” she said. “I didn’t know what they were saying.”
She carried an English-Spanish dictionary and used it to look up every word in her homework assignments.
“That dictionary was like a magic book,” she said.
Halfway through her first year in the U.S., Lourdes was comfortable speaking English. She slowly learned to read and write by reading the English and Spanish lines of bilingual books, she said. Her teacher helped her, making flash cards and practicing with her after school, Lourdes said.
Lourdes said standardized tests were frustrating and depressing. She had a hard time understanding many of the questions without her dictionary, she said.
“I would be like, ‘What are they saying?’ and I’d put the pencil down and cover my eyes because I was so mad,” Lourdes said.
In Springdale, new students fill out a form listing the languages people speak at home. Students who indicate they speak another language are tested for English proficiency, said Mary Bridgforth, district director for English as a second language.
The Spanish-speaking students also take a test to determine their literacy in their native language.
The district does not conduct a literacy assessment for Marshallese students, the district’s second-largest minority. There is no test available in their native language, Bridgforth said.
Preparing For Tests
On a recent November morning, Shirley Gregory, a fourth-grade teacher at Russell D. Jones Elementary School in Rogers, helped students work with brightly-colored wooden cubes, building towers and pyramids.
Soon the students would use the blocks to build cubes and rectangular prisms to learn how to calculate volume, one kind of problem on the standardized tests they’ll take this spring.
Jones has the largest percentage of minority students in the Rogers district, almost 81 percent. Gregory said 20 of her 26 students speak English as a second language.
The Rogers school was among the most improved schools in the state and Northwest Arkansas for math and literacy this year, according to the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas.
A report from the office shows Jones has posted a 22-point increase in the number of students testing proficient or advanced in literacy and a 15-point increase for math.
Pam Camper, principal of Jones, said linking academic concepts to real-world experiences, such as the block-building exercise, is a key to her school’s strategy for teaching the diverse student body.
Eventually the students will move on to working the volume problems with pencil and paper, but regardless of race or ethnicity, they will have a better understanding because of the blocks, Gregory said.
“The hands-on really helps,” she said. “Good teaching is good teaching.”