LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas schools and school districts are now excused from complying with the key provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that requires 100 percent of public school students to score at grade level on state math and literacy exams by 2013-14.
The U.S. Department of Education on Friday approved the Arkansas Department of Education’s request for a waiver from the federal law and endorsed the state’s alternative school-accountability plan.
That new plan, which goes into effect immediately, calls for reducing achievement gaps between a school’s overall student body and an expanded subgroup made up of all special education, poor and non-native-English-speaking students at a school.
Each school would have to reduce its achievement gaps by half by 2017.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell on Friday welcomed the federal approval of the state’s waiver request, which was submitted in late February and modified in recent weeks in response to questions from the federal agency.
“This flexibility allows Arkansas to evaluate schools in terms of performance, growth and graduation rate,” Kimbrell said. “With our new system of accountability, support and intervention, we will focus on specific problems unique to each public school in Arkansas.”
Waiver requests from four other states - Missouri, South Dakota, Utah and Virginia - were also approved Friday, bringing to 24 the number of states exempted to date from parts of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Waiver applications from 13 states are still pending.
The federal Education Department last year invited states to seek waivers to the act when Congress failed to reauthorize the now-10-yearold version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
In a telephone conference with reporters Friday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was enthused about the provisions in the Arkansas plan to combine three subgroups of students traditionally at risk of failing into one subgroup.
That expanded subgroup - if it contains at least 25 students - will have to show annual gains in achievement and academic growth, or the school will face state intervention.
“Arkansas is going to hold literally hundreds - hundreds - of additional schools accountable for the performance of low-income students, students with disabilities and English language learners,” Duncan said.
“To be very clear, these were students who were invisible for the previous 10 years,” he continued. “This is a huge step in the right direction, and I appreciate their courage so much in that.”
Under the state’s now former accountability plan, a school had to have at least 40 students in any one subgroup, such as special-education students or poor students, to be held accountable for the performance of that subgroup.
Many schools did not meet the threshold of 40 students in a subgroup and, as a result, the schools were not held responsible for the achievement of typically at risk students.
According to the newly approved waiver plan, Arkansas’ more than 1,000 schools will be classified as “achieving” or “not achieving.”
The highest of the “achieving” schools will be labeled as “exemplary” and rewarded with minimal state monitoring of their instructional programs.
On the other hand, the lowest 5 percent of schools in terms of a three-year average of student achievement will be categorized as “priority” schools and face intensive state intervention.
The next 10 percent of low-achieving schools, again on the basis of a three-year average, will be considered “focus” schools and will also be subject to a high level of state assistance.
Kimbrell said Friday that about 50 state schools identified as priority schools will be posted publicly Tuesday, as will as many as 150 schools labeled as focus schools.
The labeled schools and their districts face a loss of at least some local autonomy and will have to put into place strategies to raise achievement. Those efforts might include contracting with school management or charter management organizations.
“We know we have to spend a lot of time and resources and energy in getting these students caught up,” Kimbrell said Friday about the focused and priority schools.
“That’s going to mean a year-and-a-half or a year and-three-quarters’ worth of educational value to a student in one year, which means a lot of new strategies for a lot of schools.”
Kimbrell said schools will be able to move off the focus or priority lists in a year, but they have to maintain the new strategies for an extended period.
“They couldn’t implement strategies and say, ‘Hey, we moved from “focused” to “achieving,” so we aren’t going to do these things anymore,’” Kimbrell said.
“They will be required to keep the strategies in place for three years because we are looking for three years of data. One year won’t get you there.”
The state’s former accountability plan called for every school to meet annual, state-set performance levels on the Arkansas Benchmark and End of Course exams, with the goal of every student scoring at proficient, or grade level, in math and literacy by 2013-14.
In the new accountability plan, the required annual increases in math and literacy on the state exams will vary by school, with those schools that have the greatest achievement gaps having to make greater annual gains.
Those schools that don’t meet the annual gains will be classified as “not achieving.”
Kimbrell gave as an example of the plan’s application a school in which 84 percent of the overall student body scored at proficient in 2011, as did 60 percent of the students in the super subgroup, which is more formally titled the Targeted Achievement Gap Group.
The difference, or gap, between the two groups is 24 points, which would have to be reduced by half, or 12 points, by 2017, Kimbrell said, at a minimum of 2 points per year starting with the 2012 Benchmark and End of Course scores.
At the same time, the overall student body must show annual achievement gains, he said.
Arkansas Education Department officials held public forums across the state earlier this year to get advice about the components for a new accountability system.
Kimbrell said he and his staff were repeatedly urged to give credit for achievement gains made in schools that started with very low student performance.
“They really wanted us to focus on the growth of schools and students,” Kimbrell said. “That’s where the focus is. Let’s recognize that some schools started at a much different level of student performance than others, and let’s give credit for growth and let’s get this gap closed.”
The waiver plan means other changes for the schools.
Previously, schools that failed to meet the state’s annual achievement requirements had to offer their students the opportunity to transfer to other, higher performing schools in a district, as well as pay outside organizations to provide after-school tutoring for their students using a portion of their federal Title I funds.
The new plan is less restrictive, although students who previously transferred to a different school may continue to attend their current schools.
Lee Tackett, a North Little Rock School District principal, on Friday said she welcomed the waiver plan because she sees it giving school leaders more flexibility in how to spend federal dollars to meet the needs of students.
The Arkansas plan and supporting materials are available under the “What’s New” link on the Arkansas Department of Education website at arkansased.org or more directly at arkansased.org/programs/nclb.html.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/30/2012