LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Education, which announced the achievement status of the state’s 1,102 public schools and public charter schools on Monday, said it will release more school and district achievement data in coming weeks.

That information, some of which it made available Tuesday, will be accessible to parents and others on the Arkansas Department of Education website and through the National Office for Research on Measurement and Evaluation Systems, or NORMES, which is based at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and has a contract with the Education Department to produce statistical reports.

On Tuesday, the Fayetteville-based organization made available on its website individual school achievement reports that detail the reasons for each school’s particular achievement status.

A red indicator on the report shows a student group missed the achievement target. A green indicator shows the school met the target.

Imminent are achievement status reports for entire school districts and an expanded list of top-performing “exemplary” schools of which there are currently just five, Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said Tuesday.

Kimbrell said Tuesday that all the calculations and reports on the achievement status of the state’s schools and school districts are a work in progress.

“This is a case of learning as we go, and NORMES is having to learn, too, as we apply the new rules,” he said.

The flow of new and updated reports is the result of the state’s new school accountability system, which was approved by the U.S. Department of Education in June as a waiver to the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The 10-year-old federal law calls for all students to achieve at their grade level or better on state math and literacy tests by the 2013-14 school year, a target that state education leaders have called laudable but unachievable.

The Arkansas waiver plan instead tailors achievement goals to each school, calling for schools to cut in half the gap between the percentage of their students scoring at proficient or better on state tests last year and 100 percent proficient, and closing that gap with incremental gains over six years.

Each school’s overall student body must make the prescribed incremental annual gains on the Benchmark and End of Course exams and so must the school’s subgroup of all students who are poor, receive special education services or are learning English as a second language. The subgroup typically has different required annual gains than the overall student body.

“This new system of accountability focuses on individual schools and allows each to have its own unique set of targets,” Kimbrell said Tuesday. “No school now has a goal that it can’t reach. Under the old system, I could show you a bunch of schools that weren’t going to reach it.”

The revised accountability system includes five categories of achievement for schools: exemplary, achieving, needs improvement, focus and priority schools, with priority schools being the lowest achieving 5 percent of schools in the state.

Exemplary schools are those in which a high percentage of the student body and the subgroup of at-risk students score at proficient or better and, at the same time, both groups also show achievement progress over time.

Initially, the state Education Department identified 19 schools as exemplary on the basis of data from 2009-2011, but when officials took into account 2012 test results, only five of the original exemplary schools met the criteria.

Kimbrell said Tuesday that the NORMES organization in the coming days and weeks will sort through the 341 “achieving” schools to identify additional schools that now meet requirements to be added to the exemplary list.

Exemplary schools are entitled to greater autonomy from the state in terms of school improvement efforts.

“Achieving” schools are those in which the overall student body and the subgroup of at risk students either meet achievement targets on state tests or meet the targets for achievement gains.

They can meet those targets based on the most recent state test results or on a three-year average of their test results, whichever works to the school’s advantage.

The current five exemplary schools include KIPP: Delta Collegiate High School, an independently run charter high school in Helena-West Helena; and Haas Hall Academy, an independently run charter high school in Fayetteville. The others are Cotton Plant Elementary in the Augusta School District; Arnold Drive Elementary in the Pulaski County Special School District, and Clinton Junior High in the Clinton School District.

Scott Shirey, founder and director of Kipp: Delta Charter Schools, said Tuesday that school leaders were pleased that the charter school was included among the stateidentified exemplary schools. He attributed the success in part to the fact that that the high-performing high school students started in the charter school system in the early grades.

“It’s a testament to the fact that the longer students are at KIPP, the more productive and successful they are,” Shirey said.

Shirey said the honor was noteworthy in light of the school’s location in a part of the state where there is high poverty and widespread low achievement.

“It’s nice to look at the geographic map and see representation in the Delta,” he said.

Fourteen other schools were initially identified as exemplary but were moved to other categories on the basis of 2012 state test results. Those schools were: Van Cove Elementary in the Cossatot School District, Park Magnet Elementary in the Hot Springs School District, Tuckerman Elementary and Tuckerman High in the Jackson County School District, Kingston Elementary in the Jasper School District, Mount Pleasant Elementary in the Melbourne School District, Norfork Elementary in the Norfork School District, West Elementary in the Osceola School District, Pea Ridge Middle in the Pea Ridge School District, Marshall High in the Searcy County School District, Luxora Elementary in the South Mississippi County School District, Valley Springs Middle in the Valley Springs School District, and the Academy of Technology and the Academy of Service and Technology, both in the Vilonia School District.

In addition to the five exemplary and 341 achieving schools, there are 581 “needs improvement” schools, so labeled because the overall student body or the at-risk subgroup missed achievement targets.

There are also 109 focus schools that have the largest achievement gaps between the at-risk student group and those not at risk.

There are 46 priority schools. Both the focus and priority schools face the greatest state involvement in their operations. Both sets of schools must prepare and follow school improvement plans.

A link to the website for NORMES is on the left-hand side of the Arkansas Education Department’s website: www.arkansased.org.

To review a school’s 2012 school accountability status, use the drop-down menu under the “schools” heading on the NORMES site to select a school.

Once a school is selected, again use the drop-down menu under “schools” to select “ESEA School Accountability Report” for the school.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/21/2012