Nearly $7 million in rewards will go to more than 150 Arkansas public schools in the coming weeks for their performance on last spring's state-required math and literacy exams.
The Bentonville School District will receive the largest share of the 2016 Arkansas School Recognition Program money -- $927,400 to be split among 11 high-performing campuses.
Roberts Elementary School in the Little Rock School District will receive the largest reward for a single campus -- $178,800 -- a product of its large student enrollment and its place among the top 5 percent of schools in two categories: high scores and year-to-year achievement gains.
The money will be provided by the state Department of Education.
[LIST: Performance rewards for state’s highest-achieving schools]
Schools earning awards are also in districts such as Armorel, Bryant, DeWitt, Emerson, Taylor, Fayetteville, Greenbrier, Harrison, Mountain View, Searcy, Springdale, Rogers, Valley View, Viola, and West Memphis.
And some of the recipient schools are in charter systems including LISA Academy, Responsive Education Solutions, Haas Hall Academy, Academics Plus Charter Schools and eStem Public Charter Schools.
The awards are expected to total $6,797,700.
"It was a wonderful way to end the first semester, to learn that we had five schools that had scored in the top 10 percent in achievement or in academic improvements," Janice Warren, Pulaski County Special School District's assistant superintendent for equity and pupil services and director of elementary education, said this week about rewards going to campuses in that district.
A total of $270,600 will go to five of the district's elementary schools: College Station, Baker, Chenal, Pine Forest and Arnold Drive. Arnold Drive is now part of the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District that detached from the Pulaski County Special district July 1.
School committees will meet after the Christmas and New Year's vacation to decide how the individual schools will use the reward money.
Act 1429 of 2013, revised by Act 854 of 2015 authorizes the state to annually reward those schools that are ranked in the top 10 percent of the state's more than 1,000 schools in terms of achievement and achievement gains on state-required math and literacy tests. That was the ACT Aspire last spring. High schools with the highest graduation rates also are rewarded.
Schools ranked in the top 5 percent in achievement and in achievement gains are provided $100 per student at their campuses. Schools that rank in the next 5 percent tier of achievement and achievement gains are eligible for rewards of $50 per enrolled student.
The law directs that each winning school form a committee comprised of the principal, a teacher selected by the faculty and a parent representative to identify how the reward money will be spent within the parameters of the law.
The law specifies that the money must be spent on either nonrecurring bonuses to a school's faculty and staff members, on the purchase of materials and equipment to maintain and improve student achievement or on the temporary employment of personnel to help maintain and raise student achievement.
Each school committee must send its spending plan to the Education Department to attain the reward. Education Department staff members will begin reviewing the proposals from the school committees on Jan. 17.
Proud in Bentonville
Debbie Jones, superintendent of the Bentonville School District, said she was proud of the hard work and the focus on instruction in essential skills that is occurring at all schools in Bentonville, including the 11 that are to receive the special state funding.
"It's confirmation that you spent all this time and you worked hard," she said about the reward money. "It's just confirmation that it is paying off."
In the past, the state money has gone toward supporting the development of academic programs for Bentonville high school students and increasing the number of computer devices available to students.
The latest round of reward money is likely to be directed toward employing temporary "interventionists" to help academically struggling students, Jones said. Although legally permissible, using the reward money for employee bonuses isn't likely.
"We won't support that practice in Bentonville because it's not equitable," Jones said. "While some schools will get the reward money, others may not, and so that's not a practice that we support."
It's a difficult stand to take on the use of the reward funds, Jones said, but she also said the district is taking other steps to raise teacher pay. The district has committed to add, at a minimum, a 1 percent increase to the teacher salary fund every other year. That would result in pay increases above and beyond annual step increases for additional experience and education.
"We want to keep good teachers and we know that it is competitive," she said.
College Station Elementary School in the Pulaski County Special School District and Pine Bluff Lighthouse Academy, a charter school, also are listed among the recipients. That's a feat accomplished despite very high percentages of pupils at those schools who qualify for subsidized school meals, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Office for Education Policy noted in an analysis last week of the rewards program.
Teaching individuals
A high percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price school meals is an indication of family poverty and of students who may be academically behind their peers from more affluent families.
Lisa Watson, the former principal at College Station Elementary and now principal at Fuller Middle School, said this week that she was overjoyed by the news of the recognition and reward money.
Watson attributed the success to an ongoing analysis of student test data to identify the education needs of each child and teaching to those individual needs -- and not trying to make one size fit all.
It was an adjustment for teachers, she said. "But after they saw that the data was going to help drive their instruction and they saw kids improving, every single teacher on the staff got on board."
Watson said she hopes the school will celebrate the hard work of the pupils and use the reward money to benefit the pupils and keep the children moving forward. She said she wouldn't object to the faculty reaping at least some of the special funding in the form of bonuses.
"The teachers worked hard," she said. "Sometimes they came in as early as 6 o'clock in the morning and sometimes they didn't leave until 7 or 8 p.m. because they didn't want to wait until the next day to see how their kids had performed. They wanted that data. They would grade the work and come running to the office to say the kids had improved 10 percent."
Sarah McKenzie, executive director of UA's Office for Education Policy, noted that the schools in the 10 percent tier rewarded for high achievement -- the schools that had the highest numbers of students who scored at proficient levels on the state tests -- were primarily in Northwest and central Arkansas.
"We would expect them to come from the less-poverty regions of the state," McKenzie said. But she said she was surprised to see that the schools rewarded for achievement gains, or growth, from the 2015 tests to 2016 tests didn't have greater distribution throughout the state. Those reward recipient schools also were concentrated in northwest and central Arkansas.
Almost 50 of the schools recognized for achievement gains also are being rewarded for highest overall achievement.
The fact that so many of the highest-achieving schools also showed great achievement gains indicates that schools are continuing to push their students to do even better, she said.
But McKenzie also said, "We don't just want to reward a school or a district for having a population that is more ready to succeed than other schools or districts."
Gary Ritter, the founder of the Office for Education Policy, said Thursday that he looks forward to evaluating the student test results in forthcoming years when the state's testing system is more stabilized. That will give him greater confidence in the analysis of student achievement gains.
The state has used three testing programs in the past three years -- the Arkansas Benchmark and End of Course exams, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and most recently the ACT Aspire exams in grades three through 10 in math, literacy and science.
Ritter said the awards are, at the most, $100 a student in schools that typically spend about $10,000 a student. "It has the appearance of a big dollar amount but it amounts to about 1 percent of the per-student expenditure," he said of the rewards.
The achievement awards are calculated by adding the number of students who met or exceeded proficient levels on the Aspire math and English/language arts exams and dividing that number by the total number of test-takers. That is multiplied by 100 and the results for each school are ranked.
The calculation for determining the achievement gains of each school includes a "value-added" calculation that took into account past performances of students and compared that with their 2016 performance on the state tests.
A Section on 12/23/2016