District embracing testing, data; Hot Springs' analysis program employed by other schools

by Heather Wecsler

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Roy Rowe remembers vividly a meeting he had several years ago in which he scolded Hot Springs high school teachers about low math performance. 

"They said they were dealing with kids who hadn't been taugh fractions," said Rowe, the Hot Springs School District’s superintendent for the last 17 years. “I realized I didn’t know whether they had been taught fractions or not. And that’s an impossible situation for a superintendent to be in — not knowing what his students are learning.”  Rowe, a former math teacher, decided what he needed was actual data he could get quickly that showed what skills his students were mastering and when. So he sought the advice of the National Office of Research, Measurement and Evaluation Systems at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, which strives to improve student evaluations using interactive technology. 

Rowe hired Joel Rush, a UA doctoral candidate in statistics who worked in the office, to develop a new evaluation program for the district. Rush devised a series of tests based on the state’s standards and a database for recording the tests’ results. 

With the click of a button on a password-protected Web site, the program lets teachers and school officials view how individual students, classes and schools are doing on each of the concepts tested. The district named this process The Learning Institute. 

That was in 2000, a year before the federal No Child Left Behind Act — President Bush’s initiative to improve public school education — became law. Today, 16 other Arkansas school districts have joined the 3,800-student Hot Springs school system in using The Learning Institute. 

They are the Arkadelphia, Blytheville, Brinkley, Bryant, Camden-Fairview, Conway, Dumas, Forrest City, Hughes, La- fayette County, Marion, Mc-Gehee, Mountain Pine, Texarkana, Van Buren and Watson Chapel school districts. Most of the districts have a similar socioeconomic picture to Hot Springs, where 76 percent of the students qualify for the federal free-and-reduced-lunch program. Each district pays dues of $20 per student to participate, with a $20,000 minimum and $60,000 maximum charged per district. 

The dues help pay for The Learning Institute’s office in the Hot Springs administration building, which has 17 employees including Rush. The staff has developed 500 unique tests to be distributed in all the participating districts. 

Every four to six weeks, all the teachers in a single district will administer their tests at the same time. The tests, which differ from grade to grade, each cover a chunk of material that will be on the Arkansas Benchmark or End-of-Course exams. Each of these “chunk tests,” as Rowe calls them, are then processed through a computer. And within days, teachers know exactly what questions their students missed and can begin remediation immediately if necessary. So far this school year, the institute has distributed more than 250,000 tests. 

Rowe said The Learning Institute expands on an idea from Clarke Street Elementary School in Milwaukee, Wis., where he learned 98 percent of students were on free-and-reduced-lunch, but 90 percent scored proficient or better on the state’s mandated tests. 

That school was using textbook end-of-chapter exams to measure what concepts students were learning and then employed math and literacy focus teachers to coach other teachers on how to address concepts where students were falling behind. The Learning Institute also uses focus teachers, or coaches, who work with teachers at each school. 

“The first most critical part is having the data immediately and knowing how well you’re doing,” Rowe said. “The next thing is knowing what you’re going to do about it. And that’s still one of our biggest issues — finding the time and the resources to deal with what we’re not doing well.”  The Hot Springs school system still faces challenges in student achievement. Both Hot Springs High School and Hot Springs Middle School are in their second year on the state’s school improvement list because various subgroups of students failed to meet state-mandated performance levels on the Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course exams. At the high school, the subpopulations needing help in literacy were black students and economically disadvantaged students. In the middle school, the cited subgroups were black students in math and students with disabilities in math and literacy. 

The longer a school is on the list, the more severe the penalties. Schools on the list for two years must offer transfers and pay for tutoring for students who remain. 

“There’s spots where we know there is a problem, but for whatever reason, we have failed to implement the correct steps,” Rush said. “In literacy, in particular, I think everyone is wrestling with how you fix that particular problem just because there are very few secondary certified literacy folks out there who really understand how to teach reading to kids who haven’t been reading for a really long time.”  Rowe readily acknowledges that the database can only identify problems, not solutions. For instance, he knows from The Learning Institute’s database that many students in his district still struggle with fractions. 

But Rowe and Rush said they hope the test data will encourage teachers, administrators and even districts to exchange ideas about what works in the classroom. 

Jerry Guess, the superintendent of the 2,800-student Camden-Fairview School District, said he supports the institute because it helps education more closely resemble business, which he sees as the driving force behind new national student achievement requirements. But he said a business model has its limits because education always will be fundamentally different from the way most businesses operate. 

“We’re not dealing with manufacturing toilet paper, truck tires or any other tangible product,” Guess said. “So the variables that affect student performance are much more difficult to manage.”  Lee Vent, superintendent of the 3,900-student Forrest City School District, credited The Learning Institute with giving him feedback on student progress long before he receives the results of state-mandated tests. 

Debra Byers, a ninth- through 12th-grade reading resource teacher at Hot Springs High School and president of the Hot Springs Classroom Teacher Association, said she has heard grumblings from colleagues that the process encourages teachers to teach only what’s on the state-mandated tests. But she sees The Learning Institute as just one more tool teachers can use in guiding instruction. 

“Like it or not, the test is here to stay, and to some extent, it is going to drive instruction,” Byers said. “I don’t like the term ‘teaching to the test’ because these are the skills the government has decided it is important for students to have, and they are testing those skills.”  Jay Greene, head of the UA Department of Education Reform in the College of Education and Health Professions, said he thinks The Learning Institute’s approach makes a lot of sense. 

“It’s not really practice tests,” Greene said. “What you’re doing is measuring your progress on a regular basis and seeing where your strengths and weaknesses are, so you can focus your energies on where you’re behind and get satisfaction from the knowledge that you’re making progress in areas that you’re strong.”  Rowe encourages other school districts to contact his office if they are interested in participating. 

“I think we have a great mechanism to build some great schools, some great districts and improve education in the state of Arkansas,” he said.