U.S. tells Arkansas it must prove its public school tests aren’t too easy

by Cynthia Howell

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Sunday, July 9, 2006

The federal government says Arkansas’ Benchmark and Endof-Course exams appear to be too easy. 

In a letter to Arkansas Education Commissioner Ken James, U.S. Department of Education officials said Arkansas’ education assessment system — affecting more than half of the state’s 450,000 public school students in any given year — is missing fundamental components. 

As a result, federal approval of the assessment system is “pending,” and the state is subject to “mandatory oversight” in its use of some federal administrative grant money. 

Additionally, the state could lose some of that grant money if it doesn’t submit a plan to correct the deficiencies by the end of this month. 

The letter from Assistant U.S. Education Secretary Henry L. Johnson says the Arkansas testing system can’t be approved “due to outstanding concerns with the lack of item complexity on all assessments.” Also cited were concerns about the alternate assessments given to Arkansas students who have limited English-speaking skills or have disabilities. 

The letter directs Arkansas’ education leaders to produce “evidence that the assessments measure higher-order thinking skills and student understanding of challenging content.” 

James, Arkansas’ education chief, did not return a telephone message left at his office or an e-mail Friday about the federal agency’s concerns. 

But Julie Johnson Thompson, a state Department of Education spokesman, said Friday that state officials are not alarmed and believe the federal agency’s con- cerns can be quickly allayed. 

“We’re not concerned about that because we have never had anyone tell us that our test was not difficult enough or that we didn’t test higher-order thinking skills,” Thompson said. “I think we can furnish that evidence pretty easily.” 

The Benchmark and End-of-Course tests are made up of multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The latter requires students to write sentences or show their work in calculating answers to math questions. The Arkansas exams tend to have many more constructed-response questions than tests used in other states, Thompson said, and those types of questions require more reasoning and logical thinking than some multiple-choice questions might require. 

“That’s why I don’t think we will have any problem showing that our tests are rigorous enough,” Thompson said. 

State officials must send to the federal agency a plan and detailed timeline describing how they will move the standards and testing system into full compliance by the end of the 2006-07 school year. 

Beginning in September, the state must submit bimonthly reports on its progress in carrying out its plan. 

If the state fails at any time to meet the timeline, the federal agency could withhold 15 percent of Arkansas’ Title I, Part A administrative funds. That money would not go to the Arkansas agency but would instead be distributed to Arkansas school districts. Information on how much the state receives in that category of funding was not immediately available Friday. 

Each state developed testing programs in response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s initiative to get students — regardless of their race, disability or socioeconomic status — to achieve at their appropriate grade level by 2013-14. 

To that end, states must annually test third- through eighth-graders and students in at least one high school grade in math and literacy. Science tests also have been added to the roster of tests. 

Besides the Benchmark Exam given in grades three through eight, Arkansas students take End-of-Course exams in Algebra I and geometry, and an 11th-grade literacy test. Results of Arkansas’ 2006 tests are expected to be released in the next few days. 

Arkansas is among many states to have approval of their assessment systems held up by the federal government. 

Thirty-three states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have flawed systems, according to The Associated Press. Additionally, the federal government gave Mississippi a one-year extension and rejected outright the assessment systems in Nebraska and Maine. 

Maine is set to lose $133,883, or 25 percent, of its federal funds targeted for administration, in part because the state has replaced its own high school exam with the SAT college-entrance exam. 

Nebraska could lose about $125,000, largely because that state allows its local school districts to develop their own academic standards and testing to those standards. 

States given full approval are Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia. A handful of other states have been classified as “approved with recommendations” or “approval expected.” 

Thompson and other observers of Arkansas’ public education system said the rigor of Arkansas’ testing system has been validated by the improving achievement levels of Arkansas students on other tests, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is known as the Nation’s Report Card, and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. 

“Our Benchmark scores go up, our Iowa Test scores also go up,” Thompson said. “If they were going in different directions, I would think there was something wrong with our assessment tools.” 

Gary Ritter of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s department of education reform, said the gap between what Arkansas students earn on state tests and national tests isn’t as large as those found elsewhere. 

Ritter cited a 2003 study in Education Next, a journal of opinion and research produced by the Hoover Institution, that ranked Arkansas 12th out of the 50 states and gave it a C-plus based on the difference between the state test scores and state students’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

“Our standards are closer to NAEP than most other states,” Ritter said. “I do have the belief that as compared to other states, our standards are not that low; we are in the upper half.” 

Tom Kimbrell, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, an organization of superintendents and principals, said he was puzzled by the federal citation in light of the state’s use of some of the nation’s best-known testing experts as technical advisers. 

“All the reports we’ve seen, including the NAEP scores, indicate that Arkansas must be doing something right,” he said. “Many of our members felt at one point that maybe Arkansas had set the bar too high,” Kimbrell said about achievement levels on the state tests. 

State Rep. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, chairman of the House Education Committee, said she welcomed a call for increased test rigor. 

“As proud as I am of the improvements we’ve made and as much as we do hear complaints about standards being raised, I’ve always felt we need to ask more of our students,” said Elliott, a recently retired high school English teacher. 

“I’ve always held that our test questions should be reflective of what is required for us to have a world-class education. And I don’t think the questions reflect that,” she said. 

“I look at what is required of students in other parts of the world, and I’m always cognizant that our kids are competing in a global society. If you compare the questions we ask of our students to questions asked of students in nations with whom we are expecting them to compete, there really is no comparison. ... Our test is not nearly where it should be.”