by Cynthia Howell
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Friday, November 10, 2006
The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday gave conditional approval to an Arkansas proposal to alter the state’s system of measuring school and student progress on the yearly Benchmark Exams.
Final acceptance of the plan hinges on the state earning approval from the federal agency on Arkansas’ overall student assessment system. The U.S. Education Department in June announced that approval of the overarching assessment system was “pending” because of questions about the difficulty of the state tests and concerns about tests used for special-education students and students who have limited English speaking skills.
The conditionally approved “growth model” plan, considered a national pilot program, is designed to give Arkansas schools credit for their students who are making achievement gains on the state math and literacy tests even if the students fall short of scoring at “proficient” or better.
“We’re very pleased that it’s been approved and going forward,” Ken James, commissioner of education, said Thursday afternoon. “What this allows us to do, which we have never been able to do before, is recognize the growth that kids are making between [scoring] categories. When you look at a youngster who has been scoring at a below-basic level and that youngster is moving toward a basic score, that is still significant growth, and it should be recognized and celebrated because those kids are making progress.”
James said he anticipates approval of the state’s overall assessment plan. The state is working with the federal agency to finalize the changes in the assessment plan and he said he is confident that the final approval is forthcoming.
While the growth-model approach will recognize student gains at all levels, it is not expected to reduce the number of schools on the state’s school improvement list for failing to meet minimum achievement levels set by the state, James said. A total of 325 of Arkansas’ 1,100 schools are on the list this year.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon, a former director of the Arkansas Department of Education, announced in a teleconference with reporters Thursday that a growth-model plan proposed by Delaware was approved. He said proposals made by Arkansas and Florida also were approved for use this year but conditioned upon receiving approval of their overall state assessment plans.
“We anticipate they will get full approval,” Simon said about the two states.
Delaware, Arkansas and Florida join only Tennessee and North Carolina as states that so far have permission to pilot growth models as a means to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed by President Bush in January 2002. Proposals from Oregon and Alaska were not approved, but those states were invited to revise and resubmit their plans by the end of December. Nine additional states have turned in proposals that will now be evaluated.
Simon said he was appreciative of the proposals and the states’ interest, even the demand, for growth-model plans. The work of the states on the growth-model pilot programs will be part of the information about the No Child law that is presented to Congress as it considers the reauthorization of the act in 2007.
The federal No Child law calls for 100 percent of students to score at a proficient level — their grade level — by 2013-14. To that end, the law requires states to annually test students in grades three through eight and in at least one high school grade in math and literacy. Schools in which students don’t meet minimum achievement levels set by the state are placed on a state’s school improvement list and are sanctioned.
Those sanctions, which become harsher over time, require schools to offer students the opportunity to transfer to higherachieving schools at the sending school’s expense. Schools may also be required to pay for after-school tutoring for students, or they may have to replace the curriculum or the faculty, or otherwise be restructured.
This was Arkansas’ second try to win approval of a growthmodel plan.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced in November 2005 that her agency would permit up to 10 states to pilot student-growth models in deciding whether a school is making sufficient progress toward all students scoring at their grade level by 2013-14. That is the overarching goal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
In May, federal officials accepted the student-growth-model pilot plan offered by Tennessee and conditionally approved a North Carolina plan pending approval of that state’s student assessment system. Plans proposed by Arkansas and five other states were rejected, but those states were invited to revise their plans and resubmit them in September. The states were told their plans would be given first consideration for use in the current 2006-07 school year.
Federal officials said Thursday that there were concerns earlier this year that Arkansas’ data system wouldn’t be able to handle its proposed growth-model system. The state’s growth-model plan calls for calculating the yearly achievement gains needed by individual students to get them to a point that they will score at a proficient level on the eighth-grade Benchmark Exams.
Until now, Arkansas and most of the rest of the United States used a “status” system to assess student and school progress toward the national goal of 100 percent of students scoring at “proficient” — or grade level — by 2013-14.
In Arkansas, a minimum percentage of students at each school must score at proficient or better levels on the Benchmark or End of Course exams if their schools are to avoid placement on the state’s school improvement list. The state’s annual performance levels increase yearly for every grade.
Arkansas’ conditionally approved growth model builds on the existing status system.
A trajectory of growth will be established for individual students on the Benchmark tests, Julie Johnson Thompson, a spokesman for the state Education Department, said in a news release. For students scoring at the lowest levels — “below-basic” or “basic” — on the tests, the slope of the trajectory is determined by how much growth needs to occur for students to reach a proficient level by the time they take the eighthgrade Benchmark test.
The growth model also requires students who are already scoring at a proficient or better level on the tests to continue to show growth.
If the percentage of students exhibiting growth at a school equals the percentage of proficient students that the status model requires of a school, then the school will have made adequate yearly progress toward the 100 percent goal and will not be placed on the state’s list of schools in need of improvement and will not be sanctioned.
Arkansas schools also can continue to show adequate yearly progress toward the 100 percent goal by taking advantage of the “safe harbor” provision of Arkansas’ plan. Schools in which students don’t reach the state-set achievement levels can qualify for safe harbor if they can show that the number of students scoring at the proficient level increased by 10 percent over the percentage the previous year.
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