by Heather Hahn
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Friday, July 6, 2007
Arkansas students made gains this year on most standardized tests compared with last year’s scores, according to results state education officials released Thursday.
In addition, for the first time since the state began phasing in the Arkansas Benchmark Exams about a decade ago, the achievement gap between white and black students narrowed.
“Scores are rising steadily, though not as dramatically as we would like,” Education Commissioner Ken James said at a news conference where he announced the results of the Benchmark, End-of-Course and Iowa Test of Basic Skills exams.
Almost all of Arkansas ’ 452,000 public-school students took at least one, and a majority took two or more of the exams during the spring semester that just ended.
On the 2007 Benchmark, more than 55 percent of 207,618 test-takers scored at grade level or better on both the math and literacy sections. In 2006, 50 percent or more scored at grade level or better. But only 48 percent of the eighth-grade students scored at least at grade level in math this year. That was still an improvement over 2006’s 44 percent.
Similarly, more than half of the students who took the Endof-Course Algebra I and geometry exams scored at grade level or better. Student scores dipped slightly on the spring End-of-Course Exams, but for the first time in three years, scores increased on the 11th-grade exam in literacy, with 51 percent scoring at proficient or better.
On the Iowa Test of Basic Skills exam, students continued to score above the national level in the third-through-seventh grades, in the 49th percentile in the eighth grade and in the 48th percentile in the ninth grade.
The Iowa assessment is a national multiple-choice, standardized test that compares the achievement levels of Arkansas students with a national sample of students who took the same test, which encompasses math, science, reading, language arts and social studies.
If a student scores at the 62nd percentile on the Iowa test, the student scored better than 62 percent of the national sample of students who took the same test.
“Anytime when you are trending up, it’s been a good year,” said state Sen. Shane Broadway, DBryant, a member of the Education Committee.
“And the trend over the past three years indicates we’re making progress. Certainly, you’re never satisfied with where we need to be, but the gains that have been made I lay strictly at the feet of teachers and the work they are doing in the classroom.”
James also attributed the gains to improved professional development for teachers and principals.
One of the improvements that James stressed most was the reduction in the disparity between white and black students’ scores.
“Not only did the achievement gap narrow,” he said, “but it happened at the same time that African-American test scores improved.”
Black students in Arkansas historically have trailed their white peers often by more than 30 percentage points. But in most cases this year, they closed the divide with their white peers by 1 to 5 percentage points.
For example, 55 percent of black third-graders scored at or above proficient in math compared with 42 percent in 2006. At the same time, the difference between black and white thirdgraders in math decreased from 33 to 27 percentage points.
However, the gap between Hispanic and white, non-Hispanic students widened this year by as much as 11 percentage points as compared with 2006.
James attributed the change to an alteration in state testing of students with limited English skills. Before this year, the state used portfolio assessments for students who weren’t native English speakers. But to win federal approval of Arkansas ’ testing program, the state abandoned that system, and those students now take the same Benchmark exams as their peers take.
“You may be looking at students who in their home country may not have been at school,” James said.
“And they’re coming to the United States , and we’re putting a test in English before them and say, ‘Go forth and do well.’ They have no command of the English language. Their chances of being successful on the examination are not very good.”
James said he hopes the way students with limited English are tested will be addressed when the federal law faces reauthorization this year.
Scores on the Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course exams are used to determine whether schools are academically troubled and in need of improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The state tests include a combination of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Literacy exams also include essay questions.
Students who fail to score at proficient or better on the state exams must participate in some kind of remediation.
Beginning in the 2009-10 school year, students will have to pass each of the End-of-Course exams and the 11th-grade literacy exam to pass their courses, which are required for graduation.
Schools in which students fail to make adequate yearly progress — the minimum improvements required by the state Department of Education and by the federal law — are identified as “needing improvement” and must permit students to transfer to higherachieving schools if such schools exist in the district.
If a school’s scores continue to fall below minimum requirements, the school must provide private tutoring in addition to the option of allowing the transfers. And if scores still continue to fall, sanctions become even more severe — and call for changes in curriculum or staffing.
Currently, 310 schools are on the state’s improvement list. The 2007 list of schools in need of improvement will be released later this summer.
Still to be determined is whether 18 Arkansas districts that were put on alert status earlier this year scored well enough to avoid being placed on the state’s improvement list and penalized.
The districts were put on alert status because the student body or subgroups of students didn’t meet state achievement standards in 2006 in any of the three elementary, middle and high school grade spans.
The districts awaiting word are Brinkley, Clarendon, Cross County , Dollarway, Fort Smith , Hampton , Little Rock , McGehee, Mineral Springs, Mulberry/Pleasant View Bi-County, Murfreesboro , North Little Rock , Osceola, Pine Bluff , Pulaski County Special, Smackover, Strong-Huttig and Texarkana .
Across the state, school districts experienced a broad range of Benchmark scores.
In El Dorado , for example, 45 percent of the eighth-grade math students scored at proficient or better, as did 60 percent of the test-takers in literacy.
In Jonesboro 47 percent of eighth-graders scored at proficient or better in math, while 64 percent did in literacy.
In Pine Bluff , 11 percent of the soon-to-be high school freshmen scored at proficient or better in math, and 32 percent did in literacy.
In Brinkley, where a student boycott jeopardized the spring testing season, 34 percent of eighth-grade math students scored at proficient or better, as did 40 percent in literacy.
In Bentonville, 79 percent of eighth-grade math students scored at proficient or advanced on the test, as did 80 percent in literacy.
Karen Morton, director of testing and data for the 11,100-student school district in Northwest Arkansas , attributed her district’s high scores to high expectations.
“There is just such a culture in the schools to outperform last year,” Morton said.
“We’re very competitive in our region, in the state and in our schools. So everybody really concentrates on it.”
Margie Snider, a ninth-grade physical science teacher in the North Little Rock School District and the chairman of the district’s policy committee for teachers, said the emphasis on testing has affected teaching across the 9,800-student school system.
“We do tend to teach toward the Benchmarks more,” Snider said.
“It does give us more of a united goal, where we had more individual goals in the past. I believe that it has also caused us to have a more united effort to seeing that every child achieves every goal.”
Information for this article was contributed by Cynthia Howell of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
