NORTHWEST ARKANSAS Focus : Literacy scores decline for many area schools
Posted on Friday, July 6, 2007
The largest school districts in Northwest Arkansas showed significant decreases in elementary literacy scores on the 2007 Benchmark Exams released Thursday by state education officials.
Administrators in those districts largely blamed the lower scores on a change to state policy that forced thousands of students with little or no English skills to take the standardized tests.
Bentonville, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, Rogers, Siloam Springs and Springdale all saw their Benchmark third-grade literacy scores drop from 2006 to this year. Five of the six districts saw fourth-grade literacy scores drop, as well. Four of those six saw literacy scores decrease in the fifth and eighth grades.
Northwest Arkansas is home to the majority of students known as English-Language Learners, who overwhelmingly speak Spanish.
The U. S. Department of Education uses the terms English-Language Learner and Limited-English Proficient to refer to students who do not speak, read or write English fluently because they come from environments where English is not the dominant language.
Thousands of low-level English-Language Learners previously took an alternative portfolio exam in lieu of the Benchmarks. To win federal approval, the state abandoned that system, and those students now take the same Benchmark exams as their peers if they’ve been in the U. S. public school system for more than one year.
“You may be looking at students who in their home country may not have been at school,” state Education Commissioner Ken James said at a news conference in Little Rock.
“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, ’” James said. “They have no command of the English language. Their chances of being successful on the examination are not very good.”
The policy change meant 10, 559 English-Language Learners took the literacy exam this year in the third through eighth grades, according to state data. Last year only 4, 693 such students took the same exams.
The achievement gap between Hispanic and white, non-Hispanic students on the Benchmarks widened between 2006 and this year by as much as 11 percentage points.
The Springdale School District — which has more than 6, 000 English-Language Learners, more than any other district in the state — saw its literacy scores drop almost across the board.
The only exception was sixth grade, where scores stayed the same. In some instances, the decreases dropped Springdale’s overall literacy scores below state averages.
Don Love, Springdale’s assistant superintendent for secondary education, said an additional 464 English-Language Learners in the sixth through eighth grades took the Benchmarks this year. That’s enough new test-takers to skew Springdale’s overall scores in those grades, he said.
“I don’t know how else to account for it,” Love said. “The portfolios weren’t the best way to assess them, but it was a way, and it was preferable to just throwing them in the testing pool.”
In the Rogers School District, 230 English-Language Learners out of more than 2, 000 who took the Benchmarks this year scored on grade level or above in both literacy and math. Deputy Superintendent Mark Sparks said Rogers officials are happy with that figure, considering the test-takers’ language abilities.
Scores on the 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, short-answer and, on literacy exams, essay questions.
The entire Fort Smith School District will probably be added to the state’s school improvement list, said Kellie Cohen, director of student achievement and accountability.
Fort Smith saw a decrease in literacy scores in the third, fourth and eighth grades, which Cohen attributed to the performance of English-Language Learners and special education students.
Schools in which students fail to make adequate yearly progress — the minimum improvements required by the state Education Department and by the federal law — are identified as “needing improvement” and must permit students to transfer to higherachieving schools if there are such schools in the district.
Fort Smith is one of 18 school districts that were put on alert status earlier this year 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.
If a school’s scores continue to fall below minimum requirements, the school must provide private tutoring in addition to the option of transferring. And if scores still continue to fall, sanctions become even more severe, including calling for changes in curriculum or staffing.
Administrators interviewed said they’ll continue to put more resources into services for English-Language Learners. This includes adding teachers at schools with high concentrations of these students, expanding pre-kindergarten programs and investing in more professional development.
Virginia Abernathy, assistant superintendent for elementary schools in Rogers, said it’s the district’s goal for all 800 certified teachers to go through significant training in English as a Second Language techniques within five years.
“It’s going to become an expectation,” Abernathy said.
Across the state, students made small gains this year on the standardized tests compared with last year’s scores.
Bentonville had some of the highest scores in the state. Seventy-nine percent of its eighth grade math students scored at proficient or advanced levels on the test, as did 80 percent of the students on the literacy section of the test.
Karen Morton, Bentonville’s director of testing and data, 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.”
Students who fail to score proficient or better on the state exams must participate in some kind of remediation in their school.
For the first time since the state began phasing in the Benchmarks about a decade ago, the achievement gap between white and black students narrowed.
Black students in Arkansas have historically trailed their white peers, often by more than 30 percentage points. This year, they closed the divide with their white peers by 1 to 5 percentage points. Information for this article was contributed by Cynthia Howell of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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