ACT Aspire results show poverty continues to challenge Benton, Washington districts

DECATUR -- The Decatur School District ranked last among the public school districts and charter schools in Benton and Washington counties in overall grade-point average and in English, science and reading. The district ranked second to last in math and writing. Decatur Elementary, Decatur Middle and Decatur High School all ranked in the bottom quarter of the region's schools.

The district also had the highest percentage of low-income students, who made up 79.3 percent of the 585 students attending Decatur schools. Superintendent Jeff Gravette anticipates the percent of students qualifying for free or reduced-price meals will exceed 90 percent this school year.

The results were disappointing, especially in the middle and high school, Gravette said. Efforts to improve performance include tutoring offered after school and in the summer. The school board also recently approved a new math curriculum intended to help boost test scores.

"It will be an uphill climb, but I believe we have the staff in place to dramatically improve our achievement at the upper grade levels," he said.

Results of the new ACT Aspire continue to show an achievement gap between schools with high poverty and low poverty.

"That's something we've seen in assessment over and over," said Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the Office of Education Policy.

With a few exceptions, the highest performing schools statewide were schools with fewer poor children, while the lowest performing schools tended to have higher concentrations of low-income pupils, she said. Statistics on poverty in schools are based on the percentages of children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals based on family income.

Results for districts and schools in Benton and Washington counties follow a similar pattern.

An analysis by Office of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas provides an overall glimpse of student performance. The office found that 68 percent of students earned a ready or exceeding score in English, followed by 43 percent in math, 39 percent in reading, 38 percent in science and 31 percent in math.

The analysis also includes an overall grade-point average of 2.33 for the state, reflecting the performance levels of all students tested across grade levels and subjects.

A similar analysis was done for school districts and campuses across the state, including for the 123 schools in Benton and Washington counties. Among the 31 schools in the bottom quarter for performance, based on the grade-point average, at least 30 have low-income student populations above 50 percent of their enrollment. Among the top 31 performing schools, just six schools have low-income student populations of 49 percent or more.

Poverty affects a child's education because of struggles that are common to low-income families, including low levels of parental education, less stability in the home and poor nutrition, McKenzie said.

"A lot of that has to do with the skills kids come into school with," McKenzie said. "Once kids start behind, it's very hard for them to catch up."

The ACT Aspire results set a new baseline for evaluating student performance, educators said. Students have experienced a series of changes in testing over the past three years. The state administered Benchmark and end-of-course tests through the 2013-14 school year. The state then switched to a new testing system in the 2014-15 school year based on work of a multi-state consortium, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers in 2015.

The switch to the ACT Aspire for the 2015-16 school year followed recommendations from a 16-member Governor's Council on Common Core Review, which considered concerns about the tests from the consortium, and the desire of Gov. Asa Hutchinson to withdraw from consortium.

The ACT Aspire for the first time provided separate scores in English, reading and writing, McKenzie said. More students earned proficient scores in English than in any of the five subjects tested, but the state's lowest performance was in writing.

The English test focuses more on skills related to grammar, punctuation and editing, while the writing test gave students 30 minutes to generate, develop and compose ideas into an essay.

Past test results only reported one literacy score, though the ACT Aspire also provides a combined English language arts score reflecting all three areas.

Math also is a subject that continues to challenge students, McKenzie said.

ACT Aspire

• Given this spring to third- through 10th-graders.

• Students tested in five content areas.

• English focused on knowledge and skills for editing and revision, including punctuation, grammar, sentence structure and effective language use.

• Reading examined a student's ability to make meaning and reason through text passages.

• Writing consisted of a 30-minute writing task testing a student's ability to generate, develop and communicate ideas.

• Math skills tested include numbers, operations, geometric shapes, statistical charts, algebraic expressions and probability.

• Science covered skills include the ability to interpret of data, scientific investigation and on fundamental science content knowledge.

Source: Staff report

Where to find ACT Aspire results online:

Preliminary ACT Aspire Test Results from Arkansas Department of Education --

www.arkansased.gov/divisions/learning-services/student-assessment/test-scores/year?y=2016

Arkansas ACT Aspire Achievement from the Office of Education Policy --

www.officeforeducationpolicy.org/arkansas-school-data-act-aspire/

Source: Staff report

General News on 07/27/2016