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- October 8, 2026
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:30
Good morning everybody. We're here bright and
early. We have another exciting day here. Today we're going to be talking about adequacy, and let me see, my co-chair is at a conference,
so he is not here today. We'll miss him. What we'll start off with today is Ms. Julie Holt. She's going to talk to us about the issues related to the Arkansas Educational Support
and Accountability Act. So, Julie, if you would identify yourself, please,
Speaker 5
3:28
you will be recognized. Definitely. Thank you, Senator English. I'm Julie Holt with the
Speaker 7
3:34
Bureau. And last month, in August, when you were here, you heard the department talk about the state's compliance with the federal accountability system,
which is to comply with mandates under the Every Student Succeeds Act. So this month, or today, I'm going to talk with you about the state's accountability system, which runs parallel with that federal system under ESSA, but also is a little bit different. And that, as Senator English just said, is called the Arkansas Education Support and Accountability Program. So also last month, Nell Smith showed you this handy little chart that we've made for you, and we show each year.
I think last month it was just a white piece of paper. From now on, it's going to be this gold piece of paper. And this tells you all the topics that we're required to cover under the adequacy statute. And you'll see accountability is listed right here. So that's one reason we're talking about this today. But more importantly, this is your chance as a legislative body to evaluate the system, to make sure it's operating in the way you want, And especially in terms of is it helping the state to meet its mandates for adequacy and equity in education.
So when we're talking about accountability systems, in general, there's agreement that a good accountability system will contain these four elements. They will set expectations for the achievement of all students in an education system. They'll have a means of providing communications about whether those expectations are being met. They'll celebrate schools and school districts that are meeting expectations or exceeding expectations,
and they'll prompt action in those that are not. And then we'll also have a means to provide additional resources to struggling schools. So before we get into ASAP, or the Arkansas Educational Support and Accountability Program, let's take just a quick trip down accountability memory lane. And we started talking about accountability in Arkansas way back in 1983. And just to get your minds around that, our governor at the time was Bill Clinton,
the president was Ronald Reagan, and the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat were still two separate papers. So quite a while ago, and that was also the year that the Supreme Court, the Arkansas Supreme Court, issued its decision in the Dupree v. Alma School District case, and that's the case, I'm sure you all remember, where they first said, well, sorry, Arkansas, but your educational funding system is not constitutional, and it was because it did not provide equity for students across the state.
So in response, the legislature pumped a lot of money into the school system, but in return it said, okay, schools, we want you to show us that you are indeed producing some results. So it mandated that schools administer standardized tests in three different grades, and if 85% of the school's students didn't pass that test, which was called the minimum competency test, then the school would have to work with the Department of Education to develop a school improvement plan.
So we rocked along with that system for the next decade or so until 1999. And that's when the legislature passed Act 99, Act 999, a lot of nines. And that really beefed up the state's accountability system. And part of this was in preparation for the federal No Child Left Behind Act that was coming down the pike. But what happened was there was a lot more standardized testing added. So now instead of just three grades taking a test, you had every student in grades three through eight,
plus there were some end-of-course exams and a grade-level English exam for higher grades. The purpose of the test, remember, under the earlier system, we were looking at minimum competency. Well, now we're testing for proficiency. And in addition to having more testing, there were more consequences if schools did not perform well. And by the end of the ACTAP era, schools and school districts had to have 49.5% of their students scoring at proficient or above.
And if not, they were given a label, academic distress, which I'm sure still remember. And there were consequences with that. The state could take over a school district in academic distress. It could replace the superintendent. It could replace the school board. And then a school district had five years to get itself out of academic distress. And at that time, that was simply getting more than 49.5% of their students scoring proficient or above.
So that remained the law of the state until two years ago when you guys passed Act 930. And Act 930 created ASAP, and ASAP has a lot of the same elements than the state's plan to comply with ESSA. And these were not necessarily the same as what we had under No Child Left Behind and ACT-AP. And if you read, to get ready for this, a lot of reports from education kind of think tanks and researchers
that were written around this time that ESSA was being developed, and you could sense a lot of excitement that this was a time that we could create a new system of accountability. Depending on who you're reading, it was called like a new vision for accountability or refining accountability to focus on the right things. I kind of latched on to a phrase put out by the Learning Policy Institute, which is a nonpartisan education think tank, and they called it next generation accountability.
And so I'm going to use some of those ideas, and they're very common across these, but as a framework as we talk about our accountability system today. A lot of what was going on is people were really tired and there were no child left behind the reliance just on test scores to say how well a school was doing. So they wanted something more sophisticated that actually reflected what was going on in schools and the challenges that both students were bringing into school and that school districts themselves were facing.
So like ESSA, Act 930 provides a lot more flexibility and autonomy for schools and school districts, and there's a much greater emphasis on support than there is on labeling and sanctioning, as there was under ACT-TAP. Now, one difference I did notice, and I just wanted to point this out, is a lot of these reports that I read talked about, instead of proficiency being the goal for students, that it should be college and career readiness.
And in 2014, the American Institutes for Research produced a paper, and in that paper it showed that we were one of 14 states that did not have a statutory definition for college and career readiness in statute. So I looked at Act 930 and the legislative intent, and while we don't explicitly use the words college and career readiness, we use the language that our goal is academic readiness, individual academic growth, and competencies through the application of knowledge
in skills and core subjects, consistent with state academic standards through a student-focused learning system. So there may be the implication of college and career readiness within that without explicitly saying it. Also, in our current definition of adequacy, we do talk about career readiness. We don't explicitly say college readiness, although we talk about the required 38 courses. So two years ago, you may remember, I presented on the same topic, and it was right after Act 930 had been passed.
And so a lot of what I was able to do was say, well, we think this is what it's going to look like, and this is what's intended. So now we have two years of experience in data, and we can take a little bit deeper dive. But so at two years, we see that there's still the five levels of support that the state is to provide to the school districts. And the way ACTAP, I mean, sorry, not ACTAP, ASAP is written, the state is going to provide support to the school districts.
The school districts are going to provide support to the schools. Now, in speaking with ADE, they still do some direct work at the school level. But they say when they do, the district folks are always involved so that when ADE is ready to pull out, the district will still have the capacity and resources and know-how to continue those improvements. So there are five levels of support, starting with level one general. And level one general support is something that every school district has access to.
And what, in ADE's opinion, is all a lot of schools need. And that's the information that ADE puts on its website. the information through shared data systems that schools and school districts can access, as well as they have a designated specialist, so they can always pick up the phone and call AD and ask questions. The levels of intensity increase in terms of AD involvement at a school district level to make these improvements, all the way up to level 5, which is the most intensive.
Now, levels 1 through 4 are actually considered to be quite fluid. And a school district may be receiving level 2 support at the beginning of the year. Issues are cleared up, and they're at level 1 at the end of the year. So there's been a lot of fluidity in that. Level 5 is a little bit different story, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. So how does ADE determine the levels of support?
And in the rules, it says they're to consider a number of different things before deciding which level of support a school district needs. Such things as the federal designations, whether a school is targeted or comprehensive, so those 5% of lowest performing school district schools. If a school district has schools that are receiving the federal school improvement grants, that comes into consideration. They look at a district's fidelity to its own support plan for schools and to helping
schools implement their school improvement plans. They look at the capacity of a district to help its schools. And then there have been instances where school districts actually come and ask for a certain level of support. So there are all these different things that go into the mix to making the determination, and it's largely a judgment call, which is very different, if you'll remember, from ACT-TAP, where there was that clear line in the sand of the 49.5 proficiency rate. We did have one piece of legislation this past session
that changes that somewhat. So Act 1082 of 2019 says that depending on how students in a school score on the reading part of the ACT Aspire. They could, school districts could be placed into level three or four support. And so there are quite a few districts that this coming year will, that will go in those two levels. But by the end of June, this is what it looked like, is terms of the level of support school
districts were receiving. And, as again, these may have changed somewhat since I got these, since there's some fluidity down at those lower levels of support, but you can see that about 90 percent of school districts were considered only to need level one support. The 20 that were in level two at that time were the districts that had schools receiving those federal school improvement grants. There weren't any considered to need level three support.
Only one was receiving level four support, and that was actually Marvel Elaine, and it had requested that level of support. And then there were four that were receiving that level five support. And we will talk about them in a little more detail in just a second. As part of our adequacy study, we survey superintendents, principals, teachers, and then do site visits. So this summer we were able to survey the superintendents and we had a question of asking
them if they knew which level of support they were in or that they were receiving. And we found that most of them didn't, I mean 74 just flat out said no we don't know. The others took stabs at answers but they weren't necessarily receiving the level of support they thought they were. Now, again, this may be in large part due to that fluid nature in Level 1 through 4. And also, Level 1 through 4 is very different because there are no consequences. So it may not really matter if you're Level 3 or Level 4.
That just may not be something that sinks in superintendents' minds. So what happens under ASAP? Well, every school in the state by May 1st is to develop its school improvement plan. And Deb Kaufman has talked with you about this. It's that cycle of improvement and inquiry. So I think it's plan, do, and evaluate, and then go through it all again. So that happens each school year, and by May 1, schools turn that into their districts.
by September 1 school districts that are receiving above level 1 support are to create school or district support plans so how are they going to support their schools and implementing those improvement plans and then some of those have to submit plans to ADE so if you're in level 3 4 5 support ADE sees your plans and if you're in level receiving level two support then if AD says we
want to see your plan you give it to them so life and level five as I mentioned we have four school districts that are currently receiving level five support and and to speak about kind of nomenclature I'm saying in level five support the department will too they would prefer me at every level to say they're receiving level five support because it's the levels of support that have the names. To make this go a little quicker, I'm probably going to say in more than I say receive.
But anyway, there are four school districts right now that are considered to be in level five. And to be in level five, actually, there is a vote by the state board saying that, yes, this school district needs to receive this level of support. Little Rock and Dollar Way were in, no, they were under state control at the end of ACTAP, and so they were kind of grandfathered into Level 5. Pine Bluff became a Level 5 district this past spring, State Board vote,
and Earl actually requested to be Level 5, and the State Board approved that as well. Now, Level 5, as I said, is the one level where there's some serious consequences, And it actually looks a whole lot like what happened to school districts that were in academic distress. So the state can come in and take over, can remove the superintendent, can remove the school board. There are other measures and statutes that the state can take at any point while a district is in level five.
The one thing that happened under ACT-HAP that did not carry over to Act 930 is what happens at the end of five years. because a Level 5 school district still has five years to meet the exit criteria. Under ACT-TAP, there was a provision that if at the end of the five years a district didn't meet the target of the 49.5%, which was the one target, the state board could vote and say, well, there were circumstances outside of the district's control,
and so we're going to extend their time in academic distress before we make them face the three consequences, which are the same for academic distress as they are for Level 5. So it's either being annexed or consolidated with other districts or reconstituted somehow in its own form. So in Level 5, at the end of five years, those are the three consequences that districts face if they've not managed to exit.
Other things that happen when a school district is in Level 5 is the ADE is very involved in creating the support plans and helping districts implement those plans as well as the exit plans that put forth the requirements. Now, the interesting thing with the support plans is when you look at the ones that have been developed for all four of those districts, they are structured the exact same way, and they're structured around these six systems,
which ADE says are integral to well-performing schools. But if you look at the content within those topic areas, you see that the plans actually vary quite a bit. And again, this is in line with that next-generation accountability thought of really meeting schools where they are. So, for instance, if you look at Pine Bluff's support plan, you see there's a focus on improving student and staff attendance and student discipline but if you look at Earl's plan the focus is on instructional
practices and professional development for teachers so again they do seem to be tailored for the school districts particular issues now this not the same with the exit plans so far there have been exit plans created for three of the school districts that are in level five support. Earl's is still under development. But when you read through these plans, they're almost verbatim the same. And they're divided into two parts. The
first part mentions a number of qualitative criteria that school districts need to meet to be able to exit level five. And those involve such things as are there collaborative teams meeting regularly? Is the school aware of and using the best practices for instruction? Do teachers get clear in ongoing evaluations? Does the curriculum match up with the state standards? And is the school managing its operations fiscal and technological systems appropriately?
So in addition to those qualitative criteria, there are also some very specific, sorry I didn't click fast enough some specific criteria that's quantitative and these all have to do with what's going on with the schools and those districts that have earned an F grade and I'm going to get a little more into letter grades later on in this presentation but state law says that we sign all schools a letter grade so it's those schools that have an F that are looked at in terms of exit plans and
and here's what they have to do on the latest act aspire scores um they have to have a growth score which has not been calculated yet but a growth score of 80 and 80 is that mark in the growth scores which growth scores are those scores where you look at the individual student and say has that student performed better or worse than expected based on how they performed in the past And a score of 80 means they're right on target for what we expect them to do.
So we want the exit plans call for the F schools to have an average growth score of 80. The other thing is Aspire scores come back in four categories, needs improvement all the way up to, I think, exceeding is the top one. So at the F schools, there need to be more students scoring in those top three levels of Aspire scores than in that bottom in needs of improvement. So that's what all three of these school districts have to do to exit Level 5.
Now, of the four districts that are currently receiving Level 5 support, Little Rock is going to be the first district to hit that five-year mark, and that date is in January 2020. Based on the preliminary scores that have come out that are still being finalized from last spring's Aspire, it doesn't look like Little Rock is going to hit that bottom measure. So too many of its F schools have more kids in that bottom category than in the upper three.
So you're probably aware there have been public hearings, and the state board is trying to figure out what to do. But it has been noted and publicized in the paper that of the three consequences, reconstitution is probably the most viable one in the State Board's opinion for the Little Rock School District. So this what I've just described to you is what's in Act 930. So that's the formal accountability system but ADE also has
what is called soft accountability and that is reported through the report card and the other ways that ADE makes the data about schools public and again that's very much in line with this next generation of accountability where all of the information and differences and things about schools is out there. The one place that we do kind of veer is in its state law that schools are given
grades and the grades are the first thing that people see when they get on the report card so in some ways people are much more familiar with their school's grade than they are with what's happening with Act 930 and knowing what level of support their school district is receiving so we wanted to get into you know what's being measured with the grades and what are some of the implications with that the letter grades are correspond with the schools as a
school index score. And those are the scores created to comply with the ESSA, the Federal Accountability Law. And the ESSA index score is comprised of a weighted achievement score, and that's based on test scores where those higher scores get a little more weight. There's a growth and graduation component. Graduation is obviously high school graduation rates. That's both four-year and five-year rates. And then there's that growth score I mentioned earlier that looks at is a school, is a student performing better or worse than expected?
And then there's another measure called school quality and student success, and that's really a whole bunch of measures. And some of them depend on test scores, such as grade level reading, and, but then there are others that look at what's the school providing like, how many students are getting to take AP classes, and that kind of thing. So that's a whole mix of measures. So, because, as I said earlier, letter grades are kind of the first things that people see
and really what people are more aware of, we wanted to look further into that and what that means for the public. So we started by asking our superintendents, you know, how well do you think the letter grade reflects the quality of your school. And we had 60% who said either not well or very not well. And we let them explain their answers. And a lot of the answers to the people
who didn't feel like the grades were a true reflection of their schools said something along the lines of this. The grades do not reflect the outside variables that each individual school must start with. None of us start out on equal footing or at the same starting block. So we wanted to look at some of those different things that schools are dealing with. And to do that, we used a statistical measure called correlations. And in case some
of y'all haven't boned up on your correlation theory recently, I'm going to do just a quick little statistics lesson. So since I feel like my life has been one long diet, this seemed like an obvious one for me, but I'm going to hypothesize that the more candy bars you eat, the more weight you gain. So there we go. So to do that, I might design an experiment where I had different people eating different numbers of candy bars every day for a week,
and then I would measure them. So Danielle ate two candy bars every day for a week. Lisa had three, and on up to poor Janice, who had to eat ten candy bars a day. Then after a week, I grasped the results, and voila, I got this really nice perfect line, which this never happens. But if I did, this would be a perfect correlation, and correlations range from 1.0, so that means everything is moving perfectly together to negative 0.1.
or negative 1.0, and a negative 1.0 would be more like if I were looking at how many miles did you run and then what happened to your weight, so you would expect it to go the other way. So we can do the same thing when we're looking at our inputs for schools, which mainly are students coming into schools, and, oh, I forgot, this was a fun little slide. If the correlation value is zero, that means there's absolutely no relationship.
Like the number, and there may be research that shows this, but probably the number of spots on dogs have nothing to do with the number of hours that cats sleep. So that would be no relationship at all. So if you look at the ESSA index school score, I wanted to see do we have things that correlate with the ESSA school index score. And when I plugged in, what we mainly had to work with are demographic measures. When I plugged those in, there was a moderate correlation with the percent of free and reduced lunch kids in a student body of negative 5.9
and of black students of negative 0.595, so both moderate correlations. So I want to be very quick to say here that with correlations, you're not talking about causes. So you're talking about relationships. And so these correlations, even though there's a relationship there, there's nothing about this, and I'm certainly not saying that there's anything about the amount of income you have in your house
or the color of your skin that affects achievement. Instead, there are lots of other variables out there, and if you look at research, especially a lot of research that has to do with achievement gaps and things, you'll find there are other things that affect social, mental, physical health, and brain development, such as access to healthy foods, access to health care, books in the house, those kinds of things that drive these measures.
So I hope everyone understands that there's no cause and effect. And even correlations, I want to say again, are just a mathematic equation. So you either have to do deeper digging to find out what's going on, and sometimes you can use common sense. So like back with our candy bar example, you might say, well, yeah, a candy bar is what's causing weight gain, but even that would deserve further study
because it could be that I've gained weight and I'm depressed, so I'm eating more candy bars. So, again, nothing can be taken at face value here. But one thing that is kind of fun with correlations that you can do is you can use, if you can figure out what would be the predictive variable to explain the change in the second variable. In our example here with candy bars, we said before that there was a perfect correlation. And if there's a perfect correlation, you can take that correlation value and square it,
and that tells you the percent of variance that's explained. So we could say a perfect correlation means 100% of the change in weight is explained by the number of candy bars eaten. Well, like I said, that's probably not the case. You're probably going to end up with a graph more like this. And this is made up, so this isn't real. But this might be more likely a value of a 0.3 correlation that you got. So you could say candy bar consumption explains 9% of weight gain.
There are a whole lot of other things out there that explain the rest of it. So when you look at the demographics and the correlations and square those, you see that there are some pretty strong relationships between demographic groups and not only the ESSA index score, but also some of its components, Where that relationship gets small is with the growth in the four-year grad and five-year grad rates.
So that does take some of the influence of demographic factors out of the equation for the whole S.S. School Index score. Where this makes a difference probably shows up a little easier in these next charts. this first chart this is the distribution of all schools in Arkansas by their letter grade so you can see we have 152 schools that had A's
and 44 with F's and in between you've got a pretty normal bell curve so normal distribution though it's slightly skewed to the positive side so you have more A and B schools than you do D and F schools but if you look at school districts that have a higher than average black population so larger than average percentage of black kids in their student body which the mean the average is about just a little over 20% then you
see what happens to the letter grades they skew over to the DNF side if you look with free and reduced lunch population schools, and the average for free and reduced populations is just above 60%. You get that same pattern. You're going to have more D's and F's than you do just in the whole normal distribution of school, or the whole distribution of schools. And where this really has an impact for school districts is with the state reward
system, which is in law. And last year, Arkansas gave out just under $7 million to schools. And we give it as performance awards, which is based on those weighted achievement scores. And if you look at the lower than average black population student bodies versus the higher, you see that the lower than average were six times as likely to get a performance award. The gap was smaller when you looked at the growth and graduation rate awards
and that makes sense if you think back to the predictive value for that measure was less. So there it was only three times as likely. We do the same analysis with the free and reduced lunch population schools you see seven times as likely if you don't have as many free and reduced lunch kids. But with growth and graduation, it drops to only one and a half times as likely to get the money. So when I was doing my literature review, I came across a research paper put out by the Learning Policy Institute.
And it was actually done by some professors in Oklahoma because Oklahoma also gives schools letter grades. And what they found is that letter grades are considered composite indicators. And with composite indicators, we lose sight of the fact that the grade does not reflect the performance of many students within the schools.
So many students in D&F schools did not perform as poorly as the grades suggest. They had reading scores as high or even better than some students in A and B schools. Additionally, a large percentage of students in A and B schools scored lower than the students in B and C schools. And many students in B and C schools scored lower than students in D and F schools. So I wanted to see if this same kind of thing was happening in Arkansas. So I used our data, and I first used the ELA scale scores.
And the scale scores have different meanings at different grade levels. So I could only look at one grade, and I selected six because it was kind of in the middle. And so what this chart tells you, if you look at the green bar, those are all of the A schools. And their average scale score ranged from 424 to 429. So the A school with the lowest score had 424, with the highest it had 429. If you look down at the B school, you can see that their lowest score dropped down to 419,
yet their highest school that got a B had a score of 429 as well. And then you have to consider those are average scores for all the students in those schools, so students are scoring all over the place. So it backs up what they found in Oklahoma, that you can't look at a grade and say, oh, I don't want to send my student there because it may be horrible. You really need to dig a little deeper into the data. I did the same analysis looking at ELA growth scores, and I could include all schools in this.
And, again, you see there's a great deal of overlap between grades and then scores in ELA growth. So the next thing I thought was important to look at, There was legislation passed this last session that allows students in schools that get an F grade to utilize school choice and attend another school. So I wanted to look at, well, what's really happening in those schools that get Fs?
So I'm not going to give you another statistics lesson, but I used another statistic operation called regression. And it's kind of similar to correlation, but it takes it a step further because you can throw in all your demographic measures, and it will feed you an equation. And with that equation, you can say, okay, based on this student body's makeup, what do I expect their score to be? And then once you get those scores, you can compare it with actual scores. And so this slide shows you that after I did all that, I pulled out the schools that had the upgrades.
And there are, I think that's 12 of them, that their actual score was actually better than predicted based on the makeup of their student body. And in this regression equation, when you throw in all the demographics, you're explaining almost half, almost 50% of the variance. So there are a lot of things going on. Hopefully, these are things that are going on in school, so that maybe at Wall and Boone Park, maybe it's the things that are going on in school that are helping students score better than would be predicted.
But again, the regression formula doesn't tell us that. It only tells us what is happening, and it would take a lot more investigating to find out what the cause of that was. Another reason we felt it was important to look at what's happening with F schools is, If you'll remember when I talked about the exit criteria and those exit plans that ADE has developed, it's what happens at the F schools that are important to districts who are trying to get out of level 5 support
before facing those serious consequences. So one of the things I wanted to look at, well, all of the schools that are in levels of support above level 1 or receiving levels of support greater than level 1 support, What does their composition of schools with Fs look like? And you can see there's a huge range, all the way from 0% up to 100%. And some of this, of course, depends on numbers of schools. And so we've included the number of schools in each district in parentheses.
Speaker 16
42:35
But the top bar is Marvola Lane. That's our level 4. The next bar is a level 5 school,
Speaker 7
42:44
Dollar Way. And then the third one is Lee County, which is currently in level two, although it's had quite a few problems with accreditation, and ADEs had to be very involved with them as well. But anyway, so that's that range. And then I also wanted to look at those growth scores.
And this is from 2017-18, so not the most recent test scores. But I took the average growth score of schools in a district. So if you had two schools, there are two scores averaged together. And you see that on the whole, there are only four districts, and they're all districts receiving level 2 support, that have met or exceeded that 80 score. And there's quite a bit of a range for all the districts in there. And I had one more section that I added,
but I'm going to leave time for Nell to give her ELL report. But in the back of your report, and I'm just going to slide through these real fast, in the Lakeview decision, Collins Kilgore in the lower court and the Supreme Court agreed with him that there were a number of academic measures that pointed to Arkansas's need for academic improvement. And so in the last couple of final adequacy studies, We've included a section that lists these.
And so I've gone through and updated the academic measures just to give you an idea in the adequacy framework where we are as a state in comparison with that decision long ago. So with that, I can see there. Aren't you glad I'm not going through all this? So with that, I'll be glad to take questions. I've tried to hit on topics and analyses that I thought would help you but I'm
sure there are other things you might like to know about and if you think of them now that's great and if you think of them later my email is up there and so feel free
Senator Jane English
Unverified
44:54
to shoot me an email so Julie thank you so very much you know I this
all is so complicated we have new folks on our committee and I know somebody asked me yesterday about a tutorial it's just it's this has been very very helpful I don't know we've ever done this before but it's been very helpful because we
don't have all the answers to the questions we don't even
know what questions are sometimes so this has been very very helpful for all of us and there are a number of folks who have questions so let's
see I think think that's representative Allen there you are Iran
Representative Fred Allen
Unverified
45:35
okay thank you madam chair thank you for your presentation you said something a few minutes ago that kind of caught my interest when you were talking about the Little Rock School
District since the Little Rock School District has been and takeover by the state of Arkansas what proven progress has the school district made that is a good question and that's probably one
Speaker 16
45:58
that I would let the department answer would you like to have someone from the department I'm just looking for an answer I don't she probably
Speaker 7
46:15
know I have not delved into their improvement over
Senator Jane English
Unverified
46:18
the years. I think that's probably a question for the for the
Speaker 29
46:25
ADE. I can tell you actually representative I can tell you that
Speaker 7
46:32
the test scores before this set there were and it's I do have this written in the report I think there were eight schools that were not meeting the standards and and in Little ROCK improved with this latest round of test scores, but there's still, I think, four,
and I can't look at growth scores because those haven't been released, but I think there were still four where there were too many students scoring in that lower, lower, lowest category of ASPIRE scores. And now, and so I can tell you the quantitative, the, as far as how they're doing on those qualitative measures I did not study that to
Representative Fred Allen
Unverified
47:17
see movement over the years okay follow up isn't it true that if they're not making a kind of progress that let
the state feel they should be making it's the school district responsible or is the state responsible so I think that's an opinion you're asking I can't answer that one
Senator Jane English
Unverified
47:32
for you can't give you an opinion on that okay thank you thank you senator search thank you madam chair Judy I wanted to know the 80 the growth
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
47:57
score that we are trying to achieve now that was part of act 930 or that was part of our
Speaker 7
48:07
ESSA plan where did that 80 come from it's it's in the business rules for the ESSA plan okay and so it's part of that the ESSA
Speaker 39
48:14
school index that applies to the federal but you know the index score is also be
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
48:19
used being used for state purposes as well and what does the 80 all entail besides growth growth on the scores growth in academic performance what can you explain a little
Speaker 7
48:32
the ADE is, it's a complicated formula, but basically what ADE is doing is they're taking each student individually and looking at how their pattern of scores over the past and using that to predict what they, what the student should score based on their past performance on an exam. And then they, much like I did with those schools that had F's, they compare that score with the actual score and then there's credit given if the
student's doing better than expected or is or is lost ground and then the mathematic and I don't know the full mathematical equation but there's 80 in the end run end of it all 80 marks the point where a school a student is performing as expected. As expected. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Madam
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
49:23
Chair. Representative De La Rosa. Thank
Speaker 46
49:39
you, Madam Chair. I had questions on the A
through F scores when you mentioned up there that they follow the bill curve. Do they naturally follow the bill curve, or do we put them, or do we
Speaker 16
49:56
grade them such that they fit a bill curve? Do we make them fit
Speaker 7
50:01
that? That's a really good question, and that ADE may want to respond to this. They're based on the
Speaker 28
50:08
S-index scores, which do form a curve. ADE, through its decision-making, has decided where to slice those.
Right, and so my question is, is that
Speaker 47
50:16
based on a bill? um and yeah i'm not sure somebody answer that for
Speaker 50
50:21
me because i hear all the time it follows the bell curve nothing ever follows the bell curve naturally we force things to fit the bell curve so i'm just curious if this is naturally following it or if we are dividing our scores that way such that we assign grades to fit the bell curve and the reason i'm asking that is is there any way we're ever not going to have F schools regardless of how schools ever perform
or are we always going to be fitting them into this model whereby we always get some
Speaker 53
50:54
F's even if everybody's doing excellent. Deborah Kaufman, Division
Speaker 55
50:59
of Elementary and Secondary Education. The way that the scores were determined or the cut scores for A through F, if you recall we had six days of stakeholder input you were there one of those i was there senator english was there we had parents students
teachers business all of our supporting organizations we had such a good array of people that came in and said that to your question is does it have to follow a bell curve no the bell curve was never included in the conversation we looked at what is our expectation of an a school a b school a c school a d school and an f school and we went through numerous activities to determine those so that that would be statistically reliable and to your second question is do we
always have to f f schools no well i just
Speaker 50
51:58
remember from from those meetings and i didn't see what formula eventually came out of it so all i know is what little window that i saw but the big debate that was going on is, I mean, you were just basing it on data that we, we were basing it on data that we had and saying, how do we want to split this into A, B, C, D, and F? So inherently, in the thought process was Fs have to be assigned. There were a lot of folks in there that didn't want it. I don't even like A through F, so I'll just throw that out right now.
I am not a fan of giving a grade to a school, especially in F, because it does nothing but demoralize them and it's summing up so many factors and simplifying it to a bumper sticker essentially and everybody knows everything's much more complicated than that so but I did run the legislation that did it so because we couldn't get rid of the a through f because I didn't think it would pass but that's all I'm just trying to comprehend is the math behind it is whether we're naturally fitting that curve or if we based on previous data if we didn't
inadvertently or maybe intentionally some of us divide it that way
Speaker 55
53:01
so if you recall in the conversations there were people serving in that committee that also were against a to f so that that's part of the conversation in that type of standard setting but that type of standard setting just sets the standards and then once you've applied those standards then you look to see where the school districts fall so you did that with blind data so you
didn't know where any school was where they would fall we knew none of that in fact the sets that we had were proxy sets of data so until those standards are applied then you don't know where the actual school districts would fall so it is not a bell curve and school districts do not have to fall there your determination about a to f strictly a state decision if i could just make a comment
Speaker 62
53:54
madam chair and i actually like to get in the queue
Speaker 50
53:57
because i've got more questions these folks have
done so much work trying to make a massive amount of data fit a teeny tiny letter score so i just want to say how much i appreciate what the department of education did with all the stakeholders what you guys have done there is a massive amount of data that is rolled up and tried to make sense of into what is basically simplifying it for us and for the public to make a b c d and f i'd like to see a different score i'd like the committee to consider that going forward because it's just it's too simplified but thank you to you guys for
everything that you've done because that was i sat through just one stakeholder meeting of that and that was plenty for me
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
54:50
to appreciate what you do thank you representative garner Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm one of the new ones that's asking for tutorials, actually. So I've got a question for you. When you were talking about the
Speaker 66
55:02
schools in distress, you mentioned that the state board was leaning toward reconstitution.
Speaker 7
55:09
What does that mean? Oh, well, and I was speaking specifically about Little Rock because it is coming upon its five-year landmark. And reconstitution is, well, there's some question about it from what I've seen at the meetings of what reconstitution could mean. In law, it could mean a new superintendent or a new school board.
I think there's some question about exactly in the state board's mind I don't know that they know exactly what it's going to mean for Little Rock or if that's indeed what happens with Little Rock so legally that's what reconstitution seems to mean
Speaker 7
56:08
realm when I was yeah I think I better leave it there
cuz I'm not it I'm not I could ask Taylor to come down
Senator Jane English
Unverified
56:20
and give legal interpretations but thanks did you have any more and great let
Representative Nelda Speaks
Unverified
56:30
me see representative speaks thank you mr. chairman
I want to thank you for this report it's been very good to me to understand but the question I have is when you talk to some of the colleges they have still have such large numbers
of students coming in that have to have the remedial courses do you have any idea of what is causing this because a lot of these schools are rated A and I think there's some deep problems there and I didn't know if you have any idea why what we need to do
Speaker 7
57:14
as part of this report and and so I've not looked at that data I'll be glad to try to look
into some of that if you would like
Speaker 74
57:23
I would love to have that report okay I'll I'll get with you after the meeting. Okay, thank you. I know exactly.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
57:39
Thank you. Senator Elliott. Madam Chair, Representative Vaught was asking if that's a report we could all get. Oh, I'm
sorry. Per the question from Representative Speaks. I'm sorry, go ahead. I didn't hear you.
Representative Speaks asked for some information, and Representative Vaught was trying to ask before I got started if we could
Senator Jane English
Unverified
57:59
all get that information. I'll just repeat that. Julie, if you could send that to Michelle, then she can distribute
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
58:10
that to the committee. I'll be glad to. Thank you, Madam Chair. Ms. Holt, what does a federal law actually say
Speaker 7
58:19
about labeling schools? Under ESSA, the labels are applied to those lowest 5% performing schools.
Speaker 41
58:24
schools and I mean does it say we have to use letter grades or there are some options
Speaker 7
58:32
other than letter grades now that and I think that Deb referred to this that was in those stakeholder meetings and I remember watching those and there's quite a bit of discussion on whether to use letter grades or not so that that seemed to
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
58:48
be optional I don't think that was mandated yeah so our decision to use the letter grades I remember a discussion originally was all about parents need
to know how schools are doing and apparently realtors do too and then they take this information that in my estimation is seemingly very flawed and wreak all kind of havocs on neighborhoods by saying this school district this school is an F and blah blah blah so is it is it the case as I understand that you could actually be in a school and
your reading level scores could be as low as 50 or 60 percent
Speaker 7
59:28
I haven't looked at the reading scores and
as far as percentage proficient or above is what you're talking about and so I that might be a possibility but I couldn't tell you that it is okay well
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
59:42
Back to the original time we were talking about the importance
of having these A through Fs, and I think people do not understand that, as we said then, we need to have A through F because parents need to know how schools are doing, and everybody understands what an A through F is.
Well, clearly, everybody does not understand what an A through F is because most of us don't, and we are the ones who pass the law. So when you quoted the Learning Policy Institute, where they found that if you have an A school, you don't necessarily know all of what's going on in that school until you dig deep into all the stuff we've done. And that there's a parallel when it's an F school. You don't really know all of what you're talking about in that school because there are kids at the F school,
as you were talking about, reading, and can be many. Kids may be doing better in reading at the F school than somebody is at a C school, but they still get an F. That still can
happen under that what we were talking
Speaker 16
1:00:52
about. Right, if the school is still perceived as an F. So there is that tension that the legislature has to deal with. Now, it is
Speaker 7
1:01:00
complicated information. The grades make it easy to understand, but it does mask a lot of what is really going on with students.
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:01:08
Have you seen, and Madam Chair, I'll get back in the queue after this,
have you seen any research on the effect of labeling schools, any effect on the morale or the psyche of the people who are the ones who are
labeled? Have you seen anything about that? I did not come across any. I'll be
Speaker 7
1:01:28
glad to look and it may just not have popped up with the search terms because I wasn't looking specifically for morale. Well, that makes sense because
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:01:37
if you weren't looking for it, because one of the things we know in research is we act as if, and this was said when we were discussing the labeling of schools, if you shame them enough, they will basically get off their behinds and do what they need to do as if it's that magical.
research does not show that to be an incentive to make people do something that they have no joy in not and having an F in the first place these are not things that work so I would like the committee to think about what we are doing in terms of schools that are labeled F you think that's helping people research-based literature tells you that's wrong it is not helping people and the other end
of that is we use almost a million dollars or so i don't know how much for schools that under this same configuration that we label as a or b or whatever the case may be in growth we spend almost a million dollars on that where and we say you're doing great so we're going to give you a million dollars okay that might make sense for rewards but what we need to be thinking about is is that a good use of that million dollars is it really and we use state money to hand out
to schools that we say are doing well and i've actually had one school district say we question and they're they're going to take the money why are we getting the money there are a lot of school districts who need it and i think that is a very apt question about what we're doing shaming we ought to know after all this time 1993 we ought to know by now what we've been doing is not working and i would suggest we need to give a whole lot more thought to the inputs and a whole lot more
thought to environment and what the outside environment what is the effect of the outside environment of a student's ability to do well in school not to say they can't they can't but to ignore that I think is a really big mistake thank you madam chair I'll get back in the queue
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:03:58
thank you representative Meeks are you
Speaker 97
1:04:04
on nope there you are there I am thank
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:04:07
you madam chair a question I have and this
kind of follows up on the discussion that we had yesterday on stem in the state and trying to improve stem scores I know that you've probably done a lot of statistics or the departments does statistical works on linking math and science achievement with socioeconomic status and things like that what I'm curious about is have you or can you do those same statistics on schools that are doing more innovative things in their schools versus ones who are not and what
I mean by that is yesterday we heard about some of the schools that are looking at practical ways to engage students in math and science versus the traditional hey you're just gonna sit in a chemistry class or a math class and learn the nuts and bolts but never learn how to apply it and I'd be interested in seeing what the success rate of students is generically and also it may be even broken down by different you know economic groups to see if there is a
shown correlation where students are achieving better when they're given more choices or they're able to be more practical in the application that that that makes sense what I'm asking it
Speaker 16
1:05:35
does make sense the I guess the issue I I think would
Speaker 7
1:05:40
be there is you know is that data and are those innovative schools defined and marked and noted it within the data system I will say that I did
run some I got a little carried away with the correlations and ran some different things and I ran things such as AP school I mean AP participation rates, and then I did do the computer science classes, and there was no correlation that showed with those individual measures. There may be different ways to look at it where, you know, something would, because you did, I mean, obviously you want to find out what is working and what is happening, but
when I just ran those as I was going through all the data points that I had available, That didn't pop out, but again, if we noted the schools and had some way of identifying those schools and could really make a good comparison, it might show some interesting things. And I
Speaker 28
1:06:36
don't know if you were in attendance yesterday and heard some
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
1:06:40
of the things that the department is looking to try to do to try to improve those math and science scores, but they talked about trying to incorporate them into CTE courses and things like that. And it may be too early to see any correlations.
But I'm just wondering if opportunity allows and you're able to do that at some point, if you can see any early correlation or see any benefits to kind of point that, yes, this is the right direction to go down. Right. And I
Speaker 7
1:07:09
did not get to see that part of the meeting. We were trying to stream it in our offices. But I do plan to go back because my next presentation is on academic standards. since i really do want to hear what that presentation was and i will try to incorporate some of that into that
Speaker 107
1:07:28
report awesome thank you okay let's see representative birch
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:07:36
no who's 21 you oh representative evans thank you madam chair
Speaker 109
1:07:46
uh very well done miss holt if you could go uh to page 13 of the printout that
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
1:07:51
we received is these the slides or the report uh the report okay under the predictive value of demographics for ss school index scores
Could you go through the last paragraph of that page and just walk me through
Speaker 114
1:08:15
that to make sure that I understand what
Speaker 7
1:08:19
I'm reading? Right. So I ran correlations for each of the groups individually. And, of course, we know there's overlap between some of these groups. So ELL has some overlap with Hispanics and probably with other populations. all of the demographics are probably represented in free and reduced lunch.
But these are the, if you look at just the correlations individually. So where you have bars is where they were statistically significant. And I didn't include that in my little lesson. But there's a value that tells you, is this really a pattern that shows up because there's something going on or is it just happenstance? So everywhere there's a bar, there was a statistically significant correlation. And then when you take that correlation value and square it,
so 0.59 times 0.59 ends up about 0.37, 33 or something, then that says that, well, 33% of the change in scores can be predicted or explained by the percent of that population. Does that help? Well, in looking at the last paragraph,
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
1:09:36
it states that there is a moderately negative correlation, which I'm going way back to many years ago in statistics.
I believe that's somewhere around a negative .2. Is that
Speaker 7
1:09:51
correct, to be moderately negative? Well, moderately, and it can be defined differently in my old statistics book from grad school, that would be a very low correlation. 0.5 is considered moderate. Although, in terms of social science and social policy, a moderate correlation is, you know, that's pretty good. I mean, there's some explanatory value
Speaker 18
1:10:14
there that's considered pretty good
because there are always so many things influencing.
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
1:10:23
Follow-up, Madam Chair. Yeah, go ahead. So in looking at this, if what I'm reading is correct, is that the data is showing that there is not as much of a correlation regarding free and reduced lunch in black students as there is the relationship between ELL and Hispanic students.
Speaker 7
1:10:48
Am I reading that correctly? I hope not. it's the Hispanic and English language learners have a smaller correlation and in fact with the S index score and weighted achievement there's no correlation so you couldn't predict a school's scores based on their percentages of Hispanic or ELL students whereas you can if you plug in
Speaker 18
1:11:14
the other values or you could come up with a prediction this
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
1:11:22
shows then is that poverty left free and reduced students the poverty level or being a black student it's more predictive to easier to predict what the outcome is going to be than it is a student that is an English
Speaker 7
1:11:43
in English language learner mm-hmm okay that's what these statistics show you know not that's probably not intuitively what people would think but for some reason
in this mix of statistics that's that's what came up there was no real relationship between
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:12:01
thank you madam chair okay okay let's see representative de la rosa thank
Speaker 45
1:12:08
you madam chair I've got several little ones that's why I try to get
Speaker 50
1:12:14
back in the queue how do we currently exclude English language students from our A through F scores and I've asked the department this before
it was a while back and I don't recall the answer so they may have to answer this again but it's in state law that we're not going to include it and I know a lot of my schools their scores didn't really change when we switched over to the new system so that's why I'm curious how we factor that out how we make sure because it's I think it's rolled up in all the ESSA information so how do we
Speaker 7
1:12:50
take it back out and the department will have to help me with this but I know the first few years that a student's in the ELL program their content scores
particularly in ELA will not count toward a school's overall score they They also have English language acquisition scores, and you're going to hear more about this from Nell in hopefully a few minutes, but those are considered to be part of the growth scores. And that's one reason or could be a possible explanation of why those populations correlate positively with growth, because the language acquisition scores and how students perform
on that. Hi. Are part of the school's
Speaker 133
1:13:43
Tricia Kerr, the ESOL program director with the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education. And to answer your question on that, the English language learner scores are only for your recently arrived English learners in their first year. They are excluded from all accountability determinations. Their second year that they are here, they will have participated their first year in assessment.
The second year, their scores count in the growth calculations. And the third year,
Speaker 134
1:14:12
their score counts in growth and achievement. Right. And that's the way I wrote it. But
Speaker 50
1:14:17
my question is, how do you pull that data out? How are we ensuring that it's actually getting rolled up that way? and it may be something that the department could just get to me later on and say you know we'll sit down with you for an hour for a very boring discussion on exactly how we're taking this out but I would for my own district I really want to know the answer to that question because I can't
Speaker 133
1:14:45
want to be able to. Yeah it's written into the business rules for the ESSA calculation as well as the A to F calculation and I'm sure we would be glad to sit down with you and describe how the students are coded and that's calculated and that they
Speaker 50
1:15:02
are their scores are appropriately treated in the calculations okay I would appreciate it for that next quick question if you don't mind is it's for
you miss hold so the demographics that have been included in all of this are well all the other factors that are being correlated and all of this I understand you're going to be limited to because it's what we gather at the schools and it's the only way that you can correlate one-to-one this student with this particular aspect of them I don't think it works though because I don't think it has anything to do with whether you're black or whether you're Hispanic or any of those things I think there are so many factors that are
actually affecting this that we don't we don't consider just because we don't have access to the data so my curiosity is has anyone ever or could you correlate incarceration rates to school performance missing parents things like that drug arrests I mean it's things that we have data on and I don't know if they'll correlate specifically to a school district but I would think the state has this kind of data and surely this has to be affecting kids but all we ever see is
black Hispanic free reduced lunch things like that and those are the kinds of things I really want to know because
Speaker 135
1:16:20
I think we all kind of think that's what's going on but nobody's ever been able to
Speaker 7
1:16:26
give us any data or correlation on that no i agree that there's a lot else going on and that it's not that those you know whether you're white or black or rich or poor that is the causal factor um you're right that we're limited on the data there's some data that you could possibly pull from the census like parent education level
that's mapped down to the school district level. I hadn't looked at incarceration rates. I think absenteeism rates, when that data is available, will be very interesting to look at. But one thing I can say, my first job out of graduate school, I worked at U.S. News and World Report on those college rankings, and my charge was to develop an outcome measure for the rankings. And so what we ended up doing was using the average SAT slash ACT entrance exam score to predict graduation rates.
And, you know, my thought was that's very simplistic as well because, one, your score isn't really going to cause a graduation rate. But what I found, because ACT did have some data that, and I was trying to remember this last night, but that we must have been able to get that you could plug in, like, level of education of the mother, which is supposed to be a very influential factor, number of books in the home, things like that. But when I plugged those in, they actually didn't correlate as highly as just looking at that SAT or ACT score
because those scores already pulled in so many of those different variables. And I don't know that that's what's happening here with grouping it into just the big demographic groups, and I may be proved wrong on that. But it gave me a little more confidence in saying, yes, this isn't the determining factor, but it may be representing all of those determining factors in the best way we're able to capture them at the moment. I mean, I understand
Speaker 50
1:18:28
we're never, or I don't think we'll ever be able to assess student by student something like that.
But so I'm just asking the big picture, kind of a regional or district kind of level. Is there any correlation between the performance of the schools and an incarceration rate or drug arrests or anything like that? Because I don't think we're addressing the problem here. I think that we're, I think we are inadvertently and indirectly basically saying if you're black or if your school is predominantly black, it's going to be underperforming because those are the numbers that we end up putting up and we end up sending that out everywhere.
But we also know that black populations end up having a higher incarceration rate. So maybe it has nothing to do with what color they are. I don't think it does. maybe it has to do with the fact that we're locking more of them up and they don't have dad at home or they don't have mom at home or their home life is a wreck because, you know, of all the craziness that's occurring with law enforcement or a variety of other reasons. I mean, not to pick on one particular race, but I just don't think we're getting to the crux of what the issue is. So that's the kind of thing I'm interested in, even if it's broad.
Speaker 7
1:19:46
bit of research, and I've got a footnote in here that lists some of the papers I looked at that talk about the effects of home environment and the condition of, you know, if you live in a safe neighborhood or if you don't, and the stress that, you know, even scientific research of the impact that stressors when you're young of being hungry or hearing gunshots or something,
how that can even affect just the way your brain develops and your neurons work. I'm not a scientist, so. But all the way to other research that looks at just, you know, the effects of living more in poverty. And, you know, what happens in communities, too, is, and we can't show it in the data that we have as well, is that may impact the resources that the school as a whole are able to offer. And so it's a double whammy.
It can be a double whammy. But there, so there's some cited in here, and I can, I'll be glad to try to look up some other research to send your way. Thank you. Madam Chair, they're not going to
Speaker 50
1:20:58
be able to answer this question, but I'd like to ask it just so they can get it to me later if you don't mind. Okay. In this last session, and this is something that was just brought to my attention yesterday, so not to spring it on A to E, but somebody literally just asked me this yesterday, and I don't know the answer to it, and I don't expect you to know the answer to it. I'm just asking you to find the answer to it, and Stacy's back there nodding her head.
So in the last session, we passed a law that says that homeschool students can access regular curriculum in the schools. I voted for it. I think you guys remember that law that we passed. so my question though is how do homeschool special needs students that are accessing special needs classes how do they count towards the ESSA triggers because if they're just coming in for one or two kind of a you know resource class or things like that it's my understanding
that ESSA has triggers involved that you can't have a certain proportion of you know this minority child with this particular diagnosis in this particular arena so my question is how does that count and and you're shaking your head at me but this was asked by somebody that that
Speaker 54
1:22:10
does this in my district is pretty pretty sure she's got a valid
Speaker 58
1:22:16
question on it so we would love to talk to that person and
Speaker 55
1:22:20
and find out the specifics but just in general in the business rules for the ESSA school index homeschool students are excluded from accountability measures
Speaker 58
1:22:29
for the federal accountability even in the triggers we don't have triggers they do so I don't know what a trigger is it I'll just get with me okay I
Speaker 129
1:22:46
don't want to take up the rest of the committee's time on it thank you representative speaks are
Representative Nelda Speaks
Unverified
1:23:05
you on okay there you thank you madam chair could we have mr. key
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:23:08
come to the dead front certainly secretary key would you mind coming to the table please
Representative Nelda Speaks
Unverified
1:23:33
Johnny Key Department of Education the question I have is and and I've had this question and I've asked people and nobody can and seem to
answer it our our home life with children is no different than any other state I mean it we but we have superintendents that I've been told that do not follow what the law is what we passed the law like for the reading for different things they do not follow it's what the teachers are telling us so my question is what can we do to enforce this to do we need to clean house so
that with superintendents teachers whatever it takes because our concern right now should be the students there that they should be the utmost we want them to achieve to get to be able to go out and work and and achieve like any other child does so what do we need to do to build a fire or to do what's got to be done because we can sit here all day and hash this stuff out but unless it we get down to where the real problem is it's not going to change
Speaker 148
1:24:56
well representative speaks I think we
Speaker 149
1:24:59
all public policymakers those of us in department roles, superintendents, teachers, all across the board. I think the foundational principle we have to start on is we all have to agree that all kids can learn at high levels. I don't think we agree on that across the state, just the anecdotally from conversations that we have, you know I
remember a couple of years ago a conversation with a superintendent who claimed that the only way scores could increase in his district is if a certain number of students from another district that was higher performing transferred and he's just popping off but that's you know that tells me we have we have a problem in our expectations and so you know we have been working closely with AAEA you know one thing you have to remember is over the last five to ten
years you think about the turnover in superintendents school leaders principals it's been immense I mean there have been anywhere from 25 to 40 superintendents that may turn over in a year's time and you think about in the context of 250 260 or so districts and charters that's that's pretty immense so we are working with aaaea and other groups to really boost the mentoring processes that we have the
the processes we have for tests and leads where it's not just about evaluation but it's about support and growth for those school leaders i think our communities one thing we have done at the department is boosted our family and community engagement process our communities need to have a better understanding and i think some of the reports that we get now that well this school's not following the law is because of that in increased engagement that we're seeing around the state what do we do about those reports you know we get those too we get those calls that say
say, hey, you need to go check out so-and-so because they're not following the law, and we do. We check it out. And a lot of times what we find is they don't, I know it's hard to believe because some of these things we feel like we've talked about forever ad nauseam, but there's still a lack of awareness out there of what the laws say. So we engage closely with our processes and our partners to try to make sure there's a clear understanding of what those laws say and what the expectations are especially when it
comes to reading over the last five years I think we've we've seen huge progress in reading legislation dyslexia legislation and an understanding of what those expectations have to be at the district level you know we just representative we we will just continue to push that information out and expect through our co-ops i mean that's another area where we've really i think we've strengthened our partnership with the co-ops superintendents are more closely connected to
their co-op directors and the teams at the co-ops and they are frequently with the department so making sure the co-ops have the right information all those things are ways that we are trying
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:28:43
to tackle the concern that you voiced thank you thank you very much okay senator Elliott thank you madam chair per the questions that were raised by representative de la Rosa in 2004 Jim argue and I about the other outside
factors or at an ncsl meeting 2004 and there's a man named richard richard uh rost roststein who had written a book called class and schools it was a it is a terrific book that explains a lot of what the questions were about that we have just not engaged because i don't think anybody is here to be blamed or wants to do a bad job but there are just things we are not considering i just want to let you guys know about these two books in case you care. But class and school, the whole
title of the book is Class and Schools Using Social Economic and Education Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. Then about two years ago,
he wrote a follow-up book because we didn't really do that much with that in Arkansas anyway. We tried to, but it just didn't catch on. About two years ago, he
published a book called The Color of Law, how governments segregated Americans' neighborhoods, schools, and everything else.
And that's important to this conversation only because if we don't ever get to the point we understand the structures that were put in place to undergird where we are right now, We were forever, I think, besurfing and trying to make sure schools do everything. And that's one of the things Richard Rothstein talks a great deal about. He actually says that closing the gaps between lower class and middle class students,
no matter who they are, requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to the schools as if they alone can't eradicate poverty and inequality. And that's why the schools, we end up trying to figure out quick ways to do things and explain things. It's not just the schools. It's society's structure. For example, you look at the four schools that are right now in intensive care or under takeover.
look at who and what they are look at the demographics of who and what they are and think about the structures that we've had in place basically 400 years that we have not dismantled and it's a hard thing to do because you don't see it right away i just want to put that out there and i do have a question madam chair because this is i one thing i wanted to have on the um on the rfp that we're going to do for adequacy uh was for those people who are the experts to give us based on research and what they know give us a
list of the outside factors that will no matter how much money we put into that funding formula give us give us a list of the outside factors that will affect whether or not a student can do well or not do well in school or even do better i think that got stricken in the second round but this is what i'm talking about if we don't face up to things like that and take a look at it ms holt do you know um has this information been presented to the state board of education
that you just presented to us do they have that um
Speaker 39
1:32:31
ade had a copy of the report but we've not sent it to the state board so i don't know if so but have they had a
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:32:39
and because you did a great job of explaining has that have they had the explanation and the discussion like from
Speaker 154
1:32:44
you or whoever would do that not not from me
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:32:47
yeah do you know if they have they ever in your tenure there in the last
say five years or so do you know if anybody if that there has been a presentation
about what you just presented to us i
Speaker 7
1:33:04
i all i do is watch the state board meetings online Okay. I'm not aware of one, but that I could have easily missed something. Okay. Mr. Key, I
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:33:12
mean, Madam Chair, you don't have to come if it's okay with Madam Chair. Can you just bow yes or no or something to let us know? I'm sorry, Secretary Key, I'm trying to get used to that.
Speaker 101
1:33:31
It's okay. It's okay, Senator. And I apologize. I'll have to ask you
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:33:35
to repeat the question because I was conversing with the President's speech. I was asking in the last five years or so, or since the time you've been there, let's just say, has this kind of information about that Ms. Holt just presented to us, has the board been presenting this and had a discussion about this kind of thing, the state
Speaker 149
1:33:56
board? Well, I mean, I think this analysis really would be the first time an analysis of this type has been done
because of that transition i mean keeping in mind 2017 was the we've been implementing um you know since act 930 was put into place but we're certainly um you know we certainly make this available to them um and let them decide if they want to pursue uh you know presentation or anything along these lines um you know we have talked considerably about different elements within this but I don't think as a package that there has been any presentation that,
and we certainly wouldn't expect that to, you know, this is your process, and if we want, if the board wants, you know, I have to ask them how they want to do this. I mean, I know they're interested in this kind of thing, and they've asked about different legislative reports in the past, but to say that
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:35:03
it's been presented to them, no, ma'am. Okay. Any kind of analysis similar to this, do you know? Because I recognize Act 930 and this, but prior to that, any kind of analysis so they understand when they are making a decision that they're going to, for example, let's just use the Little Rock School District.
We're making a decision on the six F schools and that we're going to take some kind of action. And yet we know it's not as simple as that's an F school. Do we have anything to, I'm worried about what they have for them to be informed beyond it's just an F the same way we were just informed today.
Speaker 149
1:35:55
Yes, and our quarterly legislative reports are presented to the state board, and actually Thursday is the next time for that to be presented. So all of those districts that are in state authority have, and those are the, there are elements of this that are presented. The department has a presentation, and then the districts actually have an opportunity to answer questions about it. So, but it's more in line with the work that's happening on the ground.
I mean, there's not as much statistical analysis as what is here. Yeah, okay. All
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:36:36
right. Okay, thank you. And, Ms., I just think I have one more question. Is that it? I think I have one more question. Do you know if there
are other groups out there beyond the Learning Policy Institute who's done some research and looking into what it means to label schools? I know you just chose that one, but are there others?
Speaker 16
1:37:06
That was the most definitive research with actual data. Okay. But like I said, I mean, I can look. Okay. Okay, I'll look, I just thought if you had
Speaker 155
1:37:15
an answer. That's it. Well, finally, I just want us to
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
1:37:19
be aware, it's not your school district right now, but you need to think about this, what we just learned this morning. We are saying that it is gonna be a simple thing to have a grade on a school, and a State Board of Education can make a decision
about a grade on a school, and we don't even know all that it means. And yet the consequences are pretty dire. I wish we would really, really think about that, no matter who the school district is.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:37:54
Thank you, Madam Chair. Representative Beck. Thank you, Madam Chair. And this may be a conversation we can talk later. But my question is, is how do you isolate your data points when you're tracking them? I'm just gonna use an example here.
So let's say that you're using free and reduced lunch to track something, and you say, okay, there's a correlation between this and that, free and reduced lunches and that, okay? But then there's also a correlation between free and reduced lunch and the incarceration rate of parents, all right? So now if you track the incarceration rate of parents towards the initial thing that you were trying to say, well, there's a correlation there too, aren't you double dipping on that one data point?
My question was how would you isolate, or is there a method? And maybe if it's too
Speaker 7
1:38:44
violent, we'll talk later. Well, and I did not use things like incarceration because I don't know how to track that down to the school level of which parents are incarcerated. So that was not data that I was able to use. The regression formula that I talked about, and back in graduate school, we had to actually do these, and so we understood how they worked, but now you let the computer do it.
but it weeds out in a multiple regression it weeds out that extraneous influence so that you're taking away that effect of double
Speaker 16
1:39:18
predicting something all right thank you okay you have given
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:39:25
us a great deal of information here probably people haven't left so I you are to be commended because it's it's well it really is it's an important we have we have big decisions
to make here and it's really important for us to understand and have these discussions so we appreciate everything you have presented today if nothing else it's given us more questions to ask but we appreciate that and now I think we're We're prepared for Ms. Nell Smith. Where'd she go? Oh, she's coming. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 175
1:40:28
Okay. You are recognized. Good morning. My name is Nell Smith, and we're going to be talking about English language learners,
and I believe that's being passed out to you now. So for the second report today, I'm going to talk about a state categorical funding program that's designed to support students who are not proficient in the English language. So English language learner funding is one of four state categorical funds you'll hear about throughout this adequacy study. And you'll hear the other three periodically throughout the study. As I've mentioned in our June meeting, categorical funds are generally intended
to support student services targeted to students with additional needs. They're funded entirely with state dollars and they're considered restrictive funds, meaning districts can only use the funding for the intended purpose. So ELL funding definitely fits that description. So first, let me just say a word about terminology. There are a bunch of different terms that refer to English language learners, such as English learners or students who are limited English proficient. For simplicity's sake, I'm generally going to refer to these students as ELL students.
There are also different names for the instructional programs and services intended to help these students achieve English proficiency. And again, for simplicity's sake, I'm generally going to refer to these programs as English as a second language programs or ESL programs. And the department prefers the acronym ESOL for English for Speakers of Other Languages, so you might hear them refer to ESOL programs, but I'm going to be referring to ELL students and ESL instructional programs and services.
So if you'll open the report to page one, you can see that the trends in ELL enrollment over nearly a decade. The charts show the number of ELL students each year and the percentage of total enrollment that ELL students make up. The top chart shows the enrollment patterns for traditional school districts, while the second chart shows the patterns among open enrollment charter schools. Overall, statewide, there were about 38,500 ELL students in Arkansas in 2018-19, including
ELL students in both traditional school districts and open enrollment charter schools. So about 8% of the state's public school students are English language learners, and that's a little below the national average of about 9.6% at the last tally. So one thing that I want to point out is that there's been a decline in the number of ELL students in the state. It looks like a little dip on the chart showing the ELL population in traditional school districts, but in reality, this is a reduction of more than 3,300 students across the state.
So this decrease is probably not due to a reduction in non-native English speakers. It's most likely due to the fact that students are increasingly reaching English proficiency and exiting ESL programs, so they're no longer considered ELL students. And we'll talk about that change a little later in the report. So the map on page two shows districts and their concentration of ELL students. Nearly 14% of the traditional school districts have no ELL students at all.
And most of the districts that do have ELL students have very small numbers. And that means many of the state's ELL students are concentrated in just a few school districts. About half of the entire state's ELL students are enrolled in just five school districts, which you can see in the table at the top of page three. So those districts are Springdale, Rogers, Fort Smith, Little Rock, and Dequeen. Springdale alone has more than a fifth of all of the ELL students in the state.
The last table on page three shows that the vast majority of ELL students speak Spanish, about 83 percent. Another 8 percent of ELL students speak Marshallese, and about 1 percent speak Vietnamese, Arabic, and Lao. Altogether there are about 94 languages spoken by Arkansas ELL students. So now I'm going to briefly go over what schools are required to provide in terms of an English as a Second Language instructional program and how students enter and exit the program.
So there are actually very few requirements that are placed on school districts by the state. The framework of requirements are really at the federal level. Federal law requires school districts to provide an equal educational opportunity to students who are not English proficient, and the Supreme Court has, the U.S. Supreme Court has further interpreted that requirement to mean that schools can't simply provide ELL students the same exact instruction and textbooks. Instead, districts must take steps to help ELL students overcome language barriers, and they need to ensure that these students can participate
meaningfully in districts' educational programs. So the top of page four provides a bulleted list of some of the other requirements that school districts must meet in serving their ELL students. Districts must take appropriate steps to identify all students who are not proficient in English, and they have to provide an educationally sound language assistance program for students they've identified. They also have to monitor and assess the progress those students are making.
So ESL programs are intended to be temporary, where students enter the program when they're not proficient in English, then they receive instructional support with their English language development, and then they exit the program when they've achieved proficiency. Students first enter ESL programs through a home language usage survey. Parents or guardians fill out a questionnaire when they register their child for school, and the questionnaire asks them what language is spoken at home, what language the student learned first, and other questions to uncover the student's native language and the language
to which the student is regularly exposed. Students whose native language is something other than English are then asked to take a screener assessment to determine whether they're proficient in English or if they need ESL services. Students who test on the screener as limited English proficient are assigned a group of teachers and other school staff to serve as their language placement and assessment committee, or ELPAC. The purpose of this group is to ensure these students receive the instructional services they need and to monitor their English language development and their general education progress. So if you'll turn to page 5, you'll
see the section of the report covering ESL instructional programs. So once students have identified as English learners, they'll receive instructional services to help them attain English language proficiency while they're also learning the academic content that all students are learning. Arkansas schools use a combination of instructional programs to address the needs of ELL students. Some schools pull students out of their academic classes to provide ESL instruction. Some use co-teaching, which means a general ed teacher and an ESL teacher are in the classroom
together planning and delivering instruction. Some use something called sheltered English instruction, which might look like a regular academic classroom, but the instruction is delivered in a way that's specifically designed to help students learn the English language while they're learning academic content. So this type of instruction might rely heavily on pictures and props and gestures to help communicate a lesson, or they might incorporate pauses, longer pauses between sentences to give students time to make connections between language and its meaning.
One type of instructional program that's not used in Arkansas is bilingual or dual language instruction. The reason these types of programs are not used is due to a state law that calls for English to be the basic language of instruction. ADE's legal interpretation of this law is that it prohibits bilingual educational programs for ELL students. So educational research comparing instructional programs for English learners hasn't found one method of instruction to be conclusively superior for all students.
However, there's a growing amount of research finding that bilingual programs can be as effective, if not more so, than English-only programs for some ELL students. So we've talked about identifying ELL students and providing English language instruction, and so now we'll talk about how students move out of ESL programs, how they're deemed English proficient, and essentially graduate from these programs. This section starts on page 8.
So each spring, during the end of the school year, ELL students are tested to determine their English language proficiency. who test proficient are eligible to exit the ESL program. There are more criteria for actually exiting, which I'll get into in a minute, but passing the test is the first step. For students who don't test proficient, the test scores help their ELPAC assess whether the student is making appropriate progress towards proficiency. And the scores also help determine what services the student will need in the next school year. The English language proficiency
assessment the state uses is called the ELPA-21. It assesses students in four areas, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The ELPA-21 replaced another assessment the state used prior to 2015-16. The new tests criteria for determining proficiency is a little more flexible than the previous tests criteria. And remember I mentioned that there's a reduction in the number of ELL students in the state. This change in the proficiency assessment is the first
reason for that reduction. And as you can see in the chart on page 8, under the previous assessment, only about 3,500 students tested fully English proficient in 2015. That's about 9% of test takers. A year later, with the switch to ELPA21, nearly 9,000 students tested proficient, about 23% of test takers. ADE considers the ELPA21 to be a more accurate reflection of English proficiency and they believe the higher
number of students testing out of services is appropriate. But this increase in students testing proficient in English is important because it means more students are meeting the most important criteria for exiting the ESL program. However, there's more to exiting than simply passing the test. Students are also required to show that they are on par with their peers in terms of mastery of academic content. So they are demonstrating not only English proficiency through a test,
but they are also showing that their language development is allowing them to keep up with their peers on academic content. The ability to demonstrate on-grade learning helps confirm that their English language development is sufficient for continued academic growth. Under ADE guidance, ELL students must have two pieces of supporting evidence demonstrating that they're learning on grade level. For example, they may show that they're scoring ready or exceeding on the ACT Aspire in math
and that they've made at least a 19 on the ACT college entrance exam. Districts have some flexibility in which two pieces of supporting evidence they can use, but the evidence must be some kind of standardized assessment. It can't be a teacher's recommendation or some other subjective evidence. So this exit criteria is a very big change from the criteria used a couple of years ago. Previously students who tested English language proficient could exit ESL services only if
they maintained a C grade point average in core subjects and they scored ready or exceeding on the ACT ASPIRE assessment and two teachers recommended their exit from the ESL program. So you can see on the chart on page 9 that the change in tests and the change in the exit criteria has had a significant impact on the number of students exiting the ESL program. The chart shows that typically about 1,300 to 1,700 students exited the ESL program
between 2013 and 2016, but in 2017 that number increased to about 3,800 students and again jumped to 4,200 students in 2018. And we'll talk about the ELL funding in a minute, but an important point here is that because the state funding is based on the number of ELL students, an increasing number of students exiting the ESL program may ultimately mean districts receive less state funding. The increase in students exiting the ESL program
has also caused a spike in the number of students
Speaker 181
1:53:57
that districts are monitoring as former ELL
Speaker 175
1:54:01
Districts are required to monitor former ELL students in the years after they test out of ESL services. They are required to review these students' academic progress and standardize test scores at least annually. The chart on the bottom of page 10 shows this increase in former ELL students in recent years. You can see that the number of former ELL students grew from about 3,000 students in 2016 to nearly 5,400 students in 2017.
You'll also see that districts were previously monitoring students for just two years after they exited ESL services. And now they're monitoring students for four years. And that's because the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, now requires districts to monitor ELL students for four years. So you can see that in 2018, the number of monitored students nearly doubled the 2017 numbers. So we've got a combination of things going on. More students are exiting ESL programs, while at the same time, districts are having to double the years in which they monitor former ELL students.
Again, this increase is significant in part because districts don't receive state funding for former ELL students. Once they're considered former ELL students, districts no longer receive ELL state categorical funding for them. So the next section of the report provides information on how the state measures the success of English learners. And I'm going to take a minute to describe these measures because we'll talk about them more later and it can kind of get confusing. So ELL students' performance can be measured in three main ways, which I've listed on page
11. ELL students' performance can be measured based on their progress toward achieving English Language Proficiency, or ELP, their progress in mastering academic content, and their high school graduation rate. We're mostly going to focus on the first two, so how well they're doing in terms of learning the English language and how well they're doing in mastering grade-level academic content. So we'll take English language proficiency first. There are two measures ADE uses to
assess progress in becoming English language proficient, or ELP. The first is ELP student growth, and Julie mentioned student growth a little bit. That's a measure of student performance on the ELPA 21, and remember that's the English language proficiency test. So So the ELP student growth score compares an individual student's ELP proficiency level as determined by the ELPA21 with that student's previous test scores. So how well is that student progressing?
A growth score of about 80, as Julie mentioned, means the student is performing as predicted given that student's previous test scores. A score above 80 indicates the student is outpacing his or her expected performance, and a score below 80 means the student didn't meet his or her individual expected performance. The average ELP growth score for the state is 84.5, which means on average ELL students are outpacing their expected gains on the English language proficiency test.
So one thing that's notable about the ELP student growth score is that it's factored into each school's ESSA score, ESSA school index, meaning that it's now a part of an individual school's letter grade. Previous school accountability systems didn't incorporate ELL students' progress on English language development in school ratings. And we really didn't even have this measure even two years ago when we did this report. But under ESSA, states are now required to include that.
The second measure for ELP progress compares how students are doing against state-established benchmarks. So the benchmarks set an expected path to ELP based on a student's grade level when they entered the ESL program and the student's first English language proficiency score. So the benchmarks are set up as three grids, and there's a copy of the grids in the appendix at the end of the report, but I've provided a simplified table on page 13. So the grids essentially spell out what level of proficiency a student should
attain each year given their grade level and their original proficiency level. So according to the benchmarks, a student who enters the ESL program in kindergarten at a level one proficiency, the lowest proficiency score, that student should be at a level two proficiency in the first and second grade and then should move to a level three by the third and fourth grade. And finally, that student should test proficient by the fifth grade. So a student is considered on track to proficiency if the student hits those
benchmarks each year or goes beyond them. So ADE then calculates the percentage of ELL students who are hitting those benchmarks and are considered on track to proficiency. ADE doesn't use these data to measure individual school or district performance in the state accountability system, but they do use these data as part of the state's long-term goal under its ESSA plan. ADE has established a long-term goal of having at least 52% of ELL students on track to proficiency
by 2030. In 2018, 34% of ELL students statewide were considered to be on track to English language proficiency. So the state's long-term goal is to increase from 34% to 52% of ELL students on track in the next 12 years. And I'll come back to these two measures of English language proficiency in a little bit when we talk about district expenditures. But now I'll move on to the second measure of ELL student success, their progress in
mastering academic content. And this can be measured by the percentage of ELL students in a school or district who scoring ready or exceeding on the ACT ASPIRE assessments. Because these students are learning academic subject matter as they're learning the language in which it's being taught, the ACT ASPIRE scores of ELL students tend to lag behind the scores of non ELL students. You can see this in the charts at the top of page 15. You can see that about 30% of ELL students
scored ready or exceeding on math. Those are the top two sections of the bar charts. And that compares with 49% of non-ELL students. So there's a 19 percentage point gap. The gap between ELL students and non-ELL students is wider for English language arts and for science. And there's about a 26 percentage point gap between ELL and non-ELL students in English language arts and a 24% percentage point gap in science. So to compare the performance of Arkansas
students with other states we need to look at the NAEP assessment and you'll see those scores on page 17. The NAEP test assesses students grade level performance so this is another measure of academics academic skills not English language proficiency. The NAEP is administered to a sample of students in every state and it's given only every two years. The 2017 scores are the most recent scores available. The charts on page 17 show that this that each state
show each state's students scores on the fourth and eighth grade assessment for reading and math and the charts show the average scale score for each state's non ELL students in dark gray. The lighter bar for each state shows the average scale score for ELL students when there's enough ELL test takers to provide a valid average score. The states are listed from the highest average scale score among ELL students to the lowest, and you can see that Arkansas's ELL students outperformed most other states. Nationally, our ELL students
ranked fourth in eighth grade math and reading, sixth in fourth grade reading, and ninth in fourth grade math. So ELL students do fairly well, our ELL students do fairly well in that comparison. If you look on page 18, you'll see the third way the state measures student success among ELL students, the graduation rate. And this is another measure on which Arkansas's ELL students outperform other states. About 82% of ELL students graduate
from high school in Arkansas, compared with the national average of just 66 percent. Arkansas's graduation rate for ELL students is higher than the graduation rate of every other state. We're at the very top of the heap. And for comparison, it's important to note that Arkansas generally tends to rank fairly high in our graduation rate for all students. The most recent data has us at 14th overall, but our rank for ELL students is even higher at number one. So now we'll talk about money.
If you'll turn to page 19, we'll talk about ELL state categorical funding and expenditures. ELL funding that districts receive is intended to help them provide additional instructional services for ELL students. In 2018, the most recent year for which we have finalized expenditure data, the funding rate was $338 per ELL student, which totaled about $13.4 million statewide.
Districts and charter schools are also allowed to transfer funding among their categorical funds. They can move money from one categorical fund, say from their NSL funds, to their ELL account if they need more money for those programs. In 2018, a number of districts did just that. They collectively transferred nearly $5.5 million from categorical funds to be spent as ELL funding. And you can see this in the table at the top of page 20.
The transferred funds are in the fourth column from the left. The vast majority of the funds they transferred came from districts' NSL funding. That's the state categorical funding that's provided to districts based on their concentrations of poverty, and it has a new name, it's ESA now, Enhanced Student Achievement. But about $5.3 million of the total $5.5 million transferred came from NSL funding. And transferring NSL funding to districts' ELL funds makes some degree of sense.
The General Assembly originally intended for districts to use their NSL funds to supplement their ELL dollars. So after the fund transfers, districts had about $18.9 million in ELL categorical funds to spend in 2017-18. And you can see in the pie chart at the bottom of page 20 that districts spent the majority of their ELL funds on salaries for both certified and classified staff. In total, they spent about $18.5 million of their ELL funds.
We also wanted to explore other types of funds that districts are spending on ESL programs and services, so funds beyond the ELL categorical funds we just talked about. This is shown in the table at the top of page 21. So besides federal funding, which we'll talk about in a minute, the data showed that districts spent another $4.5 million on ESL programs, and that money mostly came from their foundation funds. So altogether, that's a total of nearly $23 million in ESL expenditures from non-federal
funds, or as you can see at the table at the bottom of page 21, $580 per ELL student. So the bottom line to all of this is that the state provided $338 per student in ELL and districts ended up spending $580 per student to provide services for those students. So on page 22, I've included a section describing the funding that other
states provide for ELL students. Most states do provide this type of funding for their school districts, but they provide it using a variety of different distribution methods. About 25 states provide funding as a weight on their regular per pupil funding. So for example a state with a weight of 25% for ELL students would provide the full amount of regular per pupil funding plus another 25% for each ELL student. If Arkansas's ELL funding were described as
a weight it would equal about 5%. So you could say that districts receive a 100% of the foundation funding rate for a non-ELL student and 105 for an ELL student. The weights used in other states range from about 10% to 155%. That 155 is Georgia and they are kind of an outlier so the range is actually maybe a little less. Some other states provide funding as Arkansas does through a flat funding allocation.
The allocations in these states range from $250 per ELL student to about $1,500 per student. And that's compared with Arkansas's $338 per ELL student. Still other states provide funding in terms of the cost of a teacher or other staff. For example, Tennessee provides funding to cover the cost of one additional teacher for every 20 ELL students and one additional translator for every 200 ELL students. If our ELL funding were expressed in terms of the cost of a teacher, it would support one full-time teacher for every 195 ELL students.
One thing that's important to note is that some of these states, these funding programs support all at-risk students or all students with special needs, where we have separate funding programs for other student subgroups. So it's not exactly an apples and apples comparison. So, in addition to state funding, some districts with larger ELL student populations receive Title III federal funding. The section of the report covering federal funding starts on page 23.
Districts are required to treat any Title III federal funding as supplemental funding, so they can't use it for services they're legally obligated to provide. But they can use it to supplement their language instructional programs, provide professional development for ESL staff, and provide parent and family engagement services. And not all districts received this funding. In 2017-18, 42 districts and a charter school collectively received and spent about $3.5 million in Title III funding, or about $98 per ELL student.
So now we're going to talk about the connection between district spending and how well ELL students are progressing. And this information starts on page 25. To do these analyses, I've combined districts' total spending on ESL programs. And that includes all district spending of ELL state categorical funds, all spending of federal Title III funds plus any other expenditures that districts have coded as
an instructional ESL program expenditure. There's a particular code for that. So I turned this total ESL program expenditure into a per student value by dividing it by the number of ELL students in the district, and I eliminated from the analysis districts with fewer than 15 ELL students because there's some erratic nature to those when you get to just a few students. So that left me with about 127 districts and charter schools. I then compared districts per student ESL expenditures
with the various measures of student performance that we talked about earlier. And I'll focus on, the two I'll focus on are the English language proficiency measures. So those are the ELP measures that I described. The average ELP student growth and the percentage of students who are on track to ELP. And just as a reminder, the ELP student growth is a measure of how well a student performed on the English Language Proficiency Assessment, the ELPA 21, compared with how well that same student was expected to perform based on that student's previous test scores.
So that's ELP student growth. The other measure, the percent of students on track to English Language Proficiency, that's the one that compares students' ELPA 21 performance against state-established benchmarks. So first what we found is that both ELP measures are correlated, and I'm glad Julie explained correlations earlier. So these measures are both correlated to district size, but the correlation is weak. Larger district size is associated with greater ELP gains and larger proportions of ELL students
who are on track to ELP, but not strongly so. We also found that two ELP measures do not correlate with the number of ELL students in a district or the proportions of ELL students in a district, the percentage of the student population who are English learners. Those factors don't seem to be related to ELP progress. So what impact does district spending have?
One of our ELP measures correlates with district spending per student, while the other one does not. ELP student growth does correlate with districts per student ESL program expenditures, but again the correlation is weak. So generally speaking, greater per student spending is associated with greater English language proficiency growth, but not strongly so. On page 25 in the first table, I've broken it out into quartiles by district's average
ELP growth so that you can see the pattern. Quartile 1 is made up of the districts with the lowest average ELP student growth, while quartile 5 is made up of the districts with the largest average ELP student growth. You can see that the average per student ESL expenditure increases as you move from the lower growth districts to the higher growth districts. This table may overstate the strength of the relationship between the two, but I just wanted to give you a visual sense of the pattern.
If we look at the second measure of ELP progress, districts percentage of students who are on track to English language proficiency, we see a different pattern. We found no correlation between a districts percentage of students who are considered on track to proficiency and districts per student spending on ESL programs. you can see that in the second table on page 25. I also examined the relationship between district spending and the indicators of student achievement in academic content. So ELL student
performance on ACT Aspire. None of the student achievement indicators were correlated with per student ESL expenditures. But, notably, both of the English language proficiency measures do correlate with ELL student growth on ACT Aspire. That is, districts with higher marks in the two English language proficiency measures tend to have larger than expected growth on the ACT Aspire. And that makes some logical sense.
Students who are progressing quickly in their English language development are probably going to have similar gains with academic subjects as well, since those subjects are being taught in English. So finally, I've provided some information on page 26 that compares districts that receive federal Title III funding with those that do not. Remember, only districts with larger ELL student populations receive the Title III funds, and the funding averages about $100 per ELL student for those districts.
But the data indicate that districts receiving federal Title III funding have, on average, ELP student growth and higher percentages of students on track to ELP than the districts that did not receive Title III funding. That said the difference in the two groups on the ELP growth measure is relatively small, less than a point difference. So with that I'd be happy to take any
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:15:37
questions. Lordy me, another great report. Lots of information. Now you all have to keep
this all in your mind till we get to the end and start doing the matrix oh let's see
okay senator starch thank you madam chair
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
2:15:54
now I just had a quick question this may not have been a bone but I picked up on it page six you sign a email from general counsel's office at 80 which says that they did not think that we could offer the dual language or bilingual programs the way that the law reads now now we changed that in 2017 a little bit I thought we kind of clarified
that it was not a violation if they used you know certain programs or instruction where they use both languages in order to further their English proficiency so I guess I'm a little confused as to do we need to clarify the law again or if that's just one interpretation or you cite information that says this bilingual instruction actually helps students achieve English proficiency faster and might not let them linger in these programs for a longer period of time so I'm just kind of wanting to make sure
that maybe if there's something that needs to be changed maybe we should go ahead and change
Speaker 175
2:16:55
it I know that's a lot I'm sorry no no first let me say that the the literature there is it's not saying that it's always better than English only there's plenty of research saying you know English only is is also good. I think there's a growing amount of research that's suggesting there is some benefits to bilingual education, but there's no consensus that one is better than the other. I'm going to read you what you just mentioned, the
language that was added, and I think that this is probably a question for the department to answer their legal interpretation that this prohibits bilingual education. So the law previously has said the basic language of instruction in public school branches in all the schools of the state public and private shall be the English language only so the basic language of instruction shall be English language only and then what was added was a statement that said it shall not be a violation of this section for an
educator to communicate with a student in the students native language in order to facilitate the students ability to become proficient and learn in the English language and at that point I'm just gonna let the department discuss there are you satisfied with that no I'm gonna pull a Joyce Elliott if I
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
2:18:16
can do what said I'm gonna pull a Joyce Elliott if I can and get the department to okay Sorry about that.
Speaker 133
2:18:32
Trisha Kerr, ESOL Program Director with the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education. What we encourage educators to do and what that means is they are highly encouraged to access the student's first language as they are learning English to provide, whether it's word-to-word dictionaries, whether it's, sometimes they provide bilingual paraprofessionals who can help bridge that gap, especially for your beginning level English learners, to help them understand content.
It's used for clarification purposes. We also train educators to be aware of things like cognates. A cognate is a word in regular, in regular. Regular is Spanish for regular, and regular, you know what regular is. Well, we encourage teachers to be aware of those cognates and to use them and emphasize them in instruction. We also encourage them to be aware of the student's language structure
as they're learning to read in English so that they can remedy differences that are between their first language sounds and English sounds. so we are encouraging them to tap into their first language and use it as a tool to learn English but we are instructing in English so would this
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
2:19:58
be then for their regular subject teachers or homeroom teachers or are we talking about specifically ELL teachers any teacher who serves that student okay
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:20:12
Is that it? Thank you, Madam Chair. Senator Johnson? Thank you, Madam Chair. The folks from the department wouldn't leave yet. I might need their comment on this question. I think those of us that are English speakers and really don't have a foreign language, or at least not one they use in everyday life, we sometimes forget that English is really a language that doesn't have dialects.
However, Spanish and other languages have some very distinct dialects. We tend to think that everyone that we need to deal with in Arkansas and schools in Spanish is a Mexican, and that may be true or largely true, but it's not 100% true. Do we have any way of accommodating different dialects, including Central Mexico, Central America, Northern Mexico,
and I have a friend who is a Spanish speaker that has told me that there are some distinct dialectical differences, and I'm just wondering, personnel, thank you for your work on this, but did your study do that? And to the ladies from the department, has the department have any kind of a criteria to deal with those discrepancies
Speaker 196
2:21:39
of dialect? that dialects was not something that that my research examined thank you and
Speaker 134
2:21:46
our friends from ADE that will vary district by district and student group by student group
Speaker 133
2:21:57
we do try in our trainings that we offer to educators to be aware that not all Spanish is the same so we also encourage them when they're providing interpreters to make sure that the interpreters like at parent conferences are speaking a similar Spanish to each other but that
varies community by community and how we deal with that you know and there is some dialectical differences in English that we could talk about too. It does vary region by region or British English to American English is one concept of comparing Spanish that's used in Spain versus Spanish used in Latin America. So we do try to make educators aware of those differences and knowing that not all Spanish is the same and so if you do provide a Spanish interpreter
and the family doesn't seem to be understanding, then one question might be to ask, are they
Speaker 134
2:22:56
using the same words for the same concepts that both parties
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:23:02
understand? And again, I'm very much ill-informed in differences in languages, although I did speak some German in college and went to school in Austria for a brief time, and I learned that my Austrian friends, If they wanted to talk amongst themselves and not include me, they could kind of downshift into their regional dialect,
and I couldn't hardly understand what they were saying at all. So I know that, unlike English, which is really about an accent as opposed to a dialect, that Spanish does have some distinct dialects, and I'm wondering if perhaps that's a... Has it been a problem is really what I'm asking, not that you deal with it. I guess we have in German we had Hochdeutsch or High German that everyone kind of knew to speak when they were in multiple groups,
but you could use the dialect kind of among your friends and family. I'm wondering, is there a similar situation in Spanish where there's a Castilian or some kind of higher dialect that is kind of provides some commonality that makes these teachers' jobs easier? Not that's been reported to
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:24:20
you for your help and candor. It's a difficult problem that you're dealing with,
and I know that you can't, when the report said, I believe you said 97 languages, Bill, I think. That's amazing to me that there are that many in Arkansas, but I appreciate the great work you're doing. Thank you. Senator Elliott. Madam Chair, thank
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
2:24:45
you. I just want to just let the committee know, I think I was a Senate sponsor on this bill. I think Clark Tucker and I did this bill, if I remember it all correctly. So much water under the bridge. But this bill really came out of a real-life situation at a school where there was a student
and because of the bill, before we amended it, the teachers literally could not. if I came to this country and all I spoke was say Castilian Spanish or something they literally could not talk to me if in my language even though I might have shown up not knowing any English so it didn't just come out of it was really something really needed just so that teachers could do their jobs so or anybody else in
the school. Thank you. I'm sorry I just
Speaker 179
2:25:34
might I just might add there was a
penalty a financial penalty in the law that that that was eliminated
Speaker 195
2:25:41
by that bill representative Beck thank you madam chair
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:25:47
I was looking at your students testing English language proficiency and there's obviously a trend there's data points there's three data points looks look like the trending down and also saw here that there's a decreasing number of English language learning students my question is and I might be able to I thought you might be able to
pull it off the top here real quick is that is that trend that I'm saying in that testing following the trend and the number of actual students is that is that what that is so I mean we're doing it seems like a program is doing very well so is it
Speaker 180
2:26:29
just tracking the number of students in the program are you talking about the the exit the
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:26:35
exiting kids or the ELP proficiency which the ELP proficient kids I thought I read somewhere that the number of students
are also English language students are decreasing then
Speaker 175
2:26:47
the number of English language learner students are is decreasing because students are are attaining more students are becoming proficient and exiting the
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
2:26:54
program so so the entering the program there's an increase in I guess I don't know the numbers of that was a number I was teasing at are we actually seeing
Speaker 175
2:27:06
less people entering into it and that's the numbers that I've seen have shown you know some kind of up and downs for for when they're entering but but overall
over time we can see that the number of ELL students on that first page was increasing this is what districts are getting paid for so these are the numbers these are the actual funding numbers so the numbers are are increasing up through 2016-17 and then when
Speaker 179
2:27:34
greater numbers of students are are exiting we've got some decrease all right thank you
Senator Jane English
Unverified
2:27:50
that's all the questions we have once again thank you miss nail for all of your hard work and Julie for all of your this has been a very very good discussion today appreciate all of the information and I think that we are adjourned for today don't forget to leave your books here
Agenda
A. Call to Order – 9:00 A.M.
B. Remarks by the Chairs
C. Discussion of Issues Related to the Arkansas Educational Support and Accountability Act (AESAA)
D. English Language Learner State Categorical Funding
E. Other Business
F. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Speaker 5
Speaker 7
Speaker 16
Representative Fred Allen
Unverified
Speaker 29
Senator James Sturch
Unverified
Speaker 39
Speaker 13
Speaker 46
Speaker 28
Speaker 47
Speaker 50
Speaker 53
Speaker 55
Speaker 62
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
Speaker 66
Representative Nelda Speaks
Unverified
Speaker 74
Senator Joyce Elliott
Unverified
Speaker 41
Speaker 97
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Speaker 107
Speaker 109
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
Speaker 114
Speaker 18
Speaker 122
Speaker 45
Speaker 133
Speaker 134
Speaker 135
Speaker 104
Speaker 54
Speaker 58
Speaker 129
Speaker 148
Speaker 149
Speaker 154
Speaker 101
Speaker 155
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 175
Speaker 181
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
Speaker 196
Speaker 179
Speaker 195
Speaker 180