By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas ranks 10th in the nation in a new report that evaluates states’ public education systems.
The 13th annual Quality Counts report by Washington-based Education Week, released today, gives Arkansas a grade of B-minus for overall quality of education. The nation as whole gets a C in the report.
“We’re very pleased,” said Julie Thompson, spokeswoman for the state Department of Education. “We think it shows that Arkansas is still very progressive in terms of education policies.”
Arkansas scored a B-minus and was ranked eighth in the nation in last year’s report.
Like last year, Arkansas is the only state west of the Mississippi to rank in the top 10. Maryland is No. 1, followed by Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Georgia.
The 50-state report card assigns grades based on factors such as educational policies, spending, student achievement and students’ chance of success.
The state’s lowest score in any category is a D in K-12 achievement, though the report notes that no new review was done in this area, so the achievement score remained the same as in the previous year’s report.
Of the categories that were reviewed for this year’s report, the lowest score is a C-minus in students’ chance for success. Arkansas is ranked 34th in the nation in that category, which is based on indicators such as family income, parental education, proficiency averages in various grades from preschool to college and adult income levels.
Thompson said the indicators that brought the state’s score down were ones the education system does not directly influence, such as family income.
“If you compare the things that we’re doing good with the input measures, per se, that we’re having to correct for, then that actually makes the work that we’re doing look all that much better,” she said.
This year’s report takes an in-depth look at English-language learners, or ELLs. Between 1995 and 2005, ELL populations at least doubled in 20 states, with the largest increases in percentages of ELLs occurring in Arkansas and South Carolina, according to the report.
In 2006-07, 14.8 percent of ELLs in Arkansas were making progress, compared to 34.4 percent nationally, the report states. During that year, 9 percent of ELLs were classified out of ELL status in Arkansas, compared with 12.9 percent nationally.
Arkansas’ need for an increase in teachers of English as a second language is estimated to increase 66.5 percent in the next five years, compared with a 38.4 percent increase across the nation.
The report includes comments from Springdale Superintendent Jim D. Rollins, whose district has gone from having virtually no English-language learners in 1990 to having 7,000, or 40 percent of the district’s 17,400 students, last fall.
“We had to be learners ourselves, and we had to start from scratch,” Rollins said. “We started out by trying to train 100 or so teachers a year who would volunteer to go through language-acquisition programs in the summer, but it wasn’t enough. With the growth we were experiencing, we needed to be much more comprehensive.”
Thompson said the focus on English-language learners is beneficial because it highlights an important issue both in Arkansas and nationwide. She said one item in the report is misleading, however.
The report says 14 states provide categorical funding for ELL programs and eight states provide funds earmarked for ELL services, neither group including Arkansas.
“They pulled out our budget report, and there’s not an expenditure line item that they found that schools spend on ELL, although we know that as a state we have targeted resources for schools with this population,” Thompson said.
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On the Net:
www.edweek.org
