By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas has moved up one position in Education Week magazine’s annual ranking of states’ education policies and performance, going from sixth in the nation to fifth.

“I am excited by Arkansas’ continued rise in the Education Week rankings, but there is more hard work ahead of us,” Gov. Mike Beebe said of the magazine’s annual Quality Counts report, released today.

“We’ve come a long way as a state in our pursuit of academic excellence, and we’ll continue making improvements that help our students and our state’s future,” Beebe said.

The state ranked 10th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in the magazine’s 2008 and 2009 reports before moving up to sixth in the 2011 report and fifth in the latest report.

“We’re very pleased about the latest sign of Arkansas’ advancement in education,” state Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell said. “To be ranked fifth in the nation indicates that good things are happening in Arkansas schools. Educators and policy makers across the country are taking notice.”

However, one child advocate noted the policy changes have not significantly improved academic achievement.

The ranking is based on a composite of the grades the state received in six categories. Broken down by category, Arkansas’ best score was in transitions and alignment — ensuring consistent standards and smooth transitions as students go from one grade to another — where the state received an A and was ranked first in the nation.

The state also scored a B-plus for the quality of the teaching profession in the state, ranking second in the nation behind South Carolina. This is the first time the Quality Counts report has included this category.

Arkansas scored an A in standards, assessments and accountability, ranking sixth in the nation; a C in school finance, ranking 27th; a D in K-12 student achievement, ranking 34th; and a C-minus in chance for success, ranking 44th.

Rich Huddleston, executive director of the nonprofit group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said the state has done a good job in areas like accountability and teacher development, but that should not be confused with student achievement, where the state has much work to do.

Huddleston said his group would like to see the state focus more on narrowing the achievement gap between whites and minorities, and ensuring that more students can read proficiently by the end of the third grade.

“There’s a lot of strong research out there that shows that if you’re not reading at a proficient level by the end of the third grade, that makes it much tougher for you to succeed in school in terms of graduating from high school and having the skills to go on to college and graduate from college,” he said.

Extending early childhood education to infants and toddlers, offering more summer and after-school programs and reducing absenteeism would help achieve those goals, Huddleston said.

For the fourth year in a row, Education Week gave the top ranking to Maryland, which scored an overall grade of B-plus. The nation as a whole received a C.

The magazine report noted in the report that the nation has lost ground in the category of chance for success, which gauges the role of education in a persons’ life from cradle to career.

“Scores on the chance-for-success index have dropped from pre-recession levels, due in part to declines in conditions that support early schooling success, including family income and parental employment,” Education Week said in the report.

The lowest scores were awarded in the category of K-12 student achievement. The District of Columbia, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia all received Fs in this category.