The Department is pleased to report that a proposed amendment to the No Child Left Behind Accountability Plan has been accepted by the U.S. Department of Education. There are two components to the amendment that are described here that may positively affect the school improvement status of schools in Arkansas.
One-Year Progress vs. Three-Year Progress
The originally approved accountability plan provided for a three-year composite of student proficiency to determine alert and/or school improvement status. The amendment allows schools the option of using current year performance data (instead of the three-year composite) if those scores for both literacy and mathematics are equal to or greater than the expected starting point for Adequate Yearly Progress (2001-2002) as approved in the Accountability Plan. For example, if a K-5 school’s three-year composite for literacy were 29.2 the school would have been designated on the June document in alert status. (Assume that mathematics scores exceed the starting point.) Under the amendment, if that school’s most recent literacy scores indicate that 32.1 percent were proficient, then that school will no longer be designated in alert status for the 2001-2002 year.
Confidence Intervals
The second amendment allows the Department to establish statistical confidence intervals around the starting points and yearly-progress table values as approved in the original Accountability Plan. A confidence interval establishes a lower bound (computed at 0.5 of one standard deviation) for each of the table values. If a school’s percent proficient falls within the lower bound of the confidence interval, the school will be identified as having met the starting point or adequate yearly progress as defined in the table. A sample of how this amendment impacts the table values is included in the attachment.
Schools impacted by these amendments will be contacted directly by the Department. The reports that contain student performance scores for 2002-2003 will have these factors built into the report.
The Department will report 2002-2003 school improvement status in three stages. First will be combined population for all schools in the K-5 cluster grouping. Secondly will be total combined population for middle schools and senior high schools. Finally will be subgroup data.