McCrory schools pass with flying colors in study

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — McCrory School District got the best grade in the state in a nonprofit organization’s study.

Searcy and Melbourne school districts were also awarded A’s in the study, which was conducted by the Arkansas Policy Foundation. The foundation used the spring 2008 ninth-grade test results from a standardized test called the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to rank the districts against each other.

Augusta was the only district in the Three Rivers area to receive an F in the study.

Although the results were released earlier this fall, McCrory Superintendent Barry Scott said it’s still something the school is excited about.

“We’ve been bragging about that for about two months now,” Scott said. “Really, that’s just been a great representation for our school and the caliber of our kids. Every school district has a strong class go through now and then, and we’re happy that our ninth-graders were recognized.”

Augusta Superintendent Richard Blevins, in response to the F his district received from the foundation, said Augusta has a few schools in school improvement, but it’s mostly the K-8 district’s oldest students - the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders - whose scores are the most troublesome. The district has hired literacy coaches, has applied for a grant to hire a math coach and has restructured some things.

“I feel like we’re on the right track,” Blevins said.

He said that poverty is one of the challenges that disproportionally affects Augusta schools as compared with the rest of the state.

“Eighty-five percent of our kids are listed as ‘at risk,’” Blevins said. “Those are students who meet the free and reduced lunch guidelines. By comparison, Valley View, which has been top in the state for years now, has only 1 percent of its students who are at risk. It’s not an excuse, but it’s a reality, and it’s something we have to work with.”

Arkansas Policy Foundation Executive Director Greg Kaza said the foun-dation has been ranking school districts with the letter grades for the last three years to provide an easy-to-understand indicator of how school districts are doing. He said it’s best to look at a school district’s performance over several years. Next year the state will start doing a similar ranking, but with numbers 1-5 instead of letters.

The foundation has compared their rankings with other statistics, like college remediation rates. They found that for many schools, there is a strong correlation between low grades on the foundation’s ranking system and a high percentage of graduates who need remediated courses in college. The foundation’s stated goal on its Web site is that students and parents in failing districts deserve additional options, including charter schools, choices and tax credits.

However, Kaza said another goal is to find out what highscoring school districts are doing and pass that information on to struggling school districts.

“We expect that we will do asurvey as part of our efforts to try to identify some of our school districts’ best practices,” Kaza said. “We could then publish it on the site for all to have access to and send it to problem districts.”

Scott said that McCrory has been doing things like using literacy and math specialists from their local co-op and have been doing a lot of work to streamline their curriculum. But when it comes to their success, he also pointed to some more old-fashioned factors.

“You’ve got to start out at the bottom and build a base,” Scott said. “We’ve got wonderful teachers; a wonderful school board that is supportive of students and teachers; and wonderful students. And one of the first things I said when I came here was that I was going to allow teachers to teach. One or two students are not going to take education away from their peers. Discipline is big with us, and I think it’s one of the biggest challenges that school districts face.”

Officials in Searcy School District, which also got an A and was ranked fourth, listed similar contributing factors but emphasized the work they are doing withtheir curriculum.

“Any time our students are recognized for their academic achievement, we’re pleased,” said Tony Wood, Searcy superintendent. “Some of the major contributing factors are the community in which we live and the parents who are so supportive of public education and the importance they place on academic achievement. Then we have all these hardworking professionals in the classroom providing these opportunities for our students. It’s a combination that really works, and I’m just really thankful every day.”

Searcy Assistant Superintendent Earl Walton also credited the support staff: food service, transportation, technology workers, maintenance, etc., who help make Searcy schools a great place to learn. He also said the district emphasizes safety and discipline.

“We’re teaching real hard every day from bell to bell,” Walton said. “I have come to realize that really, whenever you have any degree of success, it’s several factors working together. It would be hard to say that one is more important than another. And it probably would also be true that if you pulled one away, it wouldn’t work as well.”

Walton also emphasized that Searcy schools have been putting a lot of work into honing their curriculum, trimming the fat and testing techniques to make sure they’re doing things efficiently.

“We’ve been doing the hard, nitty-gritty work of getting down and making sure we know what we want them to know, know that we’re actually teaching it to them and that we’re assessing them on it,” Walton said. “Decisions we make on everything we do, we stop and make sure it meets the curriculum ... That’seasier said than done, and that’s what we spend a great deal of our time working on: revisiting the curriculum and making sure we stick to it.”

Melbourne School District also got an A and ranked 11th on the foundation’s list. Superintendent Gerald Cooper also emphasized that multiple factors have led to their success.

“Our people were really excited about being in the top ranking,” Cooper said. “What it is really about is academics and preparing kids for the future, and that’s what we’re all about around here. It was good for our students and teachers to be recognized for their achievements.

“You have to have good teachers,” Cooper said. “We have excellent faculty and support staff. You have to have good community support, and then obviously your students have to be motivated enough to take their studies seriously. The school board, too, they have to have the vision to lead the district in the right direction, and we have a great school board, too.”

More information is available at www.arkansaspolicyfoundation.org.

- awidner@ arkansasonline.comArkansas Policy Foundation Rankings

The following is a list of Three Rivers schools as ranked by the Arkansas Policy Foundation. The district’s ranking within the grade level is in parentheses.

A

McCrory (1)

Searcy (4)

Melbourne (11)

B

Batesville (2)

Cabot (4)

Highland (8)

Quitman (12)

Beebe (15)

Jackson County (20)

Izard County Consolidated (27)

Bald Knob (33)

Mountain View (41)

Heber Springs (42)

White County Central(44)

C

Riverview (5)

Bradford (8)

Concord (17)

Southside (31)

Pangburn (35)

Calico Rock (41)

Cave City (57)

Rose Bud (65)

Midland (70)

Cushman (71)

West Side (75)

Pulaski County Special (96)

Twin Rivers (108)

Cedar Ridge (109)

D

Newport (7)

F

Augusta (11) - from www.arkansas policyfoundation.org

Three Rivers, Pages 52, 55 on 11/06/2008