Five Arkansas Elementary Schools Highlighted for Closing Achievement Gap

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas will recognize five elementary schools in Arkansas in its new "Spotlights on Success" report published on the office's website. These five schools, whose students have experienced extraordinary academic growth over the past several years, will be highlighted June 10 at the 2011 Summer Leadership Institute at the University of Central Arkansas.

Faculty and staff at the Office for Education Policy have analyzed student data on statewide assessments since 2006 to determine what schools in the state are fostering better than expected student achievement. The researchers deliberately looked at schools with different demographic compositions in order to determine what practices could be applied to other schools in Arkansas.

According to Gary Ritter, director of the Office for Education Policy since 2003, "We looked for success in three types of schools in which there are many barriers to success, or to continued success. First, we scoured the data looking for schools serving racially diverse student bodies with great academic success for all student groups. We also examined the data for schools serving high-poverty student populations whose students had wonderful records of achievement growth. Finally, we considered relatively affluent schools, with high levels of achievement at the start, and found schools not resting on their success. In these schools, the students kept on improving year after year and were not hindered by any ceiling effects."

Howard Elementary School in Fort Smith and Marked Tree Elementary School in Marked Tree are being recognized for success serving economically disadvantaged students. Salem Elementary School in Bryant is being acknowledged for pushing its high-achieving students to even greater levels of performance over the past several years. Finally, Bragg Elementary School in West Memphis and Grace Hill Elementary School in Rogers are being touted for their work pushing all student groups in racially diverse environments to succeed at very high levels. Representatives of the five schools will take part in a panel discussion during the day's event.

The Spotlights on Success report is a case study of five successful schools and is not intended to be a list of the "best" schools in the state, Ritter said.

"Indeed, we found many schools with fantastic records of student success and we look forward to highlighting more schools in the future in this report, which we plan to produce annually," he said.

After exploring the schools, the Office for Education Policy researchers narrowed the consistent qualities found in these schools to a deliberate development of culture, a high level of structure and discipline, autonomous teaching, strong visibility of the principal, and strict enforcement of high expectations for teachers, students and parents.

On June 10, the Office for Education Policy will join the UCA College of Education to present a detailed description of the project findings, as well as the potential application of these themes in Arkansas to decrease the student achievement gap in the state. The Office for Education Policy team will be joined by John Pijanowski, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Arkansas. The presentation will be filmed by AETN. Find more information about the 2011 UCA Summer Leadership Institute online.

The Office for Education Policy is a research center within the department of education reform in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas.