The students in the Conway School District are no longer the only ones who have good grades to stick on the refrigerator.
A recent study by the Arkansas Policy Foundation, a non-profit organization that emphasizes education reform, shows that Conway was one of 11 school districts state-wide to receive an A.
According to Greg Kaza, executive director of the Foundation, the letter grades are based on the performance of ninth-graders on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the 2007-08 school year. He said the group has been issuing these grades for the past three years to provide accountability.
"This goes back to a series of recommendations we made in 1998 when we sought more transparency and accountability because tax payers were being asked to spend more money on public education so we thought there should be some sort of performance measure," Kaza said Tuesday.
The performance measure came in the form of a letter grade issued to each district based on math and literacy to not only show each district's performance level, but to gain knowledge from those better performing districts.
The Conway School District, which ranked sixth in the state and first in the 7A division, is one Kaza said he would like to see share its successful practices with other districts.
"It's important that districts like Conway that are consistently at a high performance level identify, whether at classroom level with teachers, the administrative level or the parental level, the best practices that have led to that result," Kaza said.
Dr. Greg Murry, Conway's superintendent, said he was very pleased with this year's results and added he owes the grade to the quality work Conway's teachers do every day.
"It affirms that our district continues to go in the right direction in improving student achievement and it affirms the fact that the children in the Conway School District can receive a quality education," Murry said Thursday.
According to Murry, the high mark has something to do with the focus the district has had in the last few years on improving student achievement across the curriculum.
"The immediate focus here, and at all districts in the state, is to try to ramp up and improve what we are doing and our staff, our teachers and our administrators have really risen to the occasion," Murry said.
Murry also said he was very proud to see that Conway represented the top scoring district in the state's largest division.
"There are complexities of a large school district that can make it somewhat difficult to perform well, so that says a lot about our district," Murry said.
Kaza said the Arkansas Policy Foundation does plan to continue to issue the letter grades to the state's districts, however changes must be made in the immediate future as the Iowa test is being phased out. He said the Benchmark exam will not be the basis of the scoring, but possibly a Stanford exam.
The letter grades other school districts in Faulkner County received for the 2007-08 school year are a B- for both the Greenbrier and Vilonia school districts, a C for the Mayflower and Guy-Perkins school districts and a D+ for the Mt. Vernon-Enola School District.
(Staff writer Jessica Bauer can be reached by e-mail at jessica.bauer@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1236. To comment on this and other stories in the Log Cabin, log on to www.thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)
