By JOAN McCOY
Leader staff writer
Last year, Cabot Middle School North was listed among the top 20 schools in the state, and this week, representatives from the school are in Washington, where the school is being recognized as one of 100 schools to watch by a national organization.
“Each school was selected by state leaders for its academic excellence, its responsiveness to the needs and interests of young adolescents, and its commitment to helping all students achieve at high levels,” Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, said in a recent press release. “In addition, each school has strong leadership, teachers who work together to improve curriculum and instruction, and a commitment to assessment and accountability to bring aboutcontinuous improvement.”
“We are very proud of CMSN being named a top school not only in Arkansas but one of the better schools in the nation,” Dr. Tony Thurman, superintendent of Cabot School District, said about the recognition. “This is a credit to the administration, teachers and especially the students of CMSN who have worked so hard to prove that they are deserving of the recognition they’ve received.”
But when Thurman talks about CMSN, he always includes his frustration with the state’s system of grading schools.
“Ironically, CMSN is also a school designated as ‘in need of improvement’ by the state. Our district is very supportive of being held accountable for student achievement but has advocated for a better method of measuring the overall academic success of students,” he said.
The testing that placed Middle School North on the improvement list came out of the federal No Child Left Behind law that says all students must score proficient by 2014.
CMSN is on the improvement list because of its subpopulation of special-education students who did not make adequate yearly progress.
When a school has 40 or more special-education students, they are considered a subpopulation and that subpopulation is required to meet the adequate yearly progress set by the state just like the rest of the student body, Thurman said. If it doesn’t, the whole school goes on the school improvement list.
The threshold of 40 automatically penalizes larger schools, Thurman told The Leader last year after his unsuccessful attempt to get CMSN off that list.
Smaller schools have smaller numbers of special-education students so their scores are averaged in with all the other students, thereby keeping the school score higher.
But Middle School North is further penalized because it so exceeded the expectation for adequate yearly progress in its first year on the improvement list that it couldn’t make sufficient progress in its second year, he said.
If the staff and students hadn’t worked quite so hard when CMSN was first placed on the list, it would likely be off that list now, Thurman says. Scores for the subpopulation improved 35 percent in the first two years, he said.
The state requirement is a minimum of 10 percent improvement each year for three years.
