The Arkansas School Principal Who Replaced Standardized Tests With Student-Led Art Projects

The backpacks had to remain outside. The previous administration at Orchard Gardens K–8 Pilot School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, had concluded that children might use them to conceal weapons, not because of any official policy issued by a district office. It was an elementary school. Six security guards were employed, costing the school more than $250,000 annually to maintain hallways in a structure that, by most accounts, was failing all occupants. In seven years, five principals had come and gone. Every summer, half of the teachers departed. The lowest five percent of Massachusetts schools’ test scores were found there. According to one account, the students were disillusioned. Clinical is the word. In actuality, it meant that kids were receiving their education—or lack thereof—in a structure that had given up on the possibility of change.

In 2010, Andrew Bott became the sixth principal. People had warned him that the position would ruin his career. After reviewing the security budget, he made a choice that could be interpreted as either visionary or reckless depending on who was observing. He completely removed the guards and used the funds to purchase art. Instruments, artists-in-residence, creative workshops for teachers and parents, walls covered with students’ own work. He replaced eighty percent of the current staff, hired educators who shared his vision, and enrolled the school in a federal arts integration pilot program. In just two years, the hallways that had, in his own words, felt like a prison were covered in artwork, projects, and proof that kids had created something they were proud of.

Education reformers in Arkansas and every other state currently debating the purpose and boundaries of standardized testing keep coming back to the story of Orchard Gardens’ transformation because it provides an answer to a question that accountability-focused systems are seldom willing to ask. What if the kids aren’t the issue? What if the behavior we spend money trying to suppress is actually caused by the system itself?

Arkansas has been dealing with this issue on a large scale. The state’s approach to standardized testing was completely redesigned in 2023 with the passage of the LEARNS Act, which replaced some tests and reorganized others. In the same year, the Little Rock school district announced its first bilingual education program, indicating at least some interest in curriculum models that don’t neatly fit into a framework for test preparation. Additionally, on a Wednesday morning in April, individual principals and teachers around the state have been conducting their own more subdued experiments, moving toward project-based learning, portfolio assessment, and student-led work that is difficult to reduce to a score.

Bott contended that the Orchard Gardens model was successful because it began with an inquiry into what genuinely inspires youth to participate. His response, which emphasizes the importance of ownership and the fact that students perform better when their school’s walls display their own work rather than institutional posters about test preparation, is not particularly novel. The research base on arts integration and student outcomes is substantial enough that it shouldn’t be shocking, and Sir Ken Robinson spent a career arguing the same point. Even though the evidence suggests otherwise, it is still surprising because the systems based on standardized testing are so ingrained that deviating from them feels drastic.

It’s important to remember what transpired at Orchard Gardens after Bott moved on. Under Megan Webb, his successor, the school kept getting better. That particular detail is important. When a charismatic leader departs, turnaround stories centered around them often fall apart. The ones that endure are those in which the culture shifts and parents, teachers, and students gradually come to feel that the school is theirs. That was made possible by the arts integration, which gave kids tangible possessions like a completed project, a wall bearing their name, or a finished piece of work.

When these cases are considered collectively, it seems that the schools that pose the most daring questions about the true purpose of assessment are frequently the ones that yield the most intriguing findings. Whether Arkansas or any other state is prepared to turn that question into law is still up for debate. However, the principals conducting those covert experiments in classrooms from Little Rock to Roxbury already know the solution.