Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government

Education Reform in Arkansas: Hitting a Moving Target

Education Reform in Arkansas Hitting a Moving Target GARY W. RITTER Because public schools long have been the chief priority of state governments in the United States, education nearly always tops the policy priority lists of both citizens and lawmakers. Here, Professor Ritter, a former schoolteacher who is now a professor of education policy, recounts Arkansas’s recent efforts to improve the state’s educational situation. The author sees forward motion, much of it at the prompting of repeated court decisions declaring the state’s system of public education both “inequitable” and “inadequate.” Though the state’s Lake View litigation, spanning more than a decade, receives the bulk of the attention, Ritter also provides a useful examination of recent changes to Arkansas’s school standards and curricula, assessment and accountability efforts, structural matters (including consolidation), and teacher training and compensation. Despite decades of effort, and some gains, Arkansans remain “undereducated ” compared to their peers around the nation. The most recent census data revealed that only  percent of the state’s adults (age twenty-five and older) had bachelor’s degrees. Only West Virginia could claim a lower percentage. While policymakers earnestly discuss the need to prepare all of our students for college-level work, four out of five Arkansas voters and taxpayers do not themselves possess college degrees. Many may not share the same sense of urgency about the priority that education should An early version of this article appeared as Gary W. Ritter, “Education Reform in Arkansas: Past and Present,” in Reforming Education in Arkansas: Recommendations from the Koret Task Force, eds. John Brown and Gary Ritter, (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, ), –. This revision is used with permission. command. This creates one of the greatest challenges facing state leaders and policymakers. Our students have shown improvement in recent years, but Arkansas, like many rural southern states, continues to rank near the bottom on many of America’s main indices of educational attainment: National Assessment scores, college entrance exam scores, and high-school graduation and college matriculation rates.The results of the spring  administration of the ACT college entrance exam, for example, placed Arkansas fortieth among fifty states. Similarly, the most recent administrations of  Education Reform in Arkansas TABLE  How Does Arkansas Compare? ARKANSAS U.S. AR RANK (HIGH = 1) Adult attainment measures % of population (age 25+) with high school diploma, 2005 84.9% 86.8% 42 of 51 % of population (age 25+) with Bachelor’s degree, 2007 18.2% 27.0% 50 of 51 NAEP exams, percent at or above proficient Reading grade 4, 2007 29% 33% 36 of 52 Reading grade 8, 2007 25% 31% 42 of 52 Math grade 4, 2007 37% 39% 34 of 52 Math grade 8, 2007 24% 32% 42 of 52 Science grade 4, 2005 24% 29% 34 of 45 Science grade 8, 2005 23% 29% 32 of 45 High school outcome measures Graduation rate, 2006 76% 68% 25 of 50 ACT composite score, 2007 20.6 21.1 40 of 50 ACT math score, 2007 19.9 20.8 41 of 50 Sources: Census Data for the State of Arkansas, http://www.census.gov/, retrieved June , ; National Assessment of Educational Progress, The Nation’s Report Card. Past reports available online at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard, retrieved June , ; ACT Average Composite Scores by State, Index to Annual Data Reports, available online at http://www.act.org/, retrieved June , . National Assessment exams found Arkansas in the middle tier for elementary students and in the bottom tier for middle school students, ranking anywhere from thirty-second to forty-second. FIGURE  National Assessment of Educational Progress, Average Scaled Scores, Arkansas and the United States Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress, The Nation’s Report Card. Despite some recent successes on in-state assessments and Advanced Placement exams, results from the national benchmark National Assessment of Educational Progress exam make clear how far we still have to go. While the  NAEP results reveal the good news that our state’s fourth graders have nearly “caught up” to the national average in reading and math, the results also highlight persistent problems in serving middle school students and minority youngsters. In eighth-grade math, for example , the state continues to rank in the bottom quintile, as only  percent of our students scored at or above NAEP’s “proficient” level; worse yet, fewer than  percent of Arkansas’s black students met this standard. Cries for reform should...