What's Right with Education in Arkansas?
by Julie Johnson Holt
Standing behind a tripod, a brown-haired girl, a sophomore at Cross County High School, focuses her camera on a small sketch penned on a classroom whiteboard. Click. That photo made, her classmate erases part of the drawing — sort of a blobby, starburst shape — so the girl can snap the next shot.
No, it’s not photography class. Nor is it art class. On this mild winter day in northeastern Arkansas, these kids are studying biology — the differing mitoses of normal and cancerous cells, to be exact — by preparing a stop-motion video that will explain the disease to pediatric cancer patients.
In earlier years, Cross County biology students gleaned this knowledge by reading, reviewing and memorizing the black-ink words on the pages of their textbooks. This year, enrolled in an integrated course called Biology/Career Communication, they are learning by doing.
In short, they are getting ready for the real world of the 21st century. Almost four years ago, Cross County School District superintendent Dr. Matt McClure called his community together and asked them, “‘What are the skills above academic core content that our kids are going to have to have to be able to compete and be successful when they get out [of high school]?’ That,” he said, “was the conversation starter.”
Those public confabs formed the impetus for district leaders and patrons to engage with the New Tech High School Network and adopt a project-based curriculum. With its focus on hands-on learning, teamwork, problem solving and written and verbal communication, the New Tech model lifts secondary student learning to a higher level.
This year, McClure says, he sees his students growing more engaged with their studies, more self-confident in their abilities and better-equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in today’s technology- and information-rich job market, a market that operates in a globally competitive environment.
The good news is, Cross County is not the only district in Arkansas where thoughtful community involvement is creating exciting advances for students.
El Dorado’s Long-Term Commitment
Alice Mahony was glad to help however she could with her children’s classes in the El Dorado school system. Sometimes that meant buying needed supplies, sometimes covering field trip costs. Other parents, like Claiborne Deming, provided similar support. Still, Mahony and Deming worried about the children in classes where no parent could afford such extras.
“We sat down and said we ought to really be able to do something school-wide or district-wide that impacts all the kids,” Mahony said recently.
That conversation happened in the 1990s, and, after finding an organization in Miami to emulate and embarking on a $1.6 million capital campaign, they launched the El Dorado Education Foundation in 1996.
Working with district leadership from day one, the Foundation’s roadmap of accomplishments for students is as purposeful as it is long.
With an initial goal of supporting teachers, the Foundation instituted teacher grants for creative classroom projects (with nearly $650,000 awarded so far) and annual Teacher Excellence Awards.
A few years later, after reviewing responses on alumni surveys, Foundation leaders took seriously the feedback that students needed stronger high school math courses. They partnered with the school district to hire a chair for the district’s math department, who immediately set out to strengthen the math curriculum and develop academic support programs for students.
With improved math scores and increased enrollment in higher level math classes, the math chair model proved a documented success. Curriculum chairs in science, foreign language and literacy soon followed.
The Foundation’s latest initiative, G.L.A.M.S. (Girls Learning About Math and Science), last spring introduced 147 eighth-grade girls to career possibilities in those fields by having local female professionals — from dentists to firefighters to science teachers — share their stories. In 2012, 300 girls are expected.
The Foundation has also provided critical support for two of the district’s shiniest achievements — the Murphy Oil-sponsored El Dorado Promise scholarships available to all qualifying El Dorado High School graduates beginning in 2007 and the just-opened, $42 million state-of-the-art high school.
A 2012 study shows that, since the inauguration of the scholarships, El Dorado’s graduation rates, college-going rates and even achievement test scores have surged. The scholarship program
drove much of that progress, no doubt, but the road had been well-paved by the Foundation’s accomplishments.
Arkadelphia Targets College Readiness
In 2008, “Access to Success,” an in-depth report detailing the need for improving access to higher education for Arkansas students, was produced by a legislative commission spearheaded by Rep.
Johnnie Roebuck of Arkadelphia.
Soon after, Roebuck and a group of local leaders sat down and literally sketched out on a napkin a way to tackle that problem in the Arkadelphia School District, according to school superintendent Donnie Whitten.
The problem was easy to recognize. Too many students who had their sights on college made scores on eighth-grade standardized tests that projected they’d not be admitted to college without remediation. As Roebuck’s report had shown, students requiring remediation to enter college were far less likely to earn degrees. Thus was born the Arkadelphia College Preparatory Academy, the
product of several local organizations and universities and funded by the Ross Foundation and Southern Bancorp.
The program started in April 2009 with 40 Arkadelphia ninth graders who, recruited through visits with them and their parents, committed to the necessary extra time on task required to master
high school material.
“We immediately began to see success,” Whitten said, with robust improvement of test scores appearing within a year’s time. The program now enrolls 184 students from three Clark County school districts — Arkadelphia, Centerpoint and Gurdon — who sharpen academic skills by attending Saturday and summer classes on the neighboring Henderson State University campus.
Those first ninth graders are now seniors, and, as of January, Whitten said, all but two have scored at least a 19 on the ACT, high enough to enter most Arkansas colleges without remediation. He expects the remaining two to meet their goals by the end of the school year.
Stories Worth Repeating
By 2020, three-fourths of U.S. jobs will require a two- or four-year college education. That’s a critical fact for our state, where only 18.9 percent of our population aged 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees — a rate lower than every other state save West Virginia.
In Cross County, El Dorado and Arkadelphia, a spirit of innovation, mixed with strong community support and a dose of urgency, is creating new education narratives for students. While these transformational tales are not confined to these communities, they need to be written and rewritten across our state. Not only does our state need it, our students deserve it.
As Cross County High School Principal David Clark says, “Our kids are recognizing that they’re learning to think about things in a greater depth, that it’s not enough just to spew the facts. That’s
what education has been about for too long.”