Tracking Educational Adequacy in Arkansas: A New Legislative Approach

The Arkansas Senate and House Committees on Education recently released a joint study on education adequacy implementing a new system of continuing legislative oversight to ensure that the constitutional right to an adequate system of education is provided on a permanent basis to students in the state. After fifteen years of education adequacy litigation, the legislative and executive branches of state government appear to be seriously committed to working with the courts to implement long term, stable reforms.

Statutes enacted in 2003 and 2007 which responded to the Courts’ compliance rulings (A.C.A. § 10-3-2101 et seq) established a Joint Committee on Education Adequacy. The Committee’s charge was to monitor the state’s education system on an ongoing basis to ensure that “an equal opportunity for an adequate education is being substantially afforded to the school children of the state of Arkansas and recommending necessary changes.” The Act establishes eight broad areas that the education committees must review in great detail each biennium. These include examining “the entire spectrum of public education” in Arkansas, reviewing the components of an adequate education and evaluating their costs.

Joyce Elliott—former chair of the Arkansas House of Representatives Education Committee and recently elected to the State Senate—indicated that the system of providing yearly reports seems to be an effective means of holding the legislature accountable for ensuring an adequate educational system for all students, as well as giving the school districts ongoing opportunities to express their opinions and needs.

Rich Nagel, executive director of the Arkansas Education Association, thinks, however, that there are significant issues that have not yet been sufficiently dealt with in the document, such as details regarding transportation, employee salaries, and health care, as well as categorical funding for areas like school lunches, English language learners, alternative education, and professional development.

Although the results of the present adequacy report demonstrate promising improvements in student test scores and high school graduation rates, it also indicates that there are still many problems in the education system that must be addressed, such as the persistent achievement gap between white and minority students, and between middle-income and low-income students. In Arkansas in 2007, African American students scored 28-31 points lower on state standardized tests in the 4th and 8th grade than their white peers, and low-income students scored 20-27 points lower than their middle-income counterparts.

As required by the statute, the Adequacy Subcommittee reviewed the full range of issues facing Arkansas schools and made recommendations to remedy the problems. For instance, in the 2006-2007 school year, 475 out of 950 public schools in Arkansas did not meet their Annual Yearly Progress goals as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. To address this issue, the state’s school accountability system requires the creation of the Arkansas Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (ACSIP). The ACSIP’s are written by the individual schools and monitored by the state. As more schools enter school improvement, the Arkansas Department of Education will need to review whether if there is an appropriate number of staff associated with conducting scholastic audits.

Another pressing issue discussed in the adequacy report involved teachers—their recruitment, retention, development, support, and access to resources. In the 2005-2006 school year, 84% of teachers in Arkansas were highly qualified, and the report recommends twenty strategies for improving the state’s system of developing school leaders and reaching out to other educational organizations within the state for help in researching and implementing programs.

The report also outlines many state initiatives aimed at improving public education. These programs range from a pre-kindergarten program aimed at serving low-income children to the establishment of the Governor’s Task Force on Best Practices for After-School and Summer Programs to the Governor’s technology initiative aimed at making an inventory of the technology currently available in Arkansas classrooms .

A large section of the adequacy report was dedicated to the specifics of the state school funding formula matrix. The analysis examined disbursements of foundation funding and categorical funding, the expenditures of school districts, and the per-student expenditures. The report also showed that school districts in Arkansas used their discretion to spend money in ways that often was different from the allocation pattern that had been the basis for the “evidence based” cost analysis that was the research base for the new system. The Committee recommended some modest changes to the funding system and moderate increases in funding for the next biennium. It also recommended that a report regarding public school employee health insurance should be made available by November 1, 2008.

The Adequacy Committee consulted four Arkansas education organizations to provide comments and suggestions regarding the educational adequacy study. These organizations criticized the state’s funding formula and suggested that “the current foundation funding matrix contains inaccuracies.” Input from the organizations included suggestions that the funding matrix be studied using different models that focus on diverse schools’ implementation of the funding formula, that standardized tests should be more connected with the needs of businesses, and that teacher quality should be emphasized more in the promotion of educational adequacy.

Education adequacy legal proceedings in Arkansas began in 1983 with Dupree v. Alma School District No. 30, in which the State Supreme Court ruled the state’s school funding system unconstitutional. After the ruling, the legislature revised the state education funding statues, but despite these efforts, the plaintiffs contended that the system was still inadequate. In the 2001 case, Lake View School District No. 25 v. Huckabee, plaintiffs argued that despite the new system instituted after Dupree, the Arkansas state funding system remained unconstitutional. The trial court agreed and its decision in Lake View was confirmed by the Arkansas Supreme court, which emphasized that making adequate educational opportunities available to all children is the responsibility of the state. Serious implementation of a remedy, however, required several additional special master reports and compliance rulings from the court. The years of litigation efforts in Arkansas have now led to significant improvements in education in Arkansas. Since 2004, funding for public education throughout the state has substantially increased, additional educational data has been collected and analyzed to help improve students’ educational experiences, and the upkeep and maintenance of facilities has markedly improved.

The Arkansas court’s experience demonstrates that implementing a constitutionally acceptable system of education is possible with the combined commitment and dedication of the court and the legislature. In the Lake View decision, the Arkansas court underlined the necessity of a “constant vigilance to ensure the constitutional goal is met [and that] constitutional compliance in the field of education is an ongoing task requiring constant study, review and adjustment.” In the years following this ruling, the court held strong to the need for constitutional compliance, and the legislature rose to the challenge to provide and ensure such compliance.