In a challenging editorial this morning, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called on our state to begin widely publishing the results of academic success, or lack thereof, classroom-by-classroom. The suggestion would be to make this the next step in academic accountability, highlighting the teachers who are supposedly cut out for the job and those who aren’t. The problem with the strategy, at least as outlined in the editorial, is that it doesn’t address growth in student achievement. This growth indicates a strong teacher, even if some students still haven’t made it to the next level of achievement.

At Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (AACF), we also share a sense of urgency for the children who aren’t performing successfully. Here are some alternative suggestions for the grown-ups and the students.

First let’s look at the grown-ups. There are three kinds of teachers in a school in academic distress, or in any school, for that matter. There are teachers doing a poor job who don’t want to change, teachers doing a poor job who sincerely want to improve, and teachers who are doing a great job. The state’s new teacher evaluation and support system (TESS) already effectively sorts these out, and one of the components of the evaluation is classroom results.

What we need are better ways to keep the good teachers and the improving ones in these struggling schools. So how do we do that? One of the keys is to get effective leaders in all our schools. Leaders who know how to identify weak teachers and support those who want to improve. And yes, to get rid of those who don’t belong there. We have great leadership training programs, but they haven’t reached some parts of the state. To move forward, we must solve the leadership question for all districts.

We also need strong school boards. School boards reflect their communities – some of them struggling for direction. Unfortunately, a very few of the local boards in the state are not functioning in the best interests of the students. When the adults act in the interests of protecting jobs for adults, they need to go.

Now we turn to our investment in the students. Arkansas sets aside an adequate amount of special poverty funding for low-income students (the shorthand for this funding is NSLA). However, too many of our districts aren’t using it for what it was intended – programs to help those kids succeed. Instead, many districts have diverted that funding as a budget-gap filler.

The results are plain to see. We have 32 schools identified in academic distress and numerous others classified as needing improvement. Why don’t we require these poor achieving schools to use the poverty funding on proven strategies such as Pre-K, after-school and summer programs, or extended learning? Let’s make our schools that need improvement use this state funding in ways that will benefit the children for whom it’s intended. During the fiscal session that ended in March, our legislators said they hadn’t had time in the prior year to make this needed change despite a series of reports on the topic from their own staff, AACF and the Office of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas.

A proven strategy to improve low-income student success is pre-K. Let’s provide a long overdue cost-of-living increase for the state’s Arkansas Better Chance program. It has been without any kind of increase for seven years now, while inflation has increased by more than 12 percent. That’s the same as cutting the program by 12 percent.

We appreciate the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s zeal in seeking to identify the problem. We hope our legislative leadership and our state and school officials will join in the urgency and find solutions for improving these schools.