A state-appointed committee on Little Rock area schools began Monday listing the questions it will pose to a researcher regarding how best to attain quality instruction, cost efficiency and attractive campuses in an area served by both charter and traditional public schools.
Members of the Little Rock Area Public Education Stakeholder Group, meeting for the third time, worked among themselves and with consultant Denise Airola, director of the University of Arkansas' Office for Innovation in Education, to identify the questions they want an as-yet-to-be selected researcher to explore.
The questions fall into the broad categories of providing all students access to schools that are achieving, delivering education to a diverse student population, making education efficient and cost effective, responding to patterns of charter school enrollment, locating up-do-date campuses based on current and anticipated demographics and promoting collaboration between traditional and charter schools.
"All of these different questions are fabulous," Airola said. "Now we need a research group that can help us do this. Some of the things we are talking about have been studied by some groups already," Airola added and provided the group with a list of organizations, such as the Center on Reinventing Public Education in Seattle, Mathematica Policy Research and National Center for the 21st Century Schoolhouse at San Diego State University so that the group members can read about examples of collaborative efforts elsewhere in the nation that appear to be having a positive impact on education.
The stakeholder group was created when the Arkansas Board of Education voted in April to hire a "research facilitator" to make nonbinding recommendations on how the board might better manage decision-making and communications in regard to traditional public schools and independently operated, publicly funded charter schools.
The Education Board directed that the stakeholder group -- made up of representatives of different facets of public education in Pulaski County south of the Arkansas River -- be formed to set the parameters for the researchers' work.
"If the ultimate deliverable ... is to have a set of recommendations ... we really need to begin thinking about who we can bring on board who can pull the information together and do the analysis to put information in front of you to answer these questions and go from there," Airola said, adding that she and the Department of Education would be able to assist with findings from their own areas of research.
Jim McKenzie, a member of the group and executive director of Metroplan, which is an intergovernmental planning agency in central Arkansas, urged that the group also consider the impact schools have on a community so as to produce a a holistic solution.
"My perception is that we are focused on the schoolhouse and inside the schoolhouse and not on some of the community issues that are important," he said about the stakeholder group's work. "There are problems in the community that are brought into the schools, and there are impacts that school decisions will have on the community and the neighborhoods that need to be taken into account."
Ann Brown Marshall, another committee member and a retired federal school desegregation monitor, said the stakeholders group should weave into its work the "wonderful programs that have been espoused" by the state Board of Education, the Forward Arkansas initiative to improve education statewide and by the city of Little Rock through its Youth Master Plan.
"They absolutely have to be coordinated," Marshall said. "There is no reason that we should not find a way to make the connections so that we have a really broad catchment for all of our citizens."
The stakeholders group will meet with leaders of Pulaski County charter school systems at its next meeting July 25. Additional meetings are set for Aug. 15 and 29.
Metro on 07/12/2016