Education Committee - Senate and House
Video
Transcript
7 documents
Machine transcript
May contain errors. Verify important quotations against the official video.
About transcript accuracy
- Source
- Whisper
- Model
- ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin
- Processing date
- October 6, 2026
Unknown speaker
0:00
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Members, go ahead and take your seats, if you would, please.
Speaker 6
3:30
are you coming join education will come to order members if you
Representative Keith Brooks
Unverified
3:53
would please take your seats and we will get started on our agenda for today. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Hopefully, everybody
had a good Labor Day holiday, and glad you're back here in town. If you would, I'd like to go ahead and start off just with a moment of silence and then a prayer in recognition of Senator Gary Stubblefield and his passing. Obviously, it's a very difficult thing for his family, for his constituents in the state of Arkansas, so we want to make sure that we recognize him and the amazing service that
he did. If you would, please stand with me. We'll have a moment of silence in their prayer.
Gracious Father, we thank you for your love, your mercy, your forgiveness. We're thankful
for the promise of Jesus Christ, the hope of eternity. God, we pray today for Senator Subblefield, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, God, in his passing and the loss that they feel. God, may you bring peace to their family, peace to know that the hope of Christ is the most amazing hope that any of us could ever have. Pray that you provide that to their family in the days, weeks, and years to come. Lord, that you bless him. We thank you for the service that he gave to his constituents, to the state of Arkansas, and
ultimately to his family and you. Lord, we love you. Thank you for forgiving all of us. It's in Christ we pray. Amen. Members, we will go to item B on your agenda uh consideration of motion to approve the meeting from june 16th i need a motion to approve motion and second on the senate side have a second all in favor say aye all opposed that has been approved we'll move on to c we have several uh interim study proposals uh
members if you'd like to present it let me know i don't believe that any of the ones who are on the agenda today have indicated they want to present it so without objection We will batch all three of these. I do not see any objections, so I need a motion to batch all three and approve. I have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion on the motion? All in favor say aye. All opposed? All righty. And now item D on the agenda. We have an overview of Atlas testing school scorecards and career readiness.
I'll recognize Secretary Jacob Oliva as well as Ross White. If you would please
introduce yourself, and then you are recognized. Good afternoon. Jacob
Speaker 15
6:39
Oliva, Secretary of Education, Department of Education. Ross Watt, Director for the
Speaker 17
6:44
Division of Career and Technical Education at the department.
Speaker 18
6:49
So first, I want to thank you all for an opportunity to come provide an update, an overview on kind of the state of the state or where we are in education across the state of Arkansas, review some Atlas results that we have administered from last spring that we were able to release back to the school districts about achievement levels. This week and last week, we've been presenting learning gains, giving an update on where we are with redesigning our accountability formula and talk about how all of this work is not only just aligned with Arkansas Learns
but now with Arkansas Access as we build a system of excellence for all of our students across the state. So if that's okay with you, Chair, I'd like to just go ahead and share some information. You're recognized. So just a historical perspective, if everybody remembers, we've done a redesign on our statewide assessment system. We've updated our current standards in the last two and a half years and went back to a criterion reference assessment. That means that those test items were written specific on the criteria that we're looking to measure on our academic standards.
The primary tested subjects that we're going to review today is English language arts, math, and science. This was an update from our previous assessment system that we had in the state of Arkansas, which was the ACT Aspire. And this is something that we're really proud of because it was created by Arkansas educators and experts all across the state for our Arkansas students. So I always like to look at how are we making sure that everything's aligned? And if you kind of look at our three-legged stool, what we want to really make sure we have is high-quality standards
that clearly outline what we want students to know and learn in each tested subject area and grade. What kind of high-quality instruction materials are we giving teachers and the type of professional development we're giving them to support the teaching of those standards? And then how are we going to measure how students are learning what we expect them to know when we do our standardized assessments. That's the key to making sure that the system is aligned and we've spent the last two and a half years building out that framework. When we talk about the different performance levels,
similar to ACT Aspire, there's four levels, levels one, two, three, and four. And just to give you kind of a little bit of an overview is our minimum expectation that we want to see when we define proficiency as a student that's demonstrating a level three or greater. that means they have a good understanding of what's being asked of them in the classroom and they're able to apply what they're learning into the work and other corresponding subjects a student that is at a level four they demonstrate an advanced understanding they're typically able
to apply the concepts being learned in the classroom to other concepts that may not have already been taught they're ready for a more rigorous path and expectation a level two student is somebody that has a basic understanding. We get a lot of asked questions about the difference between two and three. Level three means a student primarily can work on those tasks independently, need very few prompts or reminders from the teacher, and they're able to demonstrate at a proficient level the content we expect them to know. A student with a basic understanding means that they understand what's happening.
They may understand some of the main concepts, but they may need some additional cueing. They may need additional reminders. They may need additional support in order to get those correct answers and then a student scores at level one has a very limited understanding and they need intensive supports they may need high impact tutoring they may need before school after school summer school programs so the the biggest question that we want to know is now that we've done two years of the same assessment right the same assessment items that we have that we didn't we were able to get two years of data on our students how did we perform
in year two versus year one. Now, if you remember, we had to go through a very rigorous process called the standard-setting process when we determined what those levels are for level one, two, three, and four. Those standards were set, and based on the same standards, we're able to define how well our students did. So here you can see in green students where they performed at level three and above if you aggregate all the subject areas in ELA.
for 2024 and then in blue is how the students performed in 2025. So you can see in ELA we saw about a 0.8 percent increase in the number of students meeting what we would call that proficient level. So that's a positive trend line and we're we're pretty excited to see students are moving towards that progression. If you look at the middle column that's math you can see in green from 24 to 25 there was about a 2.7 increase. When we look at how were our students performing before the impact
of COVID, we're still below where we were when we were defining that proficient level, but you can see that we're progressing towards more students hitting that proficient benchmark, and the science was about a 2.4 increase. So if you look at that all aggregated and break it down by gray level, What you want to see is more students in the dark green and the dark blue. That means they have a proficient or deep understanding of the grade level expectations.
Thank you. And when we did that standard setting process, the state did it right. Your support got it right. We set very rigorous expectations when we want to say what a level three is, which was very aligned to similar what we've seen on the NAEP assessment, which is a national assessment of education progress. There are other states around the nation that actually went back and lowered proficiency rates for their students so that they can come out and say that they're back to the level of where they were before COVID.
Well, I think we believe that we should not lie to students, we should not lie to parents, and we should be transparent on student performance. Sometimes it's not as good as we want to see, but that's a big deal for this state to say we're going to have high expectations, and you can see over time students are starting to meet that. This chart shows you that it's a pretty even distribution across grade levels, 3 through 10, on the percentage of students score in level 1, 2, 3, or 4. You see a similar distribution in math until you get past 8th grade, and you can see that
when we went back to end-of-course exams in algebra and geometry, we're still nowhere near the proficient levels that we want to see as a state. And part of that is because we're making a transition back to end-of-course exams where we're actually teaching algebra and we're actually teaching geometry. When we gave the ACT Aspire assessment to high school students, they were taking a grade-level assessment, not a subject area assessment. And I think as we're supporting teachers and making that transition back to the content we expect them to know and learn, we're going to see greater improvements overall.
You can see science is actually a pretty even distribution, even going into the end-of-course exam for biology when you look at 3-3 performance, and then how do students make that transition back to biology. So this is a big deal. This is a lot of work for the state to make sure we had an assessment system that measured what we want students to know and learn in each of the tested subject areas, and back to end-of-course exams. One of my favorite charts is this chart because I like to look at everything by cohorts and say overall, you know, instead of trying to compare students from year to year, how is each of the cohort doing based on previous year's cohorts?
And you can see overall, this was a pretty positive year for the students across the state of Arkansas. The foundation has been laid. The support is starting to happen in our classrooms. Our teachers and administrators, our local folks are doing an excellent job. We have a unified coordinator progress learning system that's giving real-time information back to our educators to help them make sure the students are learning the standards that we want them to learn. But I like to track certain cohorts, and a cohort of a lot of interest to me is fifth grade in this slide. And you can see overall in fifth grade, make sure I can see, the ELA scores are pretty stagnant.
There's a little bit of a decline in math, and science was a little bit of an increase. this is a big deal to me because these are the kids that we sent home prematurely and took away the opportunity to learn during the COVID pandemic and had probably some of the greatest impact on making sure they had access to high quality learning and then if you look at the fourth grade the cohort of students behind them those are students that when we did bring them back to school we over quarantined them and masked them in their primary early literacy grades and we know that was going to have an impact on their learning you could see that those students are resilient
The investment in high-impact tutoring, the double down on the science of reading that we put in those primary grades are having an impact because we want to make sure that we're growing generations of students to mitigate the access to high-quality learning that we created throughout that pandemic. Another key initiative that we've been really pushing districts is making sure our systems are designed around acceleration, which was some of the foundation and backbone around access. a lot of our students are ready for more rigorous content meaning they could they're ready to earn
high school credit while they're in middle school and we a lot of times don't have systems that support that but we've been pushing districts for the past two and a half years to make sure that we're creating opportunities for students that are ready to be on a more accelerated pathway to be in those classes to get it so I get asked all the time well what if the kids aren't ready so here's a snapshot of the students that did take more rigorous coursework when they did and I think it's a very interesting anecdote so when you look at the percentage on the chart to to my
left the 2025 algebra performance levels by grade you can see that in seventh grade it's a little bit blurry but it was about 81 percent of seventh graders that took the algebra and of course exam past at a proficient level. So this mindset that kids aren't ready for more grades coursework is not necessarily showing up in the data. When we raise our expectations for students, they will meet it. And this is part of what the access and the accountability system is going to be built
around. And you can see even students in eighth grade, my numbers are a little blurry, but it's about, I'm going to say close to 70% of the students that took algebra, the algebra and of in eighth grade met at a proficient level where you can see if they took algebra in ninth grade it's you're getting down about 20 percent of the students and then in 10th grade about 17 percent of the students are passing the algebra exam now there's a lot of theories a lot of differences in thoughts beliefs and practices about why that happens and those are the conversations that we
have with districts but you can also see geometry when you look at the percentage of students Taking geometry in eighth grade, it's almost 90%. And even geometry in ninth grade, you're getting to about close to 55%, 60%. And then the students that take geometry in 10th grade, you're under 20%. Our system is being designed to push kids. We created a system in this state where we tended to focus on the bottom kids and held everybody back.
And I've often said a lot of times when you focus that kind of system, you neglect your top performing students and now we're flipping the narrative not only are we double down with our focus on the star on the lowest performing students making sure they have access to the supports they need we're opening up rigorous pathways to our students that are the best and brightest and if you remember I presented the NAEP scores back to this committee when they came out over the summer and when you look at those quintiles and this is why these math paths are really important and I've been sharing this data with district leaders all throughout the
summer and this is the foundation for some of the bones that Arkansas Access was built around. When you look at our 90th percentile kid in eighth grade math and I'm talking that's our best and brightest kids in eighth grade our 90th percentile kid our 90th percentile kid is 11 points behind the nation's average 90th percentile kid. So I know we like to be proud of some of the work we're doing and we are proud this is a lot to celebrate but if we create the conditions to help incentivize
the schools and support them better to push and accelerate our students we're going to see more students taking more advantage and more rigorous pathways and opportunities and we're going to close that gap for all of our students not just the bottom students but our highest performing students. So how do we incentivize and how do we ensure and how do we measure whether or not districts are doing that this is where we've come to look at how do we grade schools what does an a mean what does a c mean what does an f mean and if there's one thing
that I definitely heard when I first got here and we were working on Arkansas learns implementation and went out around to every district every single educational cooperative met with every superintendent if there is one question that I got at every single educational cooperative when I at those meetings. Guaranteed, I got one question was, when are we going to get rid of A through F? Now, I'm going to tell you, I'm a big believer in A through F. I'm a big believer in accountability. I think parents have a right to know how well their schools are performing. I think students
have a right to know what kind of school they go to. The community has a right to know what kind of schools are represented in their neighborhood. But if there's no confidence that the A-thro system reflects the learning that's happening in the school, then we need to fix that. And what I have found is most of the superintendents, they're okay with being held accountable. Our educational cooperators, they want to be held accountable, but they want to know that the grade that we put on top of that school is reflective of the learning that's happening in that school. So we put together work groups just like we did around standards,
test items, accountability, all these frameworks, brought people together to make some recommendations. And as we rolled out last year, if you remember, we rolled out because it was the first year of an assessment, we issued tentative grades that weren't officially kind of given because it was a transition and we had to do equal percentile linkings from one assessment to another assessment. So those grades were given provisionally, but most schools accepted or wanted to accept them because they felt that that school grade actually reflect the learning that's happened
in their school. So one of the first things that we want to do is simplify the accountability formula. We had a formula that measured school grades in this state that directly mirrored what the feds required us to report to them. So the first question I would have with superintendents and leaders across the state is, one, should we create an accountability system based on what Arkansas feels is important? or should we build an accountability system based on what we think the federal government thinks we should think is important?
And without hesitation, it was decided we needed to bifurcate the two. Sure, we have to meet some federal reporting requirements, but that doesn't mean that that needs to be the definitions that reflect the school grade. And one of the things that we do when we built around federal reporting requirements is we made it confusing. We have to add clarity. If I go to a principal, let's say Ross is a principal at high school, say hey Ross I saw your high school as a C as a school grade what are you going to work on next year to try to improve it could you tell me what you needed to fix in order to get a better grade
no because it measured everything and anything and none of it was measured on outputs of students performance we tried to micromanage and handcuff districts for making strong educational decisions by controlling the inputs that's not how you're going to improve learning and outcomes we need to hold people accountable for outputs and not micromanage inputs. So we wanted to unhandcuff that. And we built a system that's based on growth and achievement. Very simple. Then if you're at a
high school, are kids graduating and are they graduating on time? So when you look at how we define now the buckets, I like to say there's buckets, there's about nine buckets that go into school grade we want to measure our students scoring at achievement level of proficiency in English language arts math and science and then are all the students learning regardless of their achievement level can students in your school demonstrate a year's worth of growth and then also we put an extra focus on your lowest quartile are they showing a year's worth of growth so this
formula doubles down not just measuring achievement levels because that's what we got criticized saying that your school grade reflects your poverty level of your school based on achievement levels, but this is based on are your kids learning? They may come to us as a level one, they may stay a level one, but they can still hit their learning targets as they're progressing to level two and then progressing to level three, because every student has a unique learning target that's built around their own unique identifiers. So if we focus on those four or
three fundamentals achievement growth and then graduating ready to be successful in life then we have a school grade accountability that reflects what we expect students to be able to know know learn and demonstrate and that grade is reflective on the performance of that overall school we issued provisional grades last year it was a hold harmless year based on this formula ask your superintendents I think you'll find that it was very well overall received some schools they're going to say they're not proud of the grade they got, but they understood it. And some schools are
really proud of the grade they got because they feel like they're going above and beyond and meeting that mark. But there's one metric in there that we're really looking at that's going to focus on acceleration, and that's how we define a success-ready graduate. And what we've done is we've recognized that students will graduate from our system and fall into maybe one or three buckets. There's some students that are going to go to school and do the bare minimum requirements and they're going to graduate and they're going to move on. That's great. You have now earned a
standard diploma. In fact, when we used to post graduation rates on our last accountability system, we also factored in a five-year graduation rate. That's not good enough. We should expect kids to graduate in four years, especially when we only require 22 graduation requirements, which I think is really low but we don't want to I'm not going to tell people you're doing a great job even get kids across the finish line in five years you should be able to graduate on time with your cohort of peers when you enter ninth grade in four years if students are able to do that meet
the minimum graduation requirements we're really happy for them but we have some students that may do a little bit more they may earn a seal of biliteracy they may take some concurrent credits They may earn an industry-recognized credential. They may pass some IB or AP exams. So how do we recognize those students and reflect that that are going above and beyond the minimum expectations? Well, we created a diploma of merit. And then how do we recognize the students that are earning an associate's degree while they're in high school? They are an AP scholar.
They are completing that workforce credential with an apprenticeship and define a diploma of distinction. At the end of the day, all three of these designations make sure that every student that graduates from an Arkansas high school is ready to be enrolled, enlisted, and employed. And one of the things that we had to do with Arkansas Learns is really look at our workforce pathways, and I know Ross is going to talk a lot about it because we had about 65 different career pathways that are reflected in high schools all across the state.
Well, Arkansas Learns tasked us with defining credentials of value that led to a high-skill, high-wage, high-demand area, and we identified, was it 16 or 18? 18? 18 pathways, and Arkansas Learns required that every school offer three pathways, and one of them had to be on that list, and that had to go into effect for this past school year, and 100% of our schools met that requirement. So there's a lot of good work happening. that's a lot to be celebrated but these are the pathways that I've been identified this isn't a
kind of list that you just make once and then you're done right like we've got to work with workforce partners listen to industry listen to key stakeholders because what's a credential of value today may not be a credential value three years from now five years from now ten years from now and so this is a fluid document that we have people that are going through in making sure that we're updated and reflective of the times but here's the very different more technical categories of what it meant to earn a diploma merit and what it meant to be a diploma distinction because not
only are we calculating graduation rates for students like towards your high school credit but we're also measuring the number of students that are meeting these credentials and if you remember in Arkansas Access, we tied the results, let's say, of a student that earns a diploma of distinction with some of the different scholarships so that we can recognize these as a state to say this is the product and quality of student that we're proud of that graduates from our school system. And we know that if they are a recipient of a standard diploma, a diploma of merit,
or diploma of distinction, they are ready to be enrolled, enlisted, or employed. So I know I covered a lot, Chair Brooks, but I wanted to just kind of give a state of the state of an update. And then I'm sure there may be some questions. And then Ross White from our technical program area can go a little bit deeper around the pathways and what does this work really mean? Thank you, Secretary Oliva.
Representative Keith Brooks
Unverified
29:27
And prior to Mr. White doing his presentation, we'll open it up for questions for the secretary or other questions.
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
29:36
Representative Meeks, you're recognized for a question. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a question on those pathways that you had listed there. This past month, I was at probably the largest AI conference in North America. It was an industry conference. And listening to a lot of the thought leaders and the discussion going on there, The impression that I came away with was that computer programming is beginning to wane
because AI is really starting to take over kind of in that area. But AI, as you know, is becoming more and more important. And so I'll just throw it out for what it's worth that AI prompt engineering is going to become more important than computer science programming. So as you look at that going into the future, I would hope it's already on your radar, but if not, for what it's worth, I'll throw that out for you.
Speaker 33
30:37
So we'd love to follow up with you a little bit about some of the
Speaker 18
30:43
topics, because when we talk about AI, and I like to look at everything from education, but then also from a workforce perspective, it's not new, right?
Like these aren't new tools or new topics. I think it's becoming more sophisticated in the future of where we're going to head. There's a little bit of unknown, especially with generator AI. But I agree. I read, I want to say I read an article recently about like Salesforce and some of these national computing program companies are laying off thousands of programmers and it's all being replaced by AI, which is creating a different skill and a different type of worker they need.
And that's why I said these are fluid lists that are always going to grow and be updated. But I don't know if we know the extent of how AA is going to impact, you know, the technical side of the world and business industry. But I know we're having a lot of folks looking at the impact not only at schools, but for teachers, for classrooms, for tutors, for support. We're even looking at it as an agency. How can the work that we do be more efficient
Speaker 27
31:47
and better supportive of the stakeholders we serve so excellent point. No, thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chairman
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
31:56
Representative Duke you recognize your question Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, thank you for presentation. It was really informative and helpful. Um, I have a question, I guess Maybe a two-parter on the test scores on the I love seeing the cohorts. I think that's really helpful as well, but can you tell me? First of all, your first and second grade, they were tested on ATLAS this last time as well. Is that correct, or is that still a year out? So it's part of the ATLAS system.
Speaker 18
32:26
So you're talking about for the current school year that we just entered in or the results
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
32:33
from past school year? The past school year,
Speaker 18
32:36
were they tested on ATLAS? So they did the formative assessment part. So their scores aren't reflected in these charts because these charts reflect third through eighth, like for the ELA. But they did the K-2 progress monitoring system, part of our unified coordinated progress monitoring system that's under that Atlas
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
32:54
umbrella. So what are you seeing the trends with K-2?
Because, I mean, look, the third grade scores, I mean, I see the improvements, right? But I'm really curious what we're seeing. The third grade is fascinating to me because that's obviously new implementation of things, though you're starting to see how that looked with kids going through the system. Similar with K and 1 and 2, what are we seeing? What are the trends we're seeing with them? Because that's really reflective on the implementation of the programs and initiatives and things that we have done in the last couple of years.
Speaker 18
33:29
Do you have that data? Yes. Now, last year was the first year that we've rolled out the K-1-2, so it's hard to compare data from last year to this year. But we we're in the testing window for the first administration of Atlas progress morning this year. So probably in the next couple of weeks, we can get you that snapshot to look at how the students do in August of September last year compared to this year. We did have to make some modifications throughout the last year because it was the first time we implemented like in year one of the assessment.
We definitely heard from kindergarten teachers that this ain't working, right? So we had to, okay, we had to take that back, work with the assessment company, re get it right. So far, you probably haven't heard from anybody about this year because I think we did a pretty good job getting that right. But what we're seeing is, one, we know we've deployed literacy coaches to our lowest-performing schools, our DNF schools. And as they're going through the instructional rounds, what we're seeing more happening is explicit systematic instruction around the science of reading.
And recently, you may have seen I've gotten some baits about some of our textbook companies not being strong enough in the science of reading so we're having conversations with districts around how are we using high quality implementation or high quality instruction materials to make sure that that foundation is laid so now when we get that snapshot in time that information will be given to the teacher down to the standard level and help identify skills that they may need more support with but the reality is is one of the questions I'm sure someone's going to ask and I get a lot
is well how does third grade promotion work this year and notice that I call it third grade promotion it's not just an automatic retention it's a screener so we should know based on this first progress monitoring system how many students are at risk of not meeting the proficiency expectation by the end of third grade and if we identify those students now and give them high impact tutoring give them access to a high quality teacher that's trained and skilled in the science of reading we can mitigate those holes and make sure by the end of third grade they have those gaps filled so
that they can be successful and ready to move on in the fourth grade so I think I don't know if I'm answering your question the short answer is is we're going to have some much better information here pretty soon because last year we had to learn a lot about the system but we're going to be able to give information to students and districts faster in more real time than this school year than we ever have based on student performance so like if you look at last year or two years ago when we first did the baseline assessment of atlas it took us almost eight months to get achievement
scores back to districts that's because we had to go through a standard setting process this year it took us about four months in fact we just last two last week or the week before released learning gains which was in august the year before we didn't get learning gains to districts until october right like that's late in the year to help teachers understand where their students are when our spring assessment window closes this current school year 25 26 districts will have access to their achievement levels in less than two days we are turning this around this system is being built and we're going to
start getting real-time information back to students and families at a much quicker pace so that we can make those instructional pivots as necessary and get these students to support they need and hopefully we'll see the number of students at level one decrease dramatically and at three and four increase exponentially but when I talk to schools about their achievement levels from last year to this year the number of students of superintendents had told me Jacob I don't have enough kids at level three and four but we
drastically reduced the number of ones so we have a lot of number twos but we've got a lot less number ones that's a big deal that's a big deal that means we're moving the
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
37:27
needle follow-up and you kind of hit the nail on the head right there at the end of what i was getting ready to ask so
the feedback because we have the school districts have assessments from the past with their pay through two so even though it's a different test in theory right they should be relatively around the same standards the feedback that you are getting do they feel not i'm not
asking so much about the test right because the test measures whether what we're doing is effective are they giving you feedback from their teachers that the moves that we are making they're seeing even though we can't necessarily see it in the data because we don't have the same access to the data am i making myself clear what i'm trying to the answer is a thousand
Speaker 18
38:10
percent and like last week i met with all of our state literacy coaches and they're talking about the difference of what they're seeing in schools and classrooms this year versus last year.
I'm going into primary grade classrooms and seeing teachers using word walls and interacting with students that I didn't see two years ago, right? So, like, when I tell you there's a movement happening, especially in those foundational years, which is very pivotal to get it right, while we're pushing acceleration in those middle years, we're going to see drastic improvements in overall student scores. The initiative is
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
38:43
working. Because if this is doing what we believe it's supposed to be doing, then our little kids starting with us under this new system, we shouldn't have hardly anybody in one and twos.
Exactly. Right? Because like what, 99% of kids actually can be taught to read. And so we're going to start seeing that with those and catching up the older cohorts. But we're going to start seeing that in the next year or two that our K kindergartners, our first graders across the state are going to be hitting those targets. because that's what I'm looking for because you know I've had longer conversations but we should be teaching like our hair is on fire because it is because we can't let these kids continue to graduate or continue to move on without being able to read it's and so that's what I'm looking for
whenever these come in so I'll be excited to see that snapshot because I think that's going to be super helpful for all of us to see but it's encouraging I mean these numbers are encouraging ish ish but it's more encouraging when we see what the if the new implementation in those younger grades is making the difference that we hope that
Speaker 47
39:45
it is making in every cohort of students is a
Speaker 18
39:48
little bit different on numbers because it it ranges but most of them around 30,000 students so each percentage point is just over 300 kids right so when you see a percentage point increase
that's 300 more students across the state that are hitting a proficient target we still have work to do, but these aren't small numbers that we're moving. These are significant swings in the overall preparation of our students with some of the most rigorous cut scores that we could define as a state, which was important to get right. Senator Flowers, you're recognized for a question. Thank you.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
40:27
I have a couple of things that I want to know about. One is about the retention of
third graders i think under the
learns act has that been implemented this year so that's gonna
Speaker 47
40:39
that's the impact of this year's third graders so the
Speaker 18
40:43
students that started third grade this year at the end of the school year when they take the what year are we in 26 assessment in the spring those results are going to be the results that folks are looking at and and the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
41:00
level two if they score level two will they be retained no ma'am
Speaker 18
41:05
so when when they're looking at the
promotion for third grade when you look at the performance level descriptors I'll put up here they're using level one as a student that needs to be reviewed it's not automatically retained so I want to make sure we clarify that because there's some good cause exemptions it's about triggering a meeting around that student determine the best path for that student moving forward but they're using that level one definition on the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
41:36
and when you say there's some good cause rationale is that for disabled students it can be it also
Speaker 18
41:45
some of it's prescribed in the law but basically what it does is it's it's it's designed to have a meeting with the family and the educators to say this student has a very limited understanding in third grade if they were to go on to fourth grade without significant supports they're going to continue to struggle so what are we going to do one should we put them in a summer program should we offer them high impact tutoring has this student already been retained maybe it's not a good idea to keep retaining them maybe it's a student that needs to be tested for a learning
disability or has an identified learning disability, the individual educationalized plan team would make those kinds of decisions around accommodations, modifications, supports for the student. Maybe they're an English language learner with limited time learning the English language. There's a lot of factors that go into making that decision. It's not saying that they automatically have to be retained. That may be the best decision for that child. But what it's saying is that if a student does get promoted to the fourth grade without demonstrating a high level of understanding and literacy, there's some provisions that also have
to be in place because schools right now should be using that first progress monitoring system to write an intervention plan for a student that's at that limited understanding. And we need to make sure the school did what they said they were going to do. And then if that kid goes to fourth grade, do they have access to a highly effective teacher, which is required? And are they put in a 90-minute literacy block, which is required to make sure that they're getting those foundational skills embedded into them every single day to close those gaps because what happens why you have that big
shift from the foundational years around that learning how to read to read to learn is that systematic explicit instruction in the science of reading gets less and less as kids progress because they get more into text complexity and they're being asked to do things with the types of text that they're reading in the classroom it's not that these kids can't
Speaker 27
43:41
have their holds filled but if they're not getting instruction it's really hard for them to fill it so
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
43:48
does the department of education review all of those children that are in maybe level two or level one
Speaker 18
43:56
do we expect that to happen yeah i mean so that's why it's important for us to get that progress monitoring data that snapshot of data and time and then we work with districts we work with educational cooperatives i know we have folks in dnf schools each and every single day doing data walks data reviews making sure that we're providing as much support i know even um what is d and s schools d and f they're graded a d or an f at a d u r f d or f d well did you not say that we got
Speaker 15
44:32
rid of the letter grades no i said we we redefine the letter grades to make sure they're
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
44:40
reflective of the learning so we still have
Speaker 18
44:42
d and f schools and this year we're going to have graded school districts and graded educational cooperatives based on student
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
44:50
performance as well well when you say that this thing for calls in retaining or making the decision to retain or not retain a third grader is that across the board I mean who determines calls well the law identifies some
Speaker 18
45:08
specific criteria when when Arkansas Learns put this policy into place but two it also gives the ability for the school district to meet with the student the family maybe they got some literacy coaches school counselor school administrator it's an educational expert convening with the family to talk about what's the best path best path moving forward
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
45:31
for that child so you say the law gives the school the ability but is it mandatory and
is there some type of appeal process
Speaker 33
45:41
on behalf of the student I don't know if I know the answer about an appeal process but it's the law so it's mandatory um whether or not reviews
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
45:51
all of this from the school district I don't what do
Speaker 18
45:54
you mean by review like each and every single individual I don't know I don't know if we're going to be at that level this is new for us too this year so we're still trying to figure
Speaker 15
46:04
that out um i'd have to check with the team and get back with you on that has
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
46:09
the department this last question right now i have one more after this chair will allow but you recognize have have the
rules been promulgated that specifically state what we mean by good calls yes ma'am and
Speaker 15
46:25
the process and we're doing trainings with school districts now hosting webinars sending out commissioners memos making sure we can clarify that as much as possible and the last question i
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
46:37
had was on the um i think it was your last slide that dealt with success ready pathways and all the different uh occupations i guess you'd call it this one is it this one
Success Ready Pathways. Are all schools required to have a minimum of these courses or subject matters, or are they required to have every one of them? I'm really interested in, like, construction and welding, those kinds of things.
Is that mandatory in schools?
Speaker 47
47:21
So what's required is that every high school has to have at least three pathways that lead to a certificate.
Speaker 18
47:33
So three out of this list? No, it's three in total, but one of the three pathways
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
47:44
has to be something off this list. Do you have a list of what schools offer what? I'd
Speaker 49
47:50
like to see that. We can pull that for you.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
47:54
That's a great question. I'd like to see it, and I'd also like to see when you break down the percentages, I'm glad
to see that there is some acceleration in gains with the atlas,
but I'd like to see it broken down by particularly districts that have
been under state control in the last five years. So you want to see the achievement
Speaker 15
48:21
and growth for the schools that have been under state control? We can make that for you. Within the last five years. In the
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
48:30
last five years. Okay, sure. Thank you.
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
48:37
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Senator Love, you recognize your question? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Secretary Oliva, good to see you. Let me start
with this. If we were to, if we had enacted this law of retaining the students, the third grade students last year, roughly how many students would we have retained?
How many students fall into that level one? I know we can't
Speaker 18
49:00
of a ballpark. What I would say is if we acted this last year, how many students may have
Speaker 15
49:06
been identified as at risk? It would probably be close to around 10,000 because about a third of them were in the level one. But that doesn't mean that they would be retained because that
Speaker 18
49:16
would be inclusive of English language learners, students that have been retained before, special education. But that number includes is this percentage of students is at the lowest level of proficiency at a state, and that's a lot of kids.
And I know the first thing people are going to say is you can't retain that many kids. I'm going to tell you right now publicly, we do not intend to add student parking at middle school, right? Like that is not the goal of third grade promotion is to make sure that we are identifying skills that need support early, intervening, doing our job to mitigate that number as much
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
49:53
as we can. Okay, so it would
have been 10,000 students. If I had to guess.
Yeah, okay. all right um moving moving to the atlas scores sure um and this was pointed out to me um
by a an administrator in the little rock school district some of the some of the and and they had brought me in and kind of showed me some things with the atlas testing one was and it was a concern not about the students not knowing the information it was the use of the computer is a use of the the mouse and then sometimes i think they said they had to switch it to the tablet and there were some there were some issues there kind of speak to
Speak to that because that is a very big concern of actually, are you really getting to if the student knows the information or if they can just use the computer mouse to actually click on, you know, the button and wait and different things like that? So
that's a good question. So first I'd
Speaker 18
51:06
say is this starts in third grade, so most of these students are eight years old. So when you're
Speaker 15
51:14
talking about the question is, are we measuring computer proficiency or what the student knows?
Most of the students have been exposed to the basic computer understanding by the time they're eight in order to meet the expectations of this exam. I definitely think we heard that more like in the progress monitoring K2, which doesn't go under the school grade, but the kindergartners may not be where they need. So that's why it's important for folks to know that that
Speaker 18
51:41
information is just for the teacher. that's not reflective in a school grade it doesn't carry with the student okay if the student's not able to demonstrate or move that we do provide accommodations teachers are allowed to do
prompting and support that was one of the clarifications we definitely wanted to make sure we provide in kindergarten or if they sometimes you have students with sensory skills maybe they want a paper and pencil version or they need to dictate it those accommodations are allowed that's done more on a student by student level okay case by case level but it's allowed all right that
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
52:15
was that was a one of the major things because it was pointed out definitely
Speaker 15
52:20
with the little the little ones we we we heard that for sure
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
52:24
okay gotcha well if we address that then
that's fine because that was that was one thing um let's move to kind of the high impact tutoring and kind of the reading specialist. At this present point, to address the number of students that we have that may fall into the Category
1, possibly Category 2s, do we have enough reading specialists? Do
we have enough high-impact tutors to address the number of students?
Speaker 18
52:58
Well, that's a good question. I don't know if it's a loaded question or not, because the educator in me would say there's never enough support for our most vulnerable students, right? But when you look at what we were asked to do at Atlas of getting to 120 literacy coaches, we're able to provide that support for all of our DNF schools. Now, the interesting conundrum, which I think is a good problem to have, We've had schools that exited that DNF status and then hired our literacy coach saying we don't want to lose them.
They're part of our family now, and that's created a need for more literacy coaches. So it's kind of an interesting space because if you exit from a DNF, do we want to take away that support? Because maybe we have identified new ones, you know. So I think we're still going through that balance. We do have some contracts with some outside organizations where we're not able to get the enough staffing that we need. The high-impact tutoring, the feedback I get from districts is they love it.
I do think one of the things that we want to do better is promote the tutoring grants accessible to families to get additional support. That's really underutilized, right? So there's opportunity for more families to participate than are. And that's kind of what we see in some of those spaces. So I think it's like anything else when you have new initiatives, new priorities. It takes a while to get it kind of up and running. But going into this year, I think we've learned a lot from last year
and how we communicate to districts about the expectations and communicate with parents that we'll see a much
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
54:46
better utilization this year. Okay. And then kind
of as a financial piece, do we have that covered to cover the specialists
Speaker 47
54:55
in the high-impact tutoring? In our categorical
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
54:58
budget this year, yes, sir. Okay. And then lastly, going back to the part of the atlas, I've noticed that there's an opportunity for students
to kind of pre-test on the atlas.
are we making that available or making that knowledge available to parents as far as? Wouldn't
Speaker 42
55:18
you say a pre-test, like the teacher creates assessments? Well, there is,
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
55:22
I was shown that there is a piece in the atlas where students can go in and test. Yeah, that's part of the progress monitoring part. So is that made readily available to parents so that they can actually? Yeah, and I'll have to
Speaker 15
55:39
check, but it should be available where the parents can be able to log into the system,
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
55:47
That would be the hope, yeah. Is that knowledge being pushed to parents? Because I know this for a fact, that when I was made aware of it, I was like, what? You know,
we could be actually having our son test, and that knowledge was new to
Speaker 18
56:05
me, so I'm just asking. And that's probably an area that we need to continue to get better, right? I mean, a more specific communication plan
Speaker 15
56:16
around the components is probably a good idea.
You know, it's like sometimes we make informational videos and put it on our website and assume that's enough. But if you're not looking for that information on our website, how would you even know to look for it? So I'd love to talk about different strategies on what is it that parents need to know from a parent perspective to make sure that we're getting it right and not thinking about it from an educational perspective, but actually from a parent perspective as well. Okay. That's a great idea. Thank you, sir. Thank you,
Speaker 86
56:43
Mr. Chair. Representative Mayberry, you're recognized for a question.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
56:50
Thank you. Over on this side. I know
it's always hard to see where everybody is. House side over here. So a little while back, I was talking to
a group of high school students in their class, and we were just talking about a variety of education issues and I love getting feedback from students because this is who it most affects, right? So I was asking them about testing, and this class pretty much was in agreement. One of the key things that could be done to improve tests is to make students accountable.
They said, look, we don't even get the test scores back until the next school year. And most of the time, they never even look at the test scores. their parents sometimes get them sometimes don't um so they didn't even know what
how they did on those tests so that that's number one which i think you just said that you're going to get the test scores back sooner so that's good
Speaker 18
57:45
it's tough because you would want the students to know right especially if if teachers are looking at that say that maybe they want to be in an honors class or
like if if you didn't realize someone was really good at biology you might be using that result to try an AP biology course the following year and it's good for the schools and teachers for PD so we are so excited that this year when that window closes they're going to get the assessments before schools at least the achievement level results on that that's really good news I mean
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
58:16
I am glad to hear that that you'll get it sooner so you can have a little bit more you know immediate response to that but the second part of that is that to them it doesn't really make a difference and they
told me that they they know and of course none of them would admit to doing this but they know other students who just fill in the bubble well I guess you don't fill in bubbles anymore going old school I guess just pick a number and they just want to get through the test as quickly as possible that it really it makes no difference in their world and they really don't want to be bothered by the test and so is it truly then their skill level or just they're trying to hurry up and get through a test. So I want to say maybe it was Tennessee that does use the test in some way
towards the student's grade in a class. It's considered a certain percentage of their overall grade or something like that. Even if it was considered just as a test, one test grade, there would be some type of consequence or some type of benefit to taking that test and they might take it a little bit more seriously because that really disturbed me that there'd be students who just really they're just taking guesses they just want to hurry up and take the test yeah I've seen
Speaker 18
59:39
some states have a myriad of policies around this some may have 20 to 30 percent of the student's final grade is based on the end of course exam let's say for algebra whatever score they get also correlates to their actual grade on their transcript which impacts their gpa some states have an exit exam requirement to graduate from high school meaning if you don't pass let's say grade 10 ela in algebra and biology you can't graduate i mean i'm not saying i'm
advocating for any of those policies but if those are the kind of conversations you want to have around putting some meat or kind of incentive
Speaker 27
1:00:19
behind assessment, I'd be more than happy to sit with you. I don't know what the right answer is, but
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:00:25
it's worth a conversation. I don't either. I just, I thought, I never really processed that or knew that, but that's what
this class, and this is a pretty smart class. This is an advanced class that I was talking to, and they were saying they know lots of
students who finished that test practically as quickly as you possibly could answer all the questions boom boom boom and they
don't spend a whole lot of time on it so just throwing the idea
out there food for thought and something to discuss as
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:01:04
we move further thank you represent barnes you recognize for a question With the private schools and micro schools not being measured the same way the public school, do you see a problem with students being moved to your private micro schools
to afford the standards that are being placed on the
Speaker 15
1:01:26
public schools? I don't think I've seen that. I think when parents are looking for choice options, they're looking for something they feel may meet the best needs of their own child. And if that's in a micro school because they're getting maybe specialized one-on-one attention and they know that's what their child needs and that's great or a private school. Now, when we talk about accountability for private schools, we do hold them accountable
and they do have to give a standardized assessment because we want parents to know how well their children are doing. And we have made ATLAS available to micro school families and private schools as well. And some folks are choosing to participate in that assessment as well because
Speaker 27
1:02:06
they want to know how well their kids are doing. Let me give
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:02:10
you a scenario I have in mind. If I think my child is not doing well, say second grade, and I'm a little worried about the third grade testing.
If I move them to a private school or micro school, okay, hold them there until they
Speaker 127
1:02:28
get to the fourth or fifth grade, what's the possibility of that happening?
Speaker 18
1:02:34
I would hope a parent isn't doing that if they've recognized their child needs help
Speaker 15
1:02:39
to say I'm going to do everything in my power to not give them help would be concerning for me. So I would say to that parent, this is why you need to meet with your school counselor, your administrators, and your teacher to say, how can I reinforce at home and fill those gaps that my child's
Speaker 18
1:02:55
not getting at school because I want them to be successful?
Nobody should be dodging third-grade promotion. And be cognizant that I'm using that term, third-grade promotion, not retention, because we want to move you on to the next grade to be successful. Right now, if you look at all those students that are at risk and we're just pushing through the system, are they graduating? Are they graduating with the ability to be enlisted, enrolled, or employed? If you have major deficits in reading in the primary grades, school becomes not fun. And then you become disconnected.
And then you become a problem and you don't want to do it anymore. Because if you can't read, you can't succeed. So
Speaker 33
1:03:36
this is about promoting you with the toolkit to be successful at the next level. Yeah. I
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:03:43
see the intent. I think your intent is right, what we're trying to do. But in the minority area where I'm from, you have a lot of schools who do not have licensed teachers. And we're putting this mandate on them, and we're saying to these unlicensed teachers, you're going to have to perform at the level of licensed teachers.
got to perform it and and between all of the dust the child is the one suffering and we're making these rules but the child's
Speaker 18
1:04:10
suffering because the adults aren't getting on the support they need and i will never say ever that because you're a poor kid from the delta you should have access to unqualified teachers that's a different conversation we're not going to have lower expectations for students based on zip code in fact we should be identifying those zip codes and incentivizing our best and brightest to go in there and lift these kids up and not expect that
they're going to fail. I expect them to excel. And I know kids in those impoverished communities that can graduate with their AA, just like any kid in this state. And we have schools that are doing it. We have Palestine Wheatley, I want to say last year alone, graduated 13 kids with their AA. Hope School graduated about 30-something kids with their AA. Lee County, a state-controlled school that we just asked about, I think he had four kids. So I get so frustrated when we want
to make excuses. We cannot love our students in demiocrity and make excuses because their zip code limits their opportunities. That's up to us to be honest about why that continues to happen and stop perpetuating that cycle of failure yeah i agree with you i
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:05:21
agree with that i agree with that that's that was my point i was dealing with more realistic what's going on that's why
Speaker 18
1:05:29
we're trying to do and that's that's why we're putting those literacy coaches in yeah to model for those
teachers side by side because this if you remember i i got frustrated a lot and i still get frustrated with this most this notion of that we should just waive everything and put everybody in a waiver which is why this legislator says we're not going to accept that anymore. We're not going to let people just be unqualified for 30 years, be evaluated four times, and get a full pension. We want to put you on a path where you're qualified, right? So if there's a reason we got you in the door, that means we're investing in you as an educator, and we believe in you.
So the question is, how can the co-ops and the systems support that educator to give them the skills they need, which is why we've deployed those literacy coaches? Because they can do it. We need to get qualified educators, and we need to celebrate them, elevate them, and retain them at a much higher level in some of our communities than we see in other areas of the state because the staffing issues are real, right? Like getting good administrators is real. Getting systems, typically when you see a failing school, you see a failing community, right?
Like you're building an entire system. And we're not going to accept failure. And our stance and our agency stance is if we see a community that is not focused on what's best for students, which we've seen. Like we've recently did some major actions in Blytheville because they created a system that was focused on doing what's best for adults while ignoring kids. They created a place where adults would go to have a job and kids would hang out.
That's not good enough. And I don't care if you're in Blyaville, I don't care if you're in Texarkana,
Speaker 103
1:07:13
I don't care if you're in Northwest. We have to do what's right for students. That
Chair
Unverified
1:07:19
is our job. Great. Thank you. Representative
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:07:24
Brown, you're recognized for a question? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Secretary Oliva, I just want to clarify some things, and I think this will be a pretty quick answer for you. Pathways are not necessarily considered advanced placement. They're just strictly a pathway, correct?
Speaker 18
1:07:38
I think that's a great question and that's why we went when I think of a pathway it's creating an opportunity for exit and on ramps right so I think like the notion that every student's on a pathway from high school to university is a pathway but it may not be for all students so you may have some students are going to take some career technical programs maybe they're going to take some AA maybe they're going to take AP it it's it's it's about a highway with exit and on ramps but when you look at the CTE pathways, the intention of those pathways is that you could become a program completer.
And if you take a certain level of coursework in succession, it would lead to an industry certification. Ross may be able
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:08:24
to jump in there a little
bit deeper. So let me clarify. So the pathways that we were talking about are the ones on slide 18, the success-ready pathways? Yes, ma'am. And those aren't necessary, those would not be considered advanced placement. It's just strictly a course of study for some sort of a certification.
Speaker 18
1:08:47
Yes, ma'am, for these, but that wouldn't prohibit a student for taking advanced placement courses, but these have specific courses that we would want to see a student complete towards a certification to complete
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:09:00
that pathway. And then my next question that relates to that is a lot of the schools, or several schools, at least in Arkansas, have academies. Are the academies considered a pathway, or would they be in addition to a pathway? They can be, right?
Speaker 18
1:09:18
So I think, like schools are saying, they're going to develop a magnet program or an academy or an area of study, You know something that says that there's a school within the school that may be a little bit different I would hope that if they had an Academy It would be aligned to one of these pathways and not just a random program that doesn't lead to outcomes for students So I think that's the intention Thank you
Chair
Unverified
1:09:43
Representative Rye you're recognized for question Yes, sir. Thank you. Mr. Chairman
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
1:09:49
gentlemen Let me tell you a little bit about What's going on in northeast Arkansas? Back in the 70s and 80s and even 90s, we had a tremendous amount of people working in the agriculture field, okay? And basically what has happened where you had four or five children that worked from finishing high school into the farming industry,
that's not going on anymore. Big equipment has taken over. and if there's any way I don't know I know you guys are sharp when it comes to these kind of things but we really do need to I think work at our technical part of that
Speaker 18
1:10:43
especially in that area so I agree and and one of the things that um we've often heard is that we've got to expand career and technical education,
but then do we really invest in it, right? So I think one of the things that we did as a state, which was a huge statement to say we value these programs, in Arkansas Access is we looked at weighted coursework. So when we say that this is an honors course or an AP course, we are now identifying career and technical courses that get the same weighted credit as an AP course that somebody may be taking for a pathway to university.
But a pathway to career, we're going to say, is just as valuable and as rigorous as a pathway to university. And I think that's going to help with that perception that we really are valuing career and technical education because we're telling kids that this is just as important to take these courses as it is an AP course. Thank
Speaker 143
1:11:45
you, sir, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. Represent Magruder, you're recognized for a question.
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:11:52
Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, I want to thank you all for the wonderful job with the presentation.
You all put in a lot of work, and it's obvious that we are making some gains here in the state of Arkansas. And I wanted to make sure that I piggybacked off what Senator Flowers stated. I want to see if we can get this data for districts that are in high poverty just broken down for those districts. And I also as far as the achievement level
Speaker 18
1:12:18
or grades because I thought I think we were talking about grades, right? Or is it achievement levels too? I was
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:12:27
achievement levels Yeah, the atlas the science the math and ELA is what I was looking for and How close are we to getting all teachers trained in the science
Speaker 15
1:12:47
of reading Okay. That's a good question. When
Speaker 18
1:12:51
you say all teachers, you're talking about K through 12,
regardless of teaching assignment, whether I'm a band teacher, drama teacher, or are we talking about in, like, K-2 foundational years? I was focusing on K-2. We can pull a percentage for you because that would be easier, the pool than trying to figure out everybody around the science of reading when you say all teachers or even K3 space because we can look at who has met the certification requirements and what percentage we have on a pathway. I still think we have a high percentage of students or
excuse me teachers that are on a pathway to getting that provisional license but one of the things that we're going to be hopeful to present to the legislature soon is we've been doing science of reading audits in our teacher prep programs and i'm going to tell you right now you're going to be appalled at some of these teacher prep program scores and then we wonder why these teacher candidates can't meet the proficiency in the science of reading to get a professional license there's a
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:14:02
lot of work to do okay follow-up last question i heard you state this
earlier about teachers within the in the delta i would love to get together on seeing what we can come up with incentives for teachers to come to the delta that area to teach so we can make sure that we have high quality teachers in those high poverty areas so i look forward to working with you and your staff on that thank you represent back
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:14:28
you're recognized for question thank you mr chair uh thank you for the presentation and and really the good news is as far as the advancements that you've already made my question i have is sort of builds on representative
I'm going to go over to the next question a little bit. What are you seeing now? Because I'm hearing some good things back from the teachers. But what are you hearing now as your biggest deficit, the biggest gap that you have concern-wise as far as what the teachers are needing, whether that be additional education for the teachers or resources or anything like that, to implement the program learns, especially in that pre-third grade level?
Speaker 18
1:15:12
- So I think kind of when you look at this implementation like state of the state or where we are now, what do teachers need? They need good materials. They need time to plan, right? They need time to look at student data. They need time to observe other teachers. They wanna be observed by other teachers given feedback administrators are saying the same thing because it it was a lot of change right you know and we got criticized like why are we changing so much at once well because we have to
and these kids should only be in third grade once these kids shouldn't be in kindergarten once we can't wait another 10 or 15 years to get this implementation done right but the amount of work we've done in standards realignment, updating high quality instruction materials, aligning professional development, and building out that unified coordinated progress monitoring system. What we keep hearing for teachers like, this is great, but this is a lot. I still need to absorb it all. I need to better understand how to use
my progress monitoring data. How do I take that information and align lessons? How do I work with my peers and my colleagues as we differentiate instruction? I don't feel like schools are like, no, we don't want to do this. They want to do it. They want to do it well. They just want to make sure they can be validated that what they're working on is the work that they should be working on, and that's what we're trying to provide as a state is that layer and safety net to make sure we can help validate them.
And that's why we're working with our cooperatives and supporting them as well because a lot of times they're the first line of support for a school district that has questions, and that's where we're just trying to do our best is make sure we're giving them the answers quickly to any questions that they need
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
1:17:09
and the right layers of support. Just a follow-up. So not endorsing any program or anything, a lot of the statements that you made seem to align with the PLC program.
So are we doing the implementation of the PLC program or that training, not necessarily the program, that training, are the co-ops picking that up? Is that what you
Speaker 18
1:17:33
intend for it to happen? And I think some is at a district level choice. Like some districts are continuing to work in that professional learning community model when it means coming together with your peers, looking at data, designing high-quality lessons. Cooperatives are doing that. I think it's kind of an array of support.
Some may find other programs initiatives that work better for them. So it's kind of making sure it's differentiated and tailored to the unique students and schools that are being supported. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. All
Representative Keith Brooks
Unverified
1:18:08
right, seeing no additional questions, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for the presentation and answering questions. We will move on now to Mr. White for your presentation. If you would please introduce yourself and you're recognized. Good
Speaker 155
1:18:21
afternoon, Ross Watt, Director for the Division of Career and Technical Education
at the Department. Give me one second to get this slide switched over. Okay, well, good afternoon. We're
Speaker 158
1:18:43
going to extend a little bit on the information that the Secretary just covered regarding success ready graduates but this is going to be specifically kind of through the lens of career and technical education as it looks at in our schools across the state. So specifically
this is something we start with quite a bit this summer as we've done training across the state with educators but really talking about the learns act and access and how those two pieces together are really working to complement success ready graduates and really looking at alignment of our workforce needs across the state because ultimately that becomes our goal and how are we meeting and what that looks like for our state in regards to our workforce. And so one of, I think, the most important places we start is what is the vision of a Success Ready graduate? And part of that becomes we have to start this conversation early.
We have a lot of people who have this belief that magically in ninth grade our students are in high school and they're going to start making choices and making plans that are going to put them on a path to success post-graduation. And to be honest, a lot of our programs, as we know, start in the ninth grade or before the ninth grade and so students are really needing to be intentional. I spent 10 plus years in an eighth grade classroom teaching career development and so my goal every day was to spend with eighth graders about 150 of them talking about what do you want to do post high school graduation. When I look back on those years and the time spent in that classroom most of those
students knew really well typically what their parents did and then what we would typically call community helper. Beyond that, they couldn't usually tell me what was happening. Our biggest employer in the community I live in, when I would ask students what's happening there, they couldn't usually tell me what was going on there. It was a manufacturing plant that manufactured food, and they couldn't tell me anything about it. And a lot of them, that's where their parents work. So I think we have to be very intentional in this continuum of what career exposure looks like for our students and so this is a continuum we use with our schools
I'm really talking about in that sixth to eighth grade band are we making students aware by early career experiences and so through the learns act that was an important piece of legislation that really gave us we have to focus on early career experiences and so what are we doing with students in grade six and grade seven and grade eight around what I always kind of call the three areas of career awareness so they're aware of careers and why people work then career exploration where we're exploring all the things what are your dreams what would you love to do
what would you not love to do and then career development which becomes how do we start to talk about what you've identified things you like things that you are interested in things that you have an aptitude in how do we start start developing those skills and so those become essential for us to do in those middle grades we'll get people from time to time say that's way too early and I don't believe that at all as somebody who spent the time there somebody now as a father of a sixth grader and a ninth grader very intentional conversations I have with them on a regular basis about what what is it you want to do or what are your interests or what do you
enjoy as we plan that out and then by law we have student success plans that must be in place by the end of their eighth grade year and so this marries right into that as we start talking about student success plans that's more than just a four-year plan of courses you're going to take but truly a system that we should be revisiting on an annual basis throughout our high school experience, but those experiences we do in grades 6, 7, and 8 really make that student success planning tool and resource between our educators, our students, and their families be a much more powerful piece as we go forward.
And then hopefully that then leads into what we call Success Ready Pathways, and that students are identifying really what are their goals that they want to achieve post high school graduation and building out those processes in the high school experience because those pathways become a lot of opportunity but also there's a lot of things that happen or happen in between there that students need to be able to understand know their families need to be able to understand and know and our educators can support them as they move forward which in the final piece is we want them to become that success ready graduate and you heard the secretary allude earlier about
enlistment enrollment employment and that's really what we are looking at when we began to talk about this is that we want all of our students ready for one of the three e's if not all three of them that students are going to make changes we know that we know we're going to have students who graduate high school in may and have a plan in may and then by the time august rolls around that plan has changed but that we have skilled them to be able to pivot to a different option and still have skills within them that make them successful and able to move forward and be a productive member of our community and our state and our workforce holistically earlier the secretary
brought these up. They're on the screen again. These are specific to just our career and technical education pathways. I do want to give you a little bit more information around those. As he mentioned, we revisit them because they're not just a stagnant list, and this is something we're required to revisit annually. So when we look at this, we're looking at wage in our state and the demand in our state based off labor market information. And so when we're looking at wage, we're looking at the wage that is being earned from these occupational codes and so that becomes
very important because we want that family sustaining wage we want to have arkansans that are on a pathway to prosperity and making a family sustained income the other side of that then becomes demand is there demand in our state we look at this statewide all 75 counties we know we could narrow down into one specific county and probably have some outliers that are there but holistically when we look at it statewide we still see the same common needs across our state no matter where we are and so those are our driving forces when we're looking at our success
ready pathways that are career and technical focused is that labor market information and specifically at wage and demand because we want to ensure that we're preparing students for pathways that there are jobs and then there are jobs that are going to pay a decent wage for them looking forward and so this is revisited annually so as we mentioned earlier there were 18 on our initial list if you were looking at this one here you're going to notice that this number actually is a little higher than 18 and through some work we've done this past year as we move into the 26 27 school year we're going to have 22 pathways that then meet our wage and demand a part of that
is us reworking programs we've had we have a lot of programs that have been the same way for a long time and we haven't really visited what are the skills that we're teaching and how we're teaching them and so through some extensive work over the past year and a half we have really revisited all those pathways realign the standards that we're teaching and those standards align to the skills that go back to the to the careers and their occupation codes and so being very intentional with that we were able to adapt programs to meet more of the needs in our state and that becomes a big part of our conversation too is that when we look at these pathways we're focused on the needs
of Arkansas and Arkansas alone specifically as we go forward so as the secretary mentioned earlier from those pathways students can graduate with merit distinction which now becomes a part of our school accountability a to f system and so that's very important as representative Mayberry mentioned earlier you know with our students how do they want to take interest and buy in into our assessments I think this becomes an important part in our schools you know they're required and have been required my entire educational career to have three career and technical education programs on
campus how intently they've paid attention to them or how serious they've taken the programming they're offering and how rigorous it is and how appropriate it is and how it aligned is to their community needs I think is something that can be of question sometimes but now that we have this in our school accountability it definitely has our schools looking a lot more at the programs they're offering and their alignment with that and then ensuring that students are leaving with two things and I always go with merit distinction there are two important pieces one is they're completing a pathway which is at least three courses I mean those three courses is we built
a foundational set of skills and knowledge that they can go on to work they can continue their education they can enlist in the military but they also have something tangible they can take with them beyond their high school diploma when we have conversations with employers and we do on a regular basis a lot of times what we hear is that high school diploma doesn't mean a whole lot to us. Like most people have that. So what else do they have with them? What other skill do they have beyond being a high school graduate? And so that becomes a really important part of our Success Ready graduates is there's something tangible that they're taking with them, whether
it be an additional credential that's been to earn, it's a different additional post-secondary credit, it's scores on different assessments that's going to put them earlier in line for maybe an interview or opportunity is really what we're looking at when we discuss merit and distinction. and these two slides really talk about the two differences in those something that I do want to point out a fact to you is the class of 2024 so when they graduated obviously the learns act was still very new obviously they'd been in high school through pretty much the entire process
if we would have taken that class and looked at merit and distinction we would have had 9,028 students out of the 36,000 plus students we graduated that would have met merit and distinction okay like that's not a number that I'm necessarily proud of to say that we had 9,000 students that were considered success ready by how we define merit or distinction now again the class of 2028 our current sophomores this year they will be the first class that has gone through the full four years of high school under these new rules and regulations so my hope is by the time we get
to the class of 2028 we see this number has had some tremendous growth but it's also kind of our baseline to watch because that becomes a really important part of our conversation when we have employers that are looking to locate in Arkansas and they are in that process of trying to determine is there a workforce to meet that we know a lot of times most of the times they're looking at what are we what are we graduating out of high schools out of post-secondaries because they don't want to steal from the workforce that already exists a lot of times so how intentional are we when I look at this number 9,028 it's not a perfect number of exactly every student being success
ready but it paints a picture based off the programs we've built and the opportunities we've provided students and so I think that's a challenge to us in our schools right now is how do we continue to grow that and they're doing a great job we've had lots of trainings lots of questions lots of changes in programs that maybe have always traditionally been offered to meet the workforce needs of a community of a region as we go forward so as we look at enrollment to give you a general idea we do have middle school career and technical education courses and so from the previous school
year we had about 106,000 students in a career and technical education course in grade six seven or eight a lot of that is around exploration so they are exploring careers that exist and why then if we look to the high school side 912 enrollment we see it over 252,000 I always have to add that can be a duplicate number we have a lot of students who are taking a lot of courses within a pathway that might be two three periods of their day so we have a very healthy enrollment in career and technical education I think the part that then becomes something that we have to continue to
look at and have conversation about is this right here so we use the term concentrator and completer in career and technical education and that's a federal term but also we use it heavily in our state and that's the number of students who are completing programs so concentrators means they completed two courses in a program or a pathway and then we have a completer where they completed three which is the full program so you can see that from last year we had 73,000 students who would have met the concentrator number okay and then completers it goes down to 32,000
so I think we go well how did we lose more than half of them like what what's happening there that should be concerning and it should be and there's a lot of factors that go into play and sometimes it's a student has found they are not interested in that career field or that pathway that is just not right for them and they make a switch and that is perfectly okay i think it's great to learn that you have a fear of needles and blood before you go deep into a medical professions pathway but we also know we have a lot of students who have a lot of other opportunities at school or they're not required to be at school all day and they don't have to finish a schedule and so they leave and
they go to work we do have work-based earning programs that allow students to earn credit while still being enrolled in the school getting credit for it but also working they would be included in this count so we do see a significant turn there so it's also a big part of our conversation around letting students complete pathways and so we anticipate these numbers to get better but it is our reality of where we live and they've been pretty consistent for this way for some time as we look at the pathways that are offered and then there's secondary career centers that I know
you are very familiar with across the state so we have 31 secondary career centers not including satellites and those are very regionally focused and then very driven programs meaning that students are going to have to usually take at least half of their school day to be there so it's not necessarily right for every student and then of course we don't offer every pathway known to mankind they are usually very regionally focused on the workforce of those areas but you can see we're averaging a little over 10,000 students there a year which is a good number but at the
same time we have 31 of these centers across the state and the continual growth in that and then our connection with post-secondary there for the vast majority of these they are on a post-secondary campus which means those students are earning concurrent credit while they're doing this work which means moving them closer or they're already earning a certificate of proficiency a technical certificate or an associate's degree while enrolled there and I think those become really important pieces and so our continued growth with this we know as we discuss success ready pathways and we put out merit and distinction that we've already seen more of a demand for these
programs and more enrollment occurring at faster rates which then puts us to this last bit of facts so in the 24-25 school year we had over 19,000 industry recognized credentials earned in our state And so we're happy with that number, but I will tell you that number is not necessarily always the greatest industry-recognized credential known. We have spent the past year really reviewing this, and as we go into the current school year that we're in, we have really narrowed our list of what's industry-recognized credentials.
This list has become, I'll be honest, kind of a headache to manage. It's become very vendor-driven. We have vendors that can come with credentials for about anything in the world. But then when we talk to our employers, our employers are like, I've never heard of that, or I don't know what that is, or I don't need that, or I'd rather teach them myself. And so we're really trying to revisit the industry-recognized credential piece and being very intentional with that. So you might hear some conversations about that over the next year because we are really tightening that list down to what we feel like is more appropriate and then really driven by Arkansas workforce and what Arkansas workforce needs.
And then the post-secondary credentials here, this is something that the numbers now we don't love, but we know that we are already on a path to see great changes here based off of things from the Learns Act and the Access Act. So keep in mind these 24-25 numbers are focused on mostly students who would have graduated this past spring. But a little over 2,500 certificates of proficiency, 137 technical certificates, and five associate degrees. These are all specific to career and technical education. So earlier when the secretary mentioned Palestine Wheatley and Hope, those are probably more in your general studies area.
These are going to be in very technical fields. And those are all coming out of our secondary career centers. So those numbers aren't where we want them. But from the legislation that has been passed and the work that has been put in, we've already seen very much uptick in this trajectory as we go forward and anticipate these numbers to be at a much greater scale in the next two to three years, especially that class of 2028 our sophomore class seeing it almost double or quadruple and what those numbers would look like as we meet arkansas workforce needs and so that really is where we sit
in our current reality with career and technical education as it extends on what the secretary shared earlier but also the success ready pathways there's a lot of opportunity here it's also brought up a lot of conversation with school leaders communities around what are our needs and how do those align and then of course at the same time with post-secondary ensuring that we're creating pathways for our students that we know the vast majority of them are going to continue their education in some form or fashion it might not be a four-year baccalaureate degree but there's going to be some additional training and that we're able to break down some of those
barriers and make those pathways a little bit more seamless for our students and the process but also filling Arkansas workforce needs as we continue forward and so
Chair
Unverified
1:35:32
with that I believe that was my last one. So I'll
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:35:36
take any questions you have. Senator Dotson, you're recognized for a question. Thank
you, Mr. Chairman. Ross, a couple slides back where you were talking about the class of 2024, the merit and distinction graduations, 9,028. Yes, sir. Do we have any numbers in like
2023, 2022 leading up to that? And I'm sure you don't have 25 yet. So yes and no.
Speaker 158
1:35:59
So we have some numbers we could run based off of what merit distinction looks like it's just not a perfect perfect example of it but I would say we've looked at it and I know the team the public school accountability team has done a lot of work in here and it's been pretty consistent around when we look specifically in the realm of just career and technical education and completing a pathway and earning that credential or post-secondary credit that we've been
running about 10,000 or so usually is the ballpark of what our graduating class
Speaker 163
1:36:31
is that's pretty consistent in that 30,000 range so
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:36:35
roughly 25 percent is that is that consistent nationwide or with other states it varies so you have states who have a requirement of
Speaker 158
1:36:44
career and technical education workforce specific so obviously theirs is going to be tremendously higher than ours and then you have some states who have no requirements so it's going to be lower than ours
I would say we kind of just run in the middle of the pack when we look at career and technical education especially when we start talking about like completers of CTE programs which is meaning three courses we always just kind of fall right in the middle you know probably 25, 30 when it starts to look at number of completions. Now I think the other part we have to take into consideration there is number of completions is great but then also what are they taking with that besides just completing the program because i can have a student at one school that completed a program and i can say man that was extremely rigorous
they're very trained and i can maybe have another program another district and just the quality of the educator might not be as great and it might not mean as much so that's where we've added in that readiness factor that second piece that is some outside piece a credential post-secondary accreditation piece assessment that is carrying with them that shows they have a skill set that I think is really important that's new to us that we
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
1:37:54
wouldn't have had prior to this previous year. So states that don't have it as a mandatory, we're right in line with where
they're at more or less? Yeah. Okay. Yes, sir. Thank you.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:38:20
Representative Duke, you recognized? My apologies for getting there. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It was very interesting. On that, right, the slide, I think it's slide 15 right before the end where you talk about the certifications and the post-secondary credentials earned, are those, I'm assuming,
those are like 137 technical certificates represent 137 students. Correct. Correct. So can you give examples of what these certificates in all of those areas, maybe your top ones? So for technical certificates, it's typically
Speaker 168
1:38:48
going to be in the medical field. Those are going to be
Speaker 158
1:38:53
our most common there. Your certificate of proficiencies is typically going to be a lot of automotive, a lot of welding. Those are usually our biggest numbers because these are coming specifically out of our secondary career centers.
And so those are going to be most common. might see an advanced manufacturing thrown in here depending on the area but definitely medical automotive welding a little bit of construction tech but some of those like specifically to construction a lot of those have industry recognized credential that sometimes the employer is looking more for than necessarily the post-secondary credit but those would be our most common that we're going to see from that list that's there do you have follow-up
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:39:32
if i may do you have um are we tracking these kids at all any are any of these groups or career centers
tracking them after they leave i mean i have a little bit of knowledge over the
welding i was as i got introduced that how much they're making whenever they're graduating with some of this are
Speaker 164
1:39:50
we tracking that so we know and do you
Speaker 158
1:39:53
have that so one of our federal requirements but as a state we are doing a much a very good job with this is this number right here so our concentrators and completers those students we have to track 18 months post high school graduation and we have to track them on what's called post-secondary placement but it's just placement in either the workforce part-time or full-time enrollment in post-secondary the peace
corps or the military and so we do have to track all of our students eight post 18 months past high school graduation with that so we have that information and all of our districts receive that annually on kind of where they're at I will say our post-secondary placement based off of those students we typically run about 80 percent are meeting the placement requirement which means 80 percent of them are either enrolled full-time part-time or employed what's considered full-time are in the military or are in the peace corps so is that information that you could get us as well
so that we can see i can give it to you by district by school district they have their amount that that we have to
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:40:52
track that annually and submit it to the u.s department of ed so we know basically this kid took the welding classes or i moved classes and they stayed in the industry a couple 18 months later or
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:41:09
they did not or so yeah i think that would be great to see thank you senator flowers recognized thank you and thank you for the presentation i wanted to know about the certified pre-apprenticeship leading to registered apprenticeship and just general overall
how is cte set up with school districts individual school districts is it left to the school district to determine and to fund the career technical courses so i'll start with that question
and then we'll go back to the certified pre-apprenticeship if you're
Speaker 155
1:41:39
okay with that um so in our school standards
Speaker 158
1:41:42
for accreditation they are required um i believe it's the secretary mentioned earlier they have to have three career and technical education programs of study and so
that's a part of accreditation which goes to their foundation funding so that's one of those requirements and one from your list and then one of them has to be that high wage high demand that was new from the learns act and so every school has to have three again most districts actually have more than three it's pretty common it's our our smallest districts typically are just having the three but I'll be honest most have more than that and so that is where their requirement is they have obviously in their foundation funding the piece that comes in with career and technical education as a requirement and standards for accreditation and then we do receive federal
funding so the carl d perkins act so perkins funding that comes into the state now that is a state award and then we have to use it in higher ed and in k-12 so right now 70 percent of it goes to our k-12 districts and 30 percent goes to our post-secondary campuses that are eligible and they receive a federal award with that it is a very very small amount of money our state federal award is a little under 15 million dollars as a whole but then we have to split among every
k-12 district in the state and then our post-secondaries who are eligible for perkins so i always remind people the federal award is not really a lot of operational it's typically a supplemental piece that helps offset the cost of equipment or credentialing for students and what they're in and then for the certified pre-apprenticeship so we have two options with apprenticeship we have certified pre-apprenticeship which is newer for our state and that's with the office of skills development over the department of commerce and students who have the opportunity to go into a apprenticeship opportunity but it's the pre side of it because they might not be
meeting the age requirements that the apprenticeship might require and this allows them to start working in that field and gaining on-the-job training and related technical instruction hours towards the apprenticeship once they reach the age that they're able to be an approved apprentice through the United States Department of Labor. And then we have a youth apprenticeship which is very similar and it is where they're identifying they are a youth and they are aligned with an apprenticeable career and the hours they earn while they're in that youth apprenticeship count
towards the amount of hours that have to be earned in the actual apprenticeship once they become of age. So really the only difference is there is the certified pre-apprenticeship is more Arkansas controlled and local. The youth apprenticeship is through the United States Department of Labor and has a little bit more federal oversight but both of those are opportunities we have for students for apprenticeable careers in our state that have been approved. Approved by the feds? Well so good question. So there is on the youth apprenticeship side obviously we would have to have an approved apprenticeship within the state that's been approved through the United States
department of labor with a certified pre-apprenticeship it's pretty much the same because we also want it to be an approved apprenticeship which as of right now our state is we go through the federal side of it for us for the apprenticeship to be approved so you do have to file an application with the united states department of labor labor to have that apprenticeship career approved once it's an approved career in
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:44:57
the state providers can go from there well if if a school district
is allowed to just or required to just choose one subject matter from
your success ready pathway yes ma'am the other two
Speaker 163
1:45:14
but they're supposed to have three yes they're required
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:45:16
to have three for accreditation purposes so the other two
how how are they funded i mean and what is what qualifies them as a program that would be acceptable as a career well so I mean we we spell out our pathways and
Speaker 158
1:45:32
our courses so they obviously have standards just like we have for all of our other courses we have standards for each course and so they're choosing the
pathways that they have for their community also we have a state plan for Perkins federally that defines size scope and quality those are the three things federally we have to define and so it defines what is the size of the program the scope of the program and then how do you identify quality in the program and so every district their programs they offer have to meet those and so we have at actually each of our education cooperatives we employ a cte coordinator each one of them that is there to support our districts across the state and making sure they're meeting
size scope and quality um and so i mean it's no different than them having in my opinion a math english science program we have staff that's there to support them we have standards that are set and they implement those programs because they're a part of their requirement
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:46:27
for accreditation purposes so at some point at the local level those leaders in that school district and the business community i suppose would come together and figure out those other two and that's a
Speaker 158
1:46:38
good questions so that's a requirement they have annually is they're supposed to have what's
called a stakeholder engagement and that's a meeting between the educators there at the district the education leaders the those teachers but also then their business and industry and what programs do we need to be offering what are the needs of our community what are our workforce needs to identify the programs that they need to offer there and they're able to
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:47:04
choose those at the local level. And last question, the U.S. Department of Education, do they fund any of this career technical education? So that's that Carl D. Perkins Act
Speaker 158
1:47:15
that I mentioned earlier. So the Perkins funding that we receive comes from the feds, and that is what is coming from the U.S. Department of Ed to fund career and technical education in the state, in all states. Are
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:47:25
we projected to receive some Perkins? Yeah, so we've received our initial
Speaker 158
1:47:29
payment for the or our initial payout for this year and we have our obviously we'll get our second one on October 1 and it's just right under 15 million dollars as I mentioned earlier so it's not a big pot of money but that is what we receive and then we split it 70 30 percent 70 percent goes to k-12 local education agencies and then the other 30 percent goes to our post-secondary
education agencies that meet the requirement but
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:47:53
only the agencies that have the have met the requirements for whatever the department of ed through perkins has outlined
correct so our k-12 districts all of them meet it
Speaker 158
1:48:04
because it's a requirement for them for accreditation so all k-12 public districts are eligible on the post-secondary side they don't have a requirement so they're able to do that but pretty much all of our two-year community colleges receive perkins
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:48:20
on the so what you're saying is k-12 all k-12 in the state public school districts receive it So it receives, is it split proportionately?
Speaker 158
1:48:30
It's a formula. So the formula looks at two things, and the formula is given to us by the feds as well. It looks at the population of the community and then the poverty of the community, and those are the two things that calculate in to form that. It's similar to how Title I is funded
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:48:47
in districts. It's the same formula. And is all this data on the Department of Education website?
Speaker 158
1:48:52
So you can go to the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education page, and on finance you can see the breakdown of how much dollar amount each district receives under the finance section. I will tell you districts have the option to join a consortia with the Career and Technical Education Funds, which means they're putting all their money in one pot together and working as a group. And most of our districts choose to use that because it's such a small amount of money. And so we have a consortia at each of our education service cooperatives, And so most of our smaller districts, of course, which is a large number of our districts, are a part of a consortia.
But every district that's K-12 that's public does receive a piece of that dollar each year. And then they choose to either keep it or put it in the consortia.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:49:38
And we can get you that list if you would like a breakdown. I mean, that's very easy. I'm not that savvy with this computer and going online all, but I'd like whatever kind of breakdown you have for students that are engaged in that career technical, the districts. Yep, and we can provide the districts.
You've given us some because we can look at what you have from 24, 25 to kind of
see, because some of this is backed by Perkins Wright. Yes, ma'am. and the department of labor yes ma'am and so is it correct to assume that these numbers that are up here for concentrators
and completers was all federally funded no i mean so i would say no
Speaker 158
1:50:28
because again our federal funds that are coming in are such a small amount they're usually there to help provide above and beyond what is we are schools already received because again it's a part for our k-12 districts it's a part of their requirement and so when we go back to just their funding as a district then that is what they're receiving for all their requirements under standards for accreditation and they're required of those programs what comes in with the federal dollar amount is a very small amount so most of our districts are using that typically for educator training equipment that they're buying and i say equipment's usually one or two pieces
of equipment a year and then paying for students who are sitting for these credentials that they're having to pay for and they're covering the cost of those credentials so it's not going to the student but like our largest recipient in the state is probably not as a district as an individual district receiving probably four hundred thousand dollars and that's all they're receiving and that's our largest in the state and we have some districts who receive less than ten thousand dollars in Perkins because of how the formula works and it's just such a small amount of money
that comes to us federally. So I would say we have way more state-invested funds than we have federally-invested funds into career and technical education.
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:51:40
Because the federal funds would have to be targeted for certain types of courses? Well, they just have to meet that federal definition of
Speaker 158
1:51:48
size, scope, and quality, which all of our programs meet that when they implement them because that's how we ensure that they're meeting that when they offer them, whether it's state or federal dollars. Even
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:51:59
the ones that are not on this list? that
Speaker 158
1:52:03
22 list is just the ones that are meeting wage and demand we have we offer 63 programs of
study 22 of them currently meet the state's threshold for high wage
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
1:52:16
high demand okay well whatever you think
might help um in understanding how how this works and whether it's new this is my first year on education committee so I'd like to know more of the background of the CTE and if it's regional I think over in Sheridan they connected with
Malvern and some other places so that's a regional kind of career tech yes yes ma'am okay thank
Representative Keith Brooks
Unverified
1:52:50
you mr. chair thank you senator seeing no additional questions mr. why thank you for your time there is no additional business force I want to a reminder that we are meeting tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. in pine bluff where no doubt senator flowers will roll out the red carpet for all of us so we're excited for that so uh seeing no additional business joint education is adjourned
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Consideration of a Motion to Approve the June 16, 2025, Meeting Minutes [Exhibit B]
C. Consideration for Adoption of Interim Study Proposals (ISPs) [Exhibits C1-C3]
D. Overview of ATLAS Testing, School Scorecards, and Career Readiness [Exhibit D1-D2]
E. Other Business
F. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Speaker 6
Representative Keith Brooks
Unverified
Speaker 15
Speaker 17
Speaker 18
Representative Stephen Meeks
Unverified
Speaker 33
Speaker 27
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
Speaker 47
Senator Stephanie Flowers
Unverified
Speaker 49
Senator Fredrick J. Love
Unverified
Speaker 91
Speaker 42
Speaker 86
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 127
Speaker 103
Chair
Unverified
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Speaker 143
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 155
Speaker 158
Senator Jim Dotson
Unverified
Speaker 163
Speaker 168
Speaker 164