LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK
A+ ≠ A+ A
AT HUGH GOODWIN: Teacher Tobie Sprawls says “payoff is bigger” with A+.
dents grouped at tables were looking up definitions of the words on their schoolsupplied iPads. Sprawls called on them to tell her what they learned and wrote their definitions on the board. Then she handed out little booklets — stapled sheets of blank paper — in which students were to draw pictures that illustrated each word. The exercise made it easy to see the difference in the way children think and learn, a difference A+ addresses. Some children labored hard over writing their names a certain way before getting to the task at hand. One child asked for larger paper because the country (rural) is so big; a symbolic thinker drew just a gravel road to signify that word. A boy drew a messy room and called it urban because it was crowded and disorganized; a bigpicture-thinker mapped a town from a bird’s eye view. Girls sitting together at one table all made detailed farms pictures amid much giggling. Sprawls moved constantly around the room, giving help when asked, encouragement to all. It’s a little noisy and it’s a little messy and that’s all right in the A+ method, because ideas are percolating in young minds. “It’s much easier if they turn to page 17 in their book,” Sprawls said later about teaching. It’s harder on the teacher to devise ways where the kids can create their way to the answer; she spends hours planning. “But the payoff is a lot bigger,” she said. Students remember what they’ve been taught, because they were more engaged in the lesson, she said, having fun. Sprawls said she believes the method could have an even bigger impact on a struggling school, by giving students the
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JANUARY 9, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
stimulation they aren’t receiving at home. They might learn a rap song about the number of sides in a pentagon (and then sing it to themselves during their benchmark tests, as one teacher observed), or act out an event in history, or create the parts of a plant cell with cotton pompoms and construction paper. A+ didn’t invent teacher creativity; it just allows it, and, teachers say, it meshes beautifully with the new Common Core curriculum that integrates subject matter and promotes critical thinking. (“What did you do today in math?” a teacher asked a younger boy at Hugh Goodwin as a reporter walked down the hall. “Science,” he answered.) You can’t credit A+ entirely with Hugh Goodwin’s leap in math and literacy scores; it takes good teachers, too, Principal Reed said. “But it has made a huge effect on our scores, climate and attitude of our school.” In 2012, combined benchmark scores for math for Hugh Goodwin’s third and fourth graders were 88 percent proficient or advanced; their combined literacy scores were 87 percent proficient or advanced. It’s a two-and-a-half hour drive to El Dorado from North Little Rock, and Leopoulos, 66, leaves no dead air. He talks about his daughter; his past; his friendship with Bill Clinton, who has pondered the possibility of introducing A+ to Haiti, and artist George Rodrigue, who is starting A+ in Louisiana through his foundation. He talks about the withering of unattended creativity as we age, theories of learning. He is 100 percent sure that A+ could make a huge difference in state schools for pennies on the dollar compared to other
rkansas A+ is a teaching methodology that incorporates the arts into academics. It’s been shown to help students learn and retain knowledge no matter how they’re wired to absorb new information, and its sponsor, the Thea Foundation, will work with any school — public, private, charter — that wants to implement it. A+ Arkansas is an organization created by the Walton-funded Arkansas for Education Reform Foundation to promote charter schools and other school “choice” programs. The name Arkansas A+ has been around since 2003, when the model, created in North Carolina, was first introduced to pilot schools here. Thea Foundation director Paul Leopoulos, concerned that the public would confuse the two organizations and think that Arkansas A+ was for charter schools only, asked A+ Arkansas leaders to consider a name change. He got nowhere with that suggestion, and is finding that educators are confused already — even some in North Little Rock, where Arkansas A+ is headquartered. A+ Arkansas did agree to put a disclaimer on its website: “While we are strong supporters of the Thea Foundation, there is absolutely no affiliation between the A+ Arkansas Campaign and Thea Foundation’s Arkansas A+ Schools whole school reform initiative.” Leopoulos hopes the Arkansas A+ Schools model will be adopted by the state Department of Education as a way to help struggling schools and enhance high-achieving schools. A+ Arkansas, on the other hand, advocates for creating taxpayer-supported schools that operate outside the public school system, like e-STEM in Little Rock, rather than working with established school districts that must serve all students. Its spokesman is Laurie Lee, formerly known as Laurie Taylor, who is a right-wing ideologue: She has been a lobbyist for Americans for Prosperity, created by billionaires Charles and David Koch, and in 2004 created “Parents Protecting the Minds of Children,” which sought to remove books from the Fayetteville public schools that Lee (then Taylor) said were pornographic and promoted homosexuality. A way to remember the teaching method that Thea supports is that its name puts Arkansas first.
programs embraced by school districts, and the resulting achievement would in turn boost the state’s attractiveness to new business. His zeal for better education for children fuels hours of talk. “The power of her life, the power of her soul is what drives me every day,” Leopoulos said of Thea. “It’s all about this amazing young girl.” He compared his daughter’s influence to that of the young girl in Pakistan who was shot for advocating girls’ education; that girl is “going to change the frickin’ world. … the women’s movement has taken a rocket ride to the moon.” The A+ method “meets kids where they are and takes them where they can go,” Leopoulos said. “I’m not a flaming liberal” who thinks “failure is impossible,” he said, but A+ gives students confidence, a huge part of learning. “My vision is everyone has incredible potential.” To hell, he says, with the bell curve, and writing off 25 percent of your students. The A+ method, which originated in
North Carolina, has been adopted by more than 70 schools in Oklahoma. The Windgate Foundation funded the group that brought A+ to Oklahoma — a consortium of Oklahoma college educators called the DaVinci Institute — and made grants of more than a half million dollars in 2002 and 2003 to the University of Arkansas’s Great Expectations project, which oversaw the A+ pilot in Arkansas. Teacher buy-in is critical to the success of any method; A+ is no different. A+ requires whole-school buy-in, summer and monthly training and more preparation. The principal plays a crucial role in the continuing commitment to the program. Thanks to personnel changes, a couple of the state’s pilot A+ schools backed off the program, and Windgate dropped its funding in 2006. Hugh Goodwin, Cook Elementary and Woods Elementary, however, embraced the model and kept teaching it. Then, a newly-inspired Leopoulos picked up the ball, turning to the Oklahoma A+ office