BRIAN CHILSON
providing a quality education to many thousands of students even while many thousands of others — especially those in schools at or near the “academic distress” line established by the state Education Department — are being failed by the district. The nine-person state Board of Education voted 5-4 in January to dissolve the local school board and take over the LRSD because the district contained six academically distressed schools in 2014, out of 48 districtwide. The distress designation means fewer than 49.5 percent of students in those schools performed “proficient” or above on
the most underserved by the LRSD. The charter operator currently serves a much smaller percentage of poor and minority students than does the district, but it still contains a diverse mix: About 34 percent of eStem’s current enrollment comes from low-income homes and about 45 percent of its student body is African American, according to Education Department data for the 2013-14 school year (the latest year for which testing data is fully available). For the LRSD as a whole, 72 percent of students are low-income and 66 percent are black. Another 12 percent of LRSD students are Hispanic, compared to
the Arkansas Times. “We think that by recruiting families from that area, and [with] the ease of public transit from anywhere in the city to the [UALR] campus … we’ll be able to attract an even more diverse population than what we currently have.” Does the potential benefit that eStem might bring to those children outweigh the potential harm its expansion may inflict upon the LRSD and its students? This is the key question facing the state Board of Education, which may vote on approval of the charter’s growth plan as soon as December, less than a year after the LRSD takeover. If one focuses on eStem alone, the expansion looks impressive. Broaden the focus to include Little Rock as a whole, however, and things become more complicated.
‘Proximity matters’
BRIAN CHILSON
T
he college that we now know as the University of Arkansas at Little Rock came into being in 1927 as the brainchild of Central High Principal John A. Larson — although at the time the college was named Little Rock Junior College, and Central, which had been completed that same year, was simply called Little Rock High School. College classes met in unused space at the massive new high school building with the blessing of the board of the Little Rock School District. (The school board, college and high school all were, of course, exclusively white institutions.) It wasn’t until 1949, as postwar enrollment exploded, that the fledgling college moved across town into a pair of newly constructed buildings on Hayes Street — later renamed University Avenue — one of which was named after its founder. Larson Hall, laden with asbestos, today sits vacant while a bustling, diverse campus has sprung up around it. Now, some 65 years after the LRSD birthed the university, some fear UALR may soon play a major role in the district’s unraveling, even if motivated by the best of intentions. In August, UALR and leaders of eStem Public Charter Schools announced a plan to relocate eStem’s high school from downtown Little Rock to the UALR campus. Grades 11 and 12 would be housed in a renovated Larson Hall, and a new facility for ninthand 10th-graders would be built on the corner of 28th Street and Fair Park, at UALR’s northeastern corner. eStem hopes to have both schools up and running by the 2017-18 school year. The move would eventually allow the charter operator to triple its high school enrollment, from 500 students this school year to an eventual 1,500 in 10 years. And that’s only for grades 9-12. After the high school moves out of its current downtown location at the Federal Reserve Bank Building, that space could be used for additional elementary and middle school classrooms; and, in September, eStem announced plans to further enlarge its K-8 footprint with the purchase of a new building near the Clinton Presidential Center. Its goal is to reach a total of 5,000 K-12 students by 2025, some 20 percent of the 2015 student population of the LRSD. If achieved, that would place eStem among the 20 largest school districts in Arkansas. Meanwhile, the LRSD soldiers on,
TREND-SETTER: Retiring UALR Chancellor Joel Anderson knows of no college-charter school partnership like the one proposed in Little Rock. In background, Larson Hall.
standardized testing in math and literacy over the past three-year period. The new LRSD superintendent, Baker Kurrus, was appointed by Education Commissioner Johnny Key in May to turn things around, a daunting task made even harder by an array of fiscal and political challenges. Against that woeful backdrop, increasingly aggressive competition from charters like eStem could pose an existential threat to the Little Rock School District. If the district suffers, the children it serves suffer. At the same time, eStem’s expansion into UALR has the potential to benefit some of the very children among
only 6 percent of eStem students. Over half the students at eStem come from families in which their parents did not attend college, eStem CEO John Bacon said. Bacon said that the move to UALR is driven in part by a desire to reach more kids in Southwest Little Rock, which is home to most of the city’s Latino population, as well as the predominately African-American neighborhoods near the university. “I believe that it’s important that we take schools to where families are, rather than building a school over here [in downtown] and helping them figure out how to get to it,” Bacon told
UALR Chancellor Joel Anderson began his career at the university in Larson Hall in 1971, teaching political science. When he retires this June after 13 years as chancellor, he’ll leave his successor an unprecedented partnership. “To our knowledge, there’s no other place in the country where this is happening,” he told the Times. Collegecharter partnerships, yes; installing a high school on a college campus, no. “My own reaction to charter schools through the years has been one of reservation and tentativeness. … My general impression is that there are a handful of them that are very good, and then there are a good number that are working hard but aren’t necessarily strong schools. By and large, that’s still my perception.” However, when eStem’s leaders approached UALR at the beginning of the year, several things caught Anderson’s attention. First, there was John Bacon’s stated intent to serve kids from Central and Southwest Little Rock. Second, Anderson said, the school’s emphasis on the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math — was attractive, because state and national leaders alike have long exhorted higher education to produce more graduates in those fields. (The extra “e” in “eStem” stands for “economics.”) Third, the chancellor sees unprecedented opportunities to create a “seamless transition from high school to college” in terms of the curricula of both institutions. “Proximity matters,” Anderson said. “The two faculties can actually get to www.arktimes.com
OCTOBER 22, 2015
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