For a half-dozen years throughout Arkansas, colleges and universities have been mentoring educators at local public schools under the state-funded Education Renewal Zone program.
Those involved say the program’s impact has been heightened more recently by the state’s transition to socalled Common Core teaching standards.
An Education RenewalZone offers a tailored approach that can range from “Adopt a School” programs in which college professors teach a monthly class in the public schools to academia’s grant-writers helping their counterparts land a grant to buy school supplies.
But as Arkansas began the move to a new way of teaching through its Common Core State Standards, higher education found its services were especially needed.
“Since Common Core hascome about, that’s been our main focus,” said Marshal Hurst, assistant director for the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith’s Education Renewal Zone program.
The 2011-12 school year was the transition year for Common Core in kindergarten and lower elementary grades, he said. Then came upper-level elementary through 8th grade this academic year, and 9-12 in 2013-14.
UA-Fort Smith has 35 school partners from 11school districts in six counties in the greater Fort Smith region: Scott, Logan, Sebastian, Johnson, Franklin and Crawford counties, he said. It has been part of the program, funded by the Arkansas Department of Education, since July 1, 2005.
The Fort Smith campus is currently listed as the Department of Education’s “ERZ of the Month,” according to the department’s website.
June Haynie, the depart-ment’s director of the zone and scholastic audit, said the program has been around for six years after the Arkansas Legislature created it.
Two years ago, the grant program became a competitive one after state budget cuts resulted in less money to give out, she said.
For the current grant year that began July 1, the other five schools with Education Renewal Zones are: Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
Each of the six universities received a grant of $134,000 for the current year, Haynie said, and UA-Fort Smith and Henderson State have some carryover money from the previous year’s grant they can use as well.
While the program’s focus is on helping public schools that are academically “lowperforming,” Haynie said, it can and does help other schools because they often have needs, too.
The impetus for establishing the program was the tendency for the two halves of the education spectrum to do things their own way, even when this divide didn’t further the state’s educational goals.
“In the past, we were more like: ‘This is college, and this is high school.’ Or, ‘This is college, and this is the public schools,’” Haynie said.
“We have these students in the colleges who are studying to be teachers,” Haynie continued. So it made sense for these college students and their professors to have some face time with the current preferences for teaching strategies, use of technologies and best practices: “It’s no secret that districts need students to come into the schools as beginning teachers with boots on the ground.”
Hurst added that the soonto-be teachers are learning about the Common Core’s teaching vision at roughly the same time teachers already in the work force are learning it.
“We really wanted them to know that what they’re learning is cutting-edge,” he said.
Elizabeth Smith is director of the Education Renewal Zone at UA-Fayetteville.
Smith has no teaching duties. Her full-time job as director is helping the Fayetteville campus rebuild its Education Renewal Zone after a hiatus from the program that left it rejoining on July 1. Since then, she’s enlisted as partners 13 schools in the Fayetteville, Elkins, Gentry and Lincoln districts and is working to get nine schools in the Springdale School District on board.
The six universities’ programs follow the service areas of the state-funded education service cooperatives in their regions, Haynie said.
“So we’re limited to the area, but we can only serve about 25 schools at a time,” said Smith, who spends roughly half her time traveling to the schools on a $134,000 annual budget that provides $115,000 in total salary for her compensation and that of an assistant.
“I was afraid the challenge would be getting the schools involved, but it’s not that at all,” Smith said. “The challenge has been meeting all the schools’ needs and knowing where to start - prioritizing those needs.”
Smith echoed Haynie and Hurst’s observations about the differences in the needs of each school it helps on the spectrum of kindergarten (or preschool) through 12th grade.
“What we’re doing is pretty customizable for each school,” Smith said, adding that writing curricula is one of the Education Renewal Zone goals.
Smith had one school with a fairly simple need: moneyfor oversized books used in its guided-reading program. So she helped it find the right grant for this and helped to write its application.
At ASU and Henderson State, Haynie said, the Education Renewal Zone programs have developed college-prep initiatives in which they have identified some students at the ninth-grade level who are deemed not proficient academically.
“ASU takes care of the eastern part of the state,” she said, which means that the Delta, long an area of economic disadvantage, is in its service area.
At least once a month, the Jonesboro and Arkadelphia campuses bring in college professors and high school teachers to meet with the students in a classroom environment to work on their problem areas.
“They don’t receive grades,” Haynie said, but the exposure helps the students better prepare for collegelevel work and the universities get a look at the educational needs of students whomay be coming their way in a few years.
At some schools, Smith said, her program in Northwest Arkansas is helping teachers get continuing education as they try to navigate the evolution of teaching methods and strategies.
“The elementary-school and middle-school math is much more challenging now,” she said, citing middle- and junior-high school teachers as examples. As components of Algebra II are pushed down to the Algebra I curriculum, some Algebra I concepts are being pushed down to math classes in lower grade levels, she said.
As of mid-August, Arkansas was among 44 states and the District of Columbia that have voluntarily adopted new Common Core standards, according to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette archives. The standards are guidelines for what students should be able to know and do to be prepared for college-level work or careers in the American work force.
The standards will be less about a student being able to memorize by rote and simply answer questions on a test. It will be more about problemsolving, and tests involving projects the students perform to demonstrate they understand the subject matter thoroughly.
Examples educators have cited have included requiring the student to write an opinion piece on a topic, compose a timeline or design a biography cube.
Hurst said the tests are still being developed, but he doesn’t think the new gauges will tip the scale too much toward subjective grading versus objective scoring, adding that testing has always included some subjective measures such as essay writing.
“I wouldn’t say that they’re doing away with tests - but they’re changing,” he said. Simply expecting correct answers from students will no longer be enough: “I want to know why you answered it that way. The why’s and the how’s are important.”
Hurst and Haynie agreed that literacy has a much broader definition under the Common Core.
“Literacy involves all subject matter,” Hurst said, not just English class.
As Haynie put it: “If you can’t read, you can’t do math because if you can’t understand the problem you’re being asked to solve, you can’t answer it.”
Hurst said the state’s Education Renewal Zone program has six goals: professional development, curriculum development, mentoring, greater parental involvement, recruiting and retaining highquality teachers, and collaboration between the public schools and postsecondary schools.
“We were around before the Common Core,” he said. “It’s just that Common Core is a really important thing right now around the nation.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/26/2012