Arkansas’ next challenge

LITTLE ROCK — It was Nov. 21, 2002, and life was about to change for those of us who worked in the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

On that fall Thursday, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the state had to change its system of funding public education. Trying to adhere to the Lake View ruling would dominate Huckabee’s final four years in office.

In his 2010 book Defining Moments, Robert L. Brown, a former Arkansas Supreme Court associate justice, writes: “The tsunami created by the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Lake View decision threatened a sea change in public education as it had been known, structured and funded for decades. The court’s ruling struck down the formula used to fund public education on grounds that it fostered inequality in educational opportunity and offered students an inadequate product to boot. The court focused on abysmally low national rankings in per capita student expenditures; mediocre test scores; the substandard numbers of high school graduates, college graduates and those with graduate-school degrees; graduates with an inability to read and write; inadequate teacher pay; and abnormally high remediation requirements in college for English and math proficiency.”

We already had begun putting together the governor’s package for the 2003 legislative session; now those plans were worthless. Brown is correct when he writes that “no one in state government knew quite what to do. Education funding already comprised fully one-half of the state’s budget with a total appropriation approaching $2 billion. If additional funds were required, where would the money come from? And for what new programs? The session had not yet begun and already the General Assembly’s budget process had been derailed by the Arkansas Supreme Court and was in complete disarray.”

In his State of the State address on Jan. 14, 2003, Huckabee unveiled a plan that called for spending increases, accountability measures and a massive consolidation of school districts (an idea later watered down bythe Legislature).

The governor, legislators and staff members spent the entire 2003 regular legislative session dealing with the Lake View decision, and the Supreme Court said it wasn’t enough. A special session began in late 2003 and stretched into 2004. It was the longest special legislative session in the state’s history. Still, the Supreme Court said it wasn’t enough. Huckabee spent his last regular legislative session as governor in 2005 dealing with the issue, and Gov. Mike Beebe spent his first legislative session as the state’s chief executive in 2007 responding to the Lake View decision.

One of the greatest public-policy success stories in Arkansas history is the progress the state has made during the past decade improving its system of public education from kindergarten through high school. Much work remains to be done, but the ground that has been made up since November 2002 is remarkable. Looking to the next decade, the key to Arkansas being competitive in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st Century is our ability to transform the focus from K-12 to K-16. In other words, higher education. I took the job two years ago as president of the association of the state’s 11 private colleges and universities because I believe the biggest thing holding our state back is the pitifully low number of residents with college degrees.

Arkansas ranks next-to-last nationally-ahead of only West Virginia-in the percentage of residents 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Arkansans were upset last fall when the University of Arkansas Razorbacks lost a football game to the Ole Miss Rebels on the final play atLittle Rock’s War Memorial Stadium. If only we could summon as much righteous indignation a few blocks down the street at the state Capitol over the fact that we have a lower percentage of college graduates than even Mississippi.

Last week during a Senate Education Committee meeting, Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock asked the president of the University of Arkansas System, the president of the Arkansas State University System and a representative of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to testify in an attempt to put more of a legislative focus on higher education. I looked around the committee room and saw a lot of familiar faces. Some had been allies in our efforts to address the Lake View ruling a decade ago. Others had stubbornly fought for the status quo.

In the end-thanks to courageous legislative leaders such as former Sen. Jim Argue of Little Rock-it was determined that the status quo would no longer suffice when it came to K-12 education. In higher education, we’re doing a better job getting students into college. Now, we must find ways to keep them there and ensure that they receive degrees. Beebe set a goal of doubling the number of college graduates in the state by 2025. It’s a worthy goal. In order to achieve it during the next dozen years, legislators and governors will have to make higher education a priority and devote the proper resources to the battle.

When it comes to the future of Arkansas, there’s no issue that surpasses the need to increase the number of college graduates. Which legislators will lead the way? Who are, if you will, the Jim Argues of tomorrow? Those were the questions I asked myself as I looked around that Senate Education Committee room.

Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.