Kyle Kellams: The final days of any year can be a time for reflection. We decided to look back with Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the Office for Education Policy (OEP) at the University of Arkansas. We asked her not just about the past 12 months, but the past several years. This all came during a discussion that touched on teacher recruitment and retention in Arkansas, battling absenteeism, the lingering effects of COVID-19 on students and teachers, and school accountability.
Sarah McKenzie: You know, OEP started 23 years ago with a focus on using data and helping practitioners and policy makers make better decisions about education. And we’ve come a long way in that time as a state. But the changes over the past five years have been massive.
Kellams: I want to get an update from you on certain subjects that are kind of part of the education zeitgeist, but going back to 23 years ago, just the ability to use data for y’all has changed dramatically, right? 23 years ago, you didn’t have nearly the — the technology.
McKenzie: The technology or sort of the systems tracking things. And that’s one of the things that’s been really important lately as we’ve lost a lot of federal data collection, is if we want to know how we’re doing as a state and if we’re getting a return on our investment from public education, how our kids are doing after high school graduation, we need to be in charge of our own data and keep it within the state, because we can’t rely on anybody else to do it for us.
Kellams: Have schools, you know, been able to keep better data that can inform you?
McKenzie: Absolutely. I mean, the more you use the data, the better the data quality gets. So, for example, we’ve been doing teacher pipeline work for several years, Josh McGee and Gema Zamarro in particular, and those data used to be not very good or very reliable. It was just sort of whatever. But now that it’s being tracked more closely and we’re looking at turnover and we’re using it for merit pay, it’s gotten a lot cleaner because we’re using it.
Kellams: So there’s a lot more or a lot less supposition, I imagine, connected now. I think this might be the case.
McKenzie: Right. We have very good data, and Arkansas is really a leader in that. And we’re really a leader in the teacher workforce now too. We’re getting national attention for that one area. Where we are not a leader is early childhood. So OEP traditionally has been K-12 or K-20, and within the past three years we’ve really started looking at what are kids doing before they get to kindergarten. And it’s very similar to 23 years ago with K12. Like there’s just not very much data.
Kellams: Okay, as a layperson, I would think that’s going to be harder data to get because you’re talking about family, child care, child care centers, Head Start, which was in DHS versus ABC, which are state funded preschools. Yeah, it’s a — it’s a mess.
Kellams: All right. You mentioned teacher pipeline. For those who don’t recall just what the teacher pipeline is…
McKenzie: So the teacher pipeline is sort of the whole progression of teachers from entering into an educator prep program to getting a job at school, to staying in a job at school and being effective in those jobs.
Kellams: How are we doing as Arkansas?
McKenzie: Uh, we need more teachers in the teacher pipeline program. We don’t have enough to sort of balance out those that we expect are going to retire. But when we have a lot of leakage in the system. So 40 percent of the teachers that go into an educator prep program aren’t teaching in a public school in the next six years.
Kellams: Six years?
McKenzie: Right. 40% we lose.
Kellams: Whoa!
McKenzie: Of each group that comes in. In terms of retaining the teachers overall, we’ve had a little bit of a decrease in that since COVID-19. About 9% of teachers leave each year. But, it’s really trying to align the workforce better to the needs that we’re looking for.
Because if you’re an elementary school physics teacher in northwest Arkansas, there aren’t any jobs available for you, because those jobs, there’s one or two at each school, and those people generally don’t turn over very often. So if you’re a special ed teacher or a physics teacher and you want to teach somewhere else in the state, then there’s more opportunities for you. But it’s hard to get people to move their space.
Kellams: That’s what I was going to ask. Those of us who grew up in rural Arkansas, and it was a much different time, of course, but we always had a couple of gaps, and it was harder to get people from certain places to come to smaller school districts. Is that still a challenge?
McKenzie: It is still a challenge. It’s actually better. I think one of the big changes that you were referring to was the Learns Act. And under the Learns Act, minimum teacher salary went from $36,000 a year, which many small rural districts were paying to $50,000 a year, which is a huge amount of investment in teachers.
So now teachers aren’t necessarily leaving the small rural districts to go to a larger district to get more pay. And will stay in the districts where they are hopefully and not choose to leave. When we’ve looked at what happens when teachers leave, we find that they make less money once they leave public schools than they would have if they’d stayed. So, you know that idea that, oh, I could do something more. The job market is pretty hard.
So we need to do that. The state’s also doing teacher apprenticeship work where teachers can get paid for that student teaching year and partner with the mentor. So hopefully we’ll be getting more people in with better mentoring and supports. And then the Merit and incentive program is new. It’s in its third year this year, I think. And that also came under the Learns Act. And highly effective teachers or teachers in geographic and subject shortage areas can get bonuses of up to $10,000.
Kellams: You and I have talked before about absenteeism in schools and tracking that — has that tracking gotten better and has absenteeism become less of a challenge for schools?
McKenzie: That’s such a great question. And again, it’s one of those areas where we haven’t been doing intensive research on it for a long time. But in the couple years we have been. What we found was chronic absenteeism, which means missing more than 10 percent of the school days normally our school years are 180 days, so that’s about 20 days of school. It’s higher than it was before COVID-19. It’s up to 20% of our students statewide are missing 10% or more of the school days.”
It’s the highest in kindergarten, where 23% of the kids are missing, or 25%, I’m sorry. And 11th grade, where 25% of the kids are missing 10% or more of the school year.”
Kellams: 11th grade.
McKenzie: 11th grade.
Kellams: Any ideas why?
McKenzie: So people have a lot of ideas. Why? And the state has committed to reducing chronic absenteeism by 50% in the next five years. So based on where we are now, that’s getting it down to 10%, which would be a huge difference. But we don’t really know.
And my theory is it varies from community to community and from school to school, just like everything does. So what we have done is come up with a survey that students can take, really looking at seventh grade and above, because we see this increase after seventh grade and asking kids about different things, like what barriers they might have about getting to school or other commitments of their time, what aversions they might have. Is school boring? Are they getting bullied? You know, those kinds of things.
Are they disengaged? Like, do they just not engage with the community at school at all, or are there other things on their mind? And then what their misconceptions are, which may be why we’ve seen this big increase. And this isn’t just Arkansas, it’s nationally. It’s just that kids just don’t feel like it’s important to go to school anymore.
You know, we were closed for a very short amount of time in Arkansas. But, you know, it’s like once you start working from home, then you’re like, well, I don’t really need to go to the office, right? Because it seems like you can do just as well. But we know that our kids didn’t do just as well when they were staying home.
Kellams: Will we ever have a firm grasp on just what that COVID-19 year plus meant for students, school districts? Teachers?
McKenzie: I don’t think so. I think it’s so interesting, the declines that we saw, given we were shut for such a short period of time relative to other states. And we’ve seen it really across the country. So I think it’s time to focus on continuing to grow students from wherever they are, which, you know, is one of my favorite topics.
And luckily, our school accountability model has changed this year for the A through F grades, and it actually is more fair. And you and I have talked before about how schools that served wealthier populations were more likely to get an A because achievement ended up mattering more than growth.
But now growth matters more than achievement. So you could be a high poverty school with relatively low achievement, but really great growth and get an A or a B, whereas you could never do that before. So it’s more fair. It’s very focused on growth and I think that’s a good policy move forward.
Kellams: I’m speaking with Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas. Is there sort of a do you ever — do you and your colleagues ever feel like Sisyphus? Because, always studying education, It’s never, you know, even in a state with a relatively small population as Arkansas. I wish people could see the look on your face right now. You know, you’ve got so many different school districts. It’s always changing. There’s always policy that’s changing for superintendents and teachers. How do you manage to try to stay on top of the information that can help right now and in the next few years?
McKenzie: Mhmm. That’s a great question. You know I started as a classroom teacher and then I worked teaching preschool for a while. And then I worked with a district to help them understand their data. And I kept trying to pull different levers to see where I could make the biggest impact for kids.
And some days I feel like it was as a preschool teacher, you know, potty training kids and reading stories to them. Other times I feel like it was at the district level. The work that keeps me going is when I can go to a district, help them understand their data, understand their problem. But then I can also go to the State Department or legislators and explain the same information to them so that maybe they can make better decisions.
We’ve come a long way. I mean, it used to be just how many kids could pass the test, and now we’re talking consistently about growth and moving students forward and metrics that really matter for kids, like acceleration. Right? This is another new thing under the Learns Act. And the Access Act is that we shouldn’t have kids who are super precocious, just continuing to work in their grade level just because they’re in sixth grade. And our state doesn’t do a good job of pushing those kids through.
So one of the reasons why so many seniors and 11th graders may be absent is because they ran out of classes to take at their school. And there’s nothing for them to do but go to Sonic and get drinks for their teachers during prep time, you know?
So making school more meaningful for kids, is another thing that I think will help get engagement and just bring these issues up to the surface.
Kellams: What can those of us — all right, if you’re a parent of a school-age student, hopefully you’re engaged to some level with your teachers, with your school districts, maybe empty nesters, maybe people who don’t have children. It’s in all of our vital interests that our schools do well. What can we do to be more engaged to make that happen?
McKenzie: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. Since we are in an era of universal school choice right now, what that means is that just because someone’s growing up in, say, Prairie Grove, doesn’t mean they have to go to school in Prairie Grove, which is how it’s been forever. Now there’s full choice. Your kid can go to school wherever you want them to. You can homeschool them. You can send them to a private school. And that’s giving parents and communities much more power than they had before and what decisions they want to make for their kids.
And I think it’s important that the school report cards came out earlier. And while the letter grades are not a — you know, you shouldn’t just say, oh, I’m not going to go to a B school. I would really recommend that people look at the growth that is happening at those schools. That’s the indicator that I look at to see how effective a school is doing. And schools need to be held accountable by their communities if they’re not doing a good job, because kids shouldn’t be going to schools where they are not learning.
Kellams: Is it a challenge for — you know, we’ve seen the numbers about public school enrollment across the state. Is it a challenge for schools that are seeing a drop in enrollment numbers?
McKenzie: I’m sure it is a challenge. I will say with school finance, those kids are funded based on the prior year enrollment. So they’re essentially still being funded for those kids for another year, even after those kids have left.
So public school districts are going to have to get more savvy about their budgeting and what they’re spending money on, looking at return, on investments of those things. I mean, if art is the reason why kids are coming to your school, you better be sure you’re supporting that art teacher and supporting those supplies. If kids are really into robotics, you know it’s not cutting the fluff. It’s like understanding what your community wants and how you can best serve those kids.
Kellams: How easy or difficult is it for you as a school district to figure out why the students are staying with you?
McKenzie: Yeah. How easy or difficult is it for Whole Foods or Walmart to figure out why we’re shopping there? They do research on that.
Kellams: Yeah.
McKenzie: And schools traditionally haven’t had to do that because they had a monopoly on that community. People were going there because they lived there and they got a bus ride. So we’ll see how it’s going to change. And I don’t know yet what’s going to happen.
Another thing I would say is support for early childhood education and really working on access to that and affordability for that. So right now, 60% of children who are eligible for subsidized care before they go to kindergarten are not enrolled, and that means they come to kindergarten, maybe, depending on what they’ve been doing in the meantime, without the skills they need to really be ready to learn.
But in Arkansas, child-care costs between 11 and 26% of the median household income, which the national sort of target rate is 7%. So we’re paying a lot. And obviously northwest Arkansas, it’s even more. And for high-quality places, it’s even more, and this has to be figured out to really get our system to work more effectively.
The good news is early childhood is now within the Department of Education, so we’re going to be able to align it more to kindergarten readiness standards, sort of the data pieces. And we’re working really hard on bringing early childhood teachers into the work. So you were talking about our conference last week. About half of the 200 attendees that came were early childhood people, because they haven’t been able to participate in work like this before. And there’s a lot to learn.
Kellams: Finally, is it too elementary to say if we can strengthen, if we can improve early childhood care, that it can help with some of these other challenges we’ve talked about?
McKenzie: I firmly believe so. If it’s high quality and accessible early childhood care and education, right? We can’t just love them to ‘stupid.’ We have to make sure that that time — it’s so important — is being really well spent. And that doesn’t mean that your home care provider isn’t doing that, or that your center care provider isn’t. But as communities, we need to.
That’s the thing. We don’t really know. Right. We need child-care. So we just drop our kids off there and head off to work.
So having some performance indicators for early childhood settings — in the past they’ve been really about how many books do you have? How tall is your sink? What are your student-teacher ratios? Not so much about the interactions that are going on between teachers and students in those settings. But we’re heading in a direction now where pre-K settings are going to be using an assessment where it measures the number of interactions between adults and children, which is a whole new way to sort of look at what’s going on. So that’s exciting news.
Kellams: All right. We’re going to end with an unfair question.
McKenzie: Great.
Kellams: Yes. Okay. If you and I have been talking here in 2019 and I said, what do you think is going to be a big issue coming up in the next few years? No way. You would have said, oh, well, when schools close because of a pandemic.
McKenzie: Right. Yes.
Kellams: But do you and your colleagues think about — maybe five years down the road. What might we be concerned with? That is a growing concern.
McKenzie: Yeah, sure. So chronic absenteeism is one of those things. Teacher pipeline is one of those things. Because if we can’t get ahead of these early childhood — you know — we are thinking farther down the road.
I’m also very concerned about aligning what we’re doing in K-12 with both college readiness and jobs that people can do, because not everybody needs to go to college. And we really, as a system, need to make the pathways for kids who aren’t going to go to college more robust so that when they get out of school, whether they’re going to Greenland or Gravette or Bentonville or Springdale, there’s a career path for them and they’re set up for that.
Kellams: Sarah McKenzie is executive director of the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas. Thanks for coming in.
McKenzie: Thank you so much, Kyle.
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