Education – Page 5 – Family Council

Proposed Constitutional Amendment Would Remove Legislative Oversight From Arkansas’ Public Education

Feb 23, 2022Jerry CoxEducationEducation

A proposed constitutional amendment would make it more difficult for the Arkansas Legislature and the governor to oversee public education or hold educators accountable.

Arkansans For World Class Education is working to place the “Public Schools Amendment of 2022” on the ballot this November.

Among other things, the proposed amendment would remove the provision in the Arkansas Constitution that gives the state’s General Assembly the ability to make laws concerning the State Board of Education.

Currently, the Arkansas Constitution says,

The supervision of public schools, and the execution of the laws regulating the same, shall be vested in and confided to, such officers as may be provided for by the General Assembly.

Under this provision, the General Assembly gets to establish offices that oversee public education — such as a Department of Education, Secretary of Education, and State Board of Education. The governor appoints people to fill those positions.

The Public Schools Amendment of 2022 would strike this provision from the constitution, and replace it with new language that puts an unelected board in charge of public education in Arkansas. The amendment says that anyone who has served on the State Board of Education in the past 10 years would be ineligible to serve on this new board, and that the governor and the Arkansas Legislature would not have the power to review or approve new rules or policies the board makes concerning public education in Arkansas.

If the legislature and the governor cannot govern the State Board of Education and the rules that it writes, then just how much oversight would public education have in Arkansas under this amendment? The answer, it seems, is very little.

Read The Proposed Amendment Here.

Arkansas Home Schooler Earns Perfect Score on ACT

Feb 22, 2022Jerry CoxEducation, Home SchoolEducation, Home School

The Education Alliance is proud to announce that eleventh grade home schooler Alison Giggleman of Roland recently scored a perfect 36 on the ACT.

The ACT is one of the most widely-recognized standardized tests for assessing college readiness. Scoring a perfect 36 on the ACT puts Alison in the top 99th percentile of students who took the test and unlocks incredible opportunities for her when it comes to enrolling in college and qualifying for academic scholarships.

Home schoolers in Arkansas have a solid reputation for academic achievement. They routinely outperform other students on standardized tests, and many have gone on to graduate from prestigious colleges and universities.

I hope you will join us in congratulating Alison and her parents, Charles and Mika, for her accomplishment.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

Canceling Grades

Dec 6, 2021John StonestreetCritical Theory, EducationCritical Theory, CRT, Education

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center*

Last week the LA Times reported that, facing soaring rates of D’s and F’s, more schools are simply doing away with grades entirely. Instead, teachers are encouraged to give students little to no homework, move deadlines, and have fewer outcome-driven measurements of achievement.

What’s the rationale behind the move?

“By continuing to use century-old grading practices,” wrote L.A. Unified’s chief academic administrator, “we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not.” In other words, standardized grades are racist.

But isn’t suggesting that poor or minority kids can’t get good grades itself a racist belief?

A major reason for merit-based grading is that if we don’t evaluate students based on their achievements, we’ll evaluate them on something else; in this case, an administrator’s preconceived ideas about their ability to succeed, based entirely on ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Even more, by doing away with grades, educators keep students from the potential to succeed, no matter how hard they work. It’s a different kind of tyranny, but no less destructive: the tyranny of low expectations.