Better Schools, Better Work Force

Arkansas Charter Schools Mean Business for Rural Communities

By Laura H. Corbin

Parents in one rural Arkansas community decided two years ago that they weren’t willing to continue to be 20 years behind their urban counterparts in educating their children. Not only were their children worth it, but the eventual tax savings and the potential impact on local economic development would see huge benefits as well.

So, the Imboden Area Charter School was founded.

“Rural schools have been about 20 years behind urban schools for generations,” says Scott Rorex, one of the founding parents. “As long as urban schools were going down hill, that was an advantage. Now, urban schools utilizing the Baldrige Quality Criteria have demonstrated significant improvements. Why wait another 20 years before rural schools use them? A small rural system could earn a National Quality Award while an urban district was still trying to get a committee organized.”

The Imboden School is one of eight charter schools started in Arkansas since enabling legislation was passed in 1995, authorizing non-profit organizations, governments and colleges to create such schools. Some 1,500 students in the state now go to charter schools. Meanwhile, nationwide, more than 250,000 students attend charter schools – less than 1 percent of all students.

According to the Center for Education Reform in Washington, DC, a decade after the first charter school opened its doors, nearly 1,700 such schools “not only provide a very popular alternative to traditional public schools, but are having a dramatic impact on other competing schools in communities where they have been established.”

Although public schools outnumber charter schools by more than 40 to 1 nationwide, the “ripple effect being created by charter schools is remarkable,” according to the center’s report, “Charter Schools Today: Changing the Face of American Education.”

“Wherever a large number of charters are clustered, traditional schools have begun to behave differently in order to keep up, and in many states their presence is accelerating system-wide school improvement,” the report says. It notes that six of seven national and state studies examining the impact of charter schools find a positive ripple effect. A Western Michigan University study says that even in areas where no charter school exists, the impact of the initiative “can be seen in a renewed debate over the quality and performance of public schools.”

The CEC’s report continues, “Charter schools are not a silver bullet – to claim this is to set them up for failure. But they are a necessary impetus for accountable, results-driven reform.”

Charter schools offer many advantages, and rural communities throughout the country are clamoring to get an advantage for their students in the competitive workplace-world they will enter.

The purpose of charter schools in Arkansas can be summarized by the intent of the legislation, Rorex says – to provide opportunities for teachers, parents, pupils, and community members to establish charter schools to improve student learning, increase learning opportunities for all students, to encourage the use of different and innovative teaching methods, to create new professional opportunities for teachers, to provide parents and students with expanded educational choices within the public school system, and to hold schools accountable for meeting measurable student achievement standards.

Rorex and other parents, along with teachers and students were “quite frustrated with the existing education system. Friends who I had grown up with had children several years older than my children, and I had listened to them complain about schools for years. When I began to experience such problems first hand with my children, it was quite frustrating.”

“The charter school legislation created the opportunity to offer innovative approaches as an optional program,” he adds. A group submitted some of their ideas to the Arkansas Department of Education, and they received a planning grant.

“We began searching for the best educational consultants available as well as examples of the most successful educational programs,” Rorex says. “We selected the American Productivity & Quality Center to provide consulting services and discovered that the most impressive educational programs that we could locate were utilizing performance management systems based on the Baldrige Quality Criteria.”

Baldrige quality ideals are not new to business, and Rorex says the impact of using similar criteria in the charter school will benefit business as well.

“Performance levels are significantly higher for schools utilizing management systems based on the Baldrige Quality Criteria, such as graduation rates exceeding 99 percent and proficiency levels exceeding 90 percent across the board,” he says. “When students from these schools enter the work force, they will be much more productive than students coming from other schools, where typical graduation rates are from 85 percent to 95 percent and proficiency levels range from 5 percent to 65 percent.”

In addition, Rorex says, the improvements can be accomplished without raising the average cost per student. “Another part of the Imboden project is to wean schools off taxpayer funding over a period of years. I trust people will agree, a business incubator in a rural community could be expected to have a long-term impact on economic development within the community.”

Rorex likens the present funding of public education to welfare programs that trap families for generations. “Schools are paid for each child in the house and are paid a bonus if they can document the child has problems. How can we expect schools to improve if we will pay 40 percent more to schools who educate children in 14 years than we will pay a school to provide the same education in 10 years?”

He believes charter schools are one part of the equation for improving education—and thus enhancing the work force available to companies in Arkansas’ rural communities. “It is obvious that education reform is a big deal in Arkansas at the present time. Would you rather have your local school redesigned by bureaucrats and the legal system or by interested students, parents and teachers? With a charter school, you can have the second option.” Students are more engaged, he says, and teachers have said it’s like “a dream come true.”

In the long run, everybody benefits, Rorex says. “Improving education will improve productivity in the workplace, which will raise the average income of families. Weaning schools off taxpayer funding will allow those funds to be shifted to other needs.”