Huckabee shameful record, Illegal immigration facts, State government offenses

What Huckabee’s illegals are doing to schools

95 Comments

Poverty, influx of
Hispanics called
hurdles for schools



June 28, 2006

BY HEATHER WECSLER

ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The growing percentage of low-income students and other
population shifts in Arkansas’ public
schools present a challenge to education leaders in meeting the state’s
educational goals, ac­cording to a Southern Regional Education Board report

The board,
which concluded its annual two-day meeting Tuesday, released a report on Arkansas’ prog­-
ress in meeting such educational goals as availability of early child­ hood programs and compliance
with the federal No Child Left Be­hind Act of 200L Most of the data, such as the state’s results on the
Na­-
tional Assessment of Educational Progress, have been issued before. But the report also tracks demo­
graphic changes in the state.

According to the report, the
percentage of the state’s students
who are low-income— defined as
students
who qualify for the Na-
tional School Lunch Program—has
climbed from 39 percent of Arkan­-
sas students in 1990 to 56 percent
in
2004. In that year, 251,000 students
were approved for the school lunch
program  in Arkansas

Ken James, the state
education commissioner and a member of the
board who attended the meet­ing,
said the state is already trying to
address the number of students living in poverty by supporting
pre-kindergarten programs and funneling
state funds toward dis­tricts with high percentages of low-income
students.

“We’re doing our best to level
the playing field for those stu­-
dents who are coming to us with
poverty and other contributing
factors,” James said. “That’s go­
ing to pay dividends, and I think
already is when you look at our
fourth-grade Benchmark scores
for the last few years.”       

  Based
on the current popula- ‘tion of first-graders, the report also predicts that over the next 12 years
the proportion of Hispanic graduating high school seniors in the state will grow from 5 percent



To 27
percent The report projects that
the percentage of white and black seniors will
drop. The over­all student
population is expected to slightly decrease from about 452,000 students in 2006 to about 447,000
in 2012.

Such trends will make improv­ing student test scores and gradu­ation rates tougher for Arkansas, the
board said. The board —
a nonprofit nonpartisan organiza­tion based in Atlanta — advises state
educators and policy-mak­ers on how to
improve education. Its 16 member states extend from Texas in the
southwest to Dela­ware in the northeast.

Benny Gooden, the superin­tendent of
the 13,400-student Fort Smith School
District, said in 20 years he has seen the Hispanic population of his
school system grow from less than one-half
of 1 percent to about 21 percent.

He said those students fre­quently
arrive on campus without good language skills.

“They also typically don’t have good preschool experienc­es to
prepare them for school,” Gooden said.

The report says
Hispanic eighth-graders in Arkansas
who scored at or above basic level in
math on the National Assessment of
Education­al Progress trailed white
students by 19 percentage points in
2005. Black eighth-graders trailed
their white counterparts by 45
percent­age points in 2005. But the report also says in Arkansas, the
high school graduation rates for black students
and Hispanic males ex­ceed the national
average. And the state’s overall
graduation rate of 77 percent exceeds
the national aver­age in 2003 of 74 percent

Sea Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, who
also attended the Southern Regional
Education Board meet­ing, said he
believes Arkansas has taken
important steps in address­ing its
demographic challenges.

“Our future is something we can change,” he said. “But it
re­quires choices for school improve­ment to be made today.”

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