2018 Pulaski County Education Report Card

Our goal is to help parents, school personnel, community members, and policy makers understand how effectively the students in their community are being served. Pulaski students are demonstrating similar growth in achievement on the ACT Aspire as students in the state overall, but in achievement, graduation rates, and School Quality and Student Success, Pulaski County schools are performing below the state average

Arkansas Teacher Supply

This brief examines teacher supply in Arkansas. Using survey data collected in Spring 2017 and data publicly available from the Arkansas Department of Education, we examine how teacher supply varies by district, grade level, and subject across the state. In particular, we examine characteristics associated with the most favorable teaching supply

Curriculum Restructuring at Lynchburg College: Effects of Realignment to State-Mandated Competencies and Implications for K-6 Math and Science Teacher Preparation

Because Lynchburg College offers a four-year program to attain teacher licensure, current restructuring efforts have been aimed at targeting the professional studies requirements across a program of courses that are efficiently integrated. Math and science methods courses will be combined into a workshop course. A new general studies program has been approved which requires eight hours of lab sciences and three hours of math. A General Science course has been approved which will be geared towards pre-service teachers. The professional core requires an additional eight hours of lab sciences, totaling 16 hours in science, and six hours of math, geared towards the needs of pre-service teachers. While recommended teaching practices are stressed, these may be de-emphasized by the student teaching capstone experience. This is due to the current pressure in public schools to address content-loaded Standards of Learning. From this perspective, standards-based education may prove to be an impediment to reform efforts in science education that stress process skills and the messy, time-consuming nature of learning

Power-law behavior reveals phase transitions in landscape controls of fire regimes

In low-severity fire regimes of the American West and elsewhere, landscape memory of fire events is registered in fire-scarred trees, with temporal record lengths often exceeding 200 years^1-5^. Understanding the environmental controls on historical wildfires, and how they changed across spatial scales, is difficult because there are no surviving explicit records of either weather or vegetation (fuels). We show how power laws associated with fire-event time series arise in limited domains of parameters that represent critical transitions in the controls on landscape fire. We used stochastic simulations iteratively with Monte Carlo inference to replicate the spatio-temporal structure of historical fire-scar records in forested watersheds of varying topographic complexity. We find that the balance between endogenous and exogenous controls on fire spread shifts with topographic complexity, where in the most complex landscapes the endogenous controls dominate and the pattern exhibits criticality. Comparison to an self-organized criticality (SOC) model^6,7^ shows that the latter mimics historical fire only in a limited domain of criticality, and is not an adequate mechanism to explain landscape fire dynamics, which are shaped by both endogenous and exogenous controls. Our results identify a continuous phase transition in landscape controls, marked by power laws, and provide an ecological analogue to critical behavior in physical and chemical systems^8-11^. This explicitly cross-scale analysis provides a paradigm for identifying critical thresholds in landscape dynamics that may be crossed in a rapidly changing climate

A critique of the notion of 'purpose' from a black British woman's perspective

This study aims to explore “purpose” from a Black British Christian Woman’s perspective. The study comprises five chapters. The topic of purpose is first introduced in Chapter 1, including the rationale for this study. It contextualizes the discussion by identifying Black-led churches, in particular, the New Testament Church of God (NTCG), as a context, due to the predominance of Black Christian women. In Chapter 2 the critical literature review outlines the key writers about Christian purpose in this field. There is a dearth of writings about this notion concerning Black Christian women in the UK. It establishes that God is positioned as central, to the discovery of purpose. Moreover, although some of the literature incorporates the perspectives of Black women, the majority was found to be written from a male bias and Eurocentric lens. Chapter 3 employs both a Womanist and Psychoeducation paradigm as a culturally appropriate interpretative framework, relevant to Black Christian women. It sets out the methodology, highlighting the process of establishing the focus group interviews. Significantly, the chapter offers an insight into the key ideas deriving from the works of five Womanist thinkers: situating the interplay of race, class, and gender inequalities as central to these women’s contextual realities. Chapter 4 provides the findings and analysis of data, incorporating the voices of 14 Black British Christian women who participated in the Focus Group Interviews. The second part of the chapter is the Womanist practical application, entitled: ‘Purpose Re-Imagined – A Multi-dimensional Model’. This provides a graphical imagery, supported by a personal, spiritual, relational, and socio-political context. Finally, the conclusion summarises that Black British Christian women’s reliance on popular narratives, largely written from a male bias has limited the way they perceive and navigate the notion of purpose. Furthermore, attribute this to the dearth of scholarly writing which addresses the notion of purpose specifically and relevant to Black British Christian women’s context and as such a lack of their engagement. The study has also reinforced the uniqueness and value of Black British Christian women’s identities, their lives, and the phenomenal roles and contributions within the family, Pentecostal church, the Black community, and UK society, whilst navigating the interplay of race, class, and gender oppressions. Moreover, how a Black female lens, can be transformational for empowering these women for re-imagining purpose across their personal, spiritual, relational, and socio-political contexts

High-Growth Elementary Schools in Arkansas Based on Performance on the ACT Aspire Examinations

This section highlights elementary schools across the state whose students demonstrated high growth on the Arkansas ACT Aspire exams. The ACT Aspire was administered to students in grades 3 through 10 in April 2018 in Math and ELA courses which include English, Writing, and Reading

2017 Pulaski County Education Report Card

There are many things that contribute to a ‘good’ school, but we believe student academic growth is perhaps the most meaningful measure of school performance or school effectiveness. Many Pulaski County schools had high growth at one or two school levels, and there is evidence of variation in growth rates between schools within the same districts. We recommend district and school leaders examine where their students are not demonstrating high growth, examine high growth schools to see what those schools are doing differently, and consider how they can further support learning for their students

Presidential Candidates on K-12 Education

Every four years, our presidential candidates work hard to convince us that they have the best plan to keep us safe, prosperous, and well-educated. While economic challenges have recently taken center stage in the presidential election, education is still a critically important issue to OEP and its constituents. Here, we provide a summary of the views of each candidate on key issues and hope that this information is useful to our readers. In this brief, the OEP does not endorse one candidate over the other. Indeed, there is much to like in each candidate’s platform

School Discipline in Arkansas

This brief examines school discipline practices and outcomes in Arkansas. Using data publicly available from the Arkansas Department of Education, we examine state-wide discipline trends, summarize the analysis on school-level data demonstrating disparities in student discipline, and make recommendations for utilizing this information

Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS)

The DSN (Deep Space Network) mission support requirements for the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) are summarized. The TDRSS consists of four identical satellites in geosynchronous orbits (35,800 km) and a dedicated ground station. The payload of each satellite is a telecommunications service system that relays communication signals between low earth-orbiting user spacecraft and the TDRSS ground terminal. Mission objectives are outlined and the DSN support requirements are defined through the presentation of tables and narratives describing the spacecraft flight profile; DSN support coverage; frequency assignments; support parameters for telemetry, command and support systems; and tracking support responsibility