The delayed release of an updated financial aid form has prevented students from knowing if they qualify for new free tuition programs at Arkansas universities.

This fall the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and the University of Central Arkansas in Conway each announced last-dollar scholarships, which cover what’s left in tuition and fees after federal and state aid is applied to students’ accounts.

All three institutions require students to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which is being redesigned and should be available by Dec. 31, according to the .

The form is typically available in October, and the postponement is making Jonathan Coleman “anxious” as UALR’s director of financial aid and scholarships.

“At this point we can’t even tell students who’s eligible for it because we don’t know. The feds don’t even know,” Coleman said. “So hopefully we’ll be able to start communicating with students by mid-February, but that’s just kind of a fingers crossed, let’s hope.”

In the fall of 2024, UALR will offer the program to all freshmen who are Pell Grant-eligible and receive the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship.

Students are not required to live or work on campus or complete an additional form, Coleman said. They simply must apply for admission and the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship and complete the FAFSA form.

The scholarship will be renewable for three years, and officials anticipate awarding it to about 200 freshmen during the inaugural year. The initiative is being supported through a combination of private and institutional funds, Coleman said. This includes a $25 million gift UALR received from an anonymous donor in 2020, $15 million of which was earmarked to establish need-based scholarships.

Coleman said UALR has focused on affordability because the institution has several first-generation and low-income students. Additionally, higher education has increased nationwide and more students are selecting colleges based on affordability rather than an academic program, Coleman said.

According to a 2023 Hanover Research , 46% of surveyed students said they were very or extremely likely to enroll in an institution, but 34% of respondents with higher education doubts cited financial barriers as their primary concern.

“It’s important to give students the opportunity,” Coleman said. “Whether they come or not, it’s up to them, but it’s important that we message that they can if they want to, even if it’s for a semester…some college is better than no college, especially if we’re going to help you pay for it without student loans.”

As a first-generation student, UALR senior Joe Santana said he didn’t know how to apply for scholarships when he started college at a different institution. Because he didn’t receive financial aid, Santana took out student loans.

“My parents, they’re not wealthy,” he said. “They’re immigrants from Mexico and they’ve built everything they have from scratch, so as their first child, they wanted to give opportunities to me and I’m very grateful for them.”

The Dumas native switched to UA-Little Rock his junior year and was pleasantly surprised to receive a scholarship just for transferring. His younger brother enrolled as a freshman at the same time and received the , which offers half-off tuition for eligible students.

That scholarship can be combined with the Trojan Guarantee, Coleman said.

Having learned to navigate college and financial aid on his own, Santana said he feels it’s his duty to assist younger family members, like his cousin who’s graduating high school next year and considering attending UALR.

Santana said it’s important for colleges to advertise financial aid opportunities, especially to first-generation students, and he’s grateful assistance is available.

“I didn’t know how to apply for scholarships and I feel like that is one reason I really couldn’t have any,” Santana said. “UALR having the new scholarships, I hear almost every year it’s something new, it makes me happy because students who have a passion for school like me and didn’t have a lot of money can get a chance at school.”

Arkansas State University

Arkansas State University has launched a statewide advertising campaign promoting its new last-dollar scholarship, A-State Promise Plus.

In addition to announcing the initiative during a , the university has pushed out advertising on social media and billboards around Arkansas, including in places where people aren’t used to seeing an ASU presence, Interim Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Todd Clark said.

“We’ve got a new attitude as an institution,” Clark said. “We’re going to plant our flag in the state as well, and there are a lot of reasons why now is a good time for A-State. Now’s the time. We’ve got a lot of momentum.”

is for students whose households make less than $70,000. The “plus” part of the scholarship, Clark said, is additional funding for on-campus housing.

First-year students receive a $2,500 housing scholarship that increases to $4,500 a year for students who continue to live on campus for their sophomore through senior years.

As everyone awaits the release of the revised FAFSA form, Clark said Arkansas State is encouraging students to apply for admission and submit a .

“If students are willing to submit the CSS Profile, then we are able to determine their eligibility and can start the groundwork for putting together an award package for them, basically an estimate of what we think the Promise Plus will be for them,” Clark said. “Once we get a completed FAFSA, once it gets released, then we’ll be able to lock in their specific award package.”

University of Central Arkansas

The UCA Commitment is open to incoming freshmen at the University of Central Arkansas who are Pell-eligible or whose households make less than $100,000 annually.

Courtney Bryant, associate vice president for enrollment management and UCA commitment director, said there’s a mistrust from some students about the new program because it seems “too good to be true.” Bryant said the FAFSA delay is making it difficult to dispel those concerns.

“This time last year half of our freshman applicants had already submitted their FAFSA, while now we have zero,” she said. “And so we have this wonderful opportunity and we can direct students on what they can be doing…but we can’t definitively say you are eligible for the UCA Commitment because we don’t have all the data points.”

UCA President Houston Davis and a $10 million gift from the Windgate Foundation in September. the donation closed out the school’s capital campaign and supports UCA Commitment. He said $5 million will support an endowment for UCA Commitment and $5 million will support scholarship operations.

Bryant said the university anticipates 40% of incoming freshmen will be eligible, roughly 750-800 students. A unique component of the scholarship is its service requirement of 10 hours per semester.

While finances can be a barrier for college students, Bryant said engagement and belonging are also challenges. Research shows engaged students are more likely to be retained, so the service requirement is a way to invest in students, she said.

“The overall goal is to get them to that degree, so just the retention component is huge as far as the purpose and drive for what we’re trying to do,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

Fully enacted, the initiative would include a massive pay raise for teachers that would move the minimum salary from 48th in the nation to fourth; an infusion of resources to literacy instruction, including 120 new reading coaches; a strike against the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms; and a statewide rollout of education savings accounts over the next three years. 

The plan is still only a loose proposal that has not been released as formal legislation. But those elements would make it a transformative bill in Arkansas, where student achievement was profoundly discouraging even before the pandemic. Tom Newell, vice president of government affairs for the reform-oriented advocacy group , said the so-called LEARNS (Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Readiness, Networking, and Safety) program held the potential to “expand and improve learning opportunities across the state.”

“Arkansas LEARNS will expand and improve learning opportunities across the state,” Newell said in a statement.“This landmark legislative proposal is a chance to modernize learning, empowering families to choose and customize the education that’s best for their child.”

The package holds significant political promise as well. Already recognizable from her service in the Trump administration, Huckabee Sanders’s rise was assured even before she was selected to deliver the nationally televised response last week to President Biden’s State of the Union Address. But her focus on schools — and especially the strategic decision to combine the additional K–12 funding with broadened educational options — offers insight into the GOP’s policy and messaging strategy just months after a disappointing midterm performance.  

Olivia Gardner, the director of education policy for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, agreed that the “huge undertaking” promised by Huckabee Sanders would inevitably help shape the legacy of a governorship that is still only weeks old.

“She talked about how she wanted education to be the hallmark of her administration, and I think this demonstrates that that is definitely going to be the case,” Gardner remarked.

Boosting teacher pay

While experts differ on the potential impact of the LEARNS plan, none dispute that student outcomes in Arkansas are in dire need of improvement. 

According to the release of 2022 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test known colloquially as the Nation’s Report Card, reading scores in Arkansas are the ninth-worst of any state. Performance in math was even worse. In both subjects, students lost considerable ground during the pandemic for in-person learning.  

Though the dismal achievement can be pinned on multiple factors — including — local and national experts have increasingly pointed to a deficient supply of skilled teachers. Over the last decade, enrollment in Arkansas’s teacher preparatory programs , leading some districts in the state’s more impoverished counties to request waivers that would allow them to hire applicants without teaching licenses. 

A from the nonprofit advocacy group TNTP found that roughly 4 percent of Arkansas teachers were uncertified, more than double the national average. In 30 districts, uncertified employees made up 10 percent or more of the teaching workforce. 

Gema Zamarro Rodriguez, an economist at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, said she believed the pay bump included in LEARNS could make the profession substantially more attractive. That increase — effectively lifting the starting teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 — would improve the earnings of nearly half of all Arkansas teachers. 

What’s more, “those teachers are not uniformly concentrated in the state; they are mostly concentrated in …shortage areas” in and around the state’s Delta region, Zamarro said. “I think increasing salaries could be positive, and it’s really going to affect the areas that need it more.”

Gov. Huckabee Sanders is pushing for several other workforce incentives, including the addition of 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. But those inducements are paired with more controversial measures. The administration has thus far been short on details, but a proposed $10,000 bonus for “good teachers” seems to open the door to a merit pay system that could prove unpopular with rank-and-file instructors. 

Another change would be much less ambiguous in its effects: the repeal of , a law that requires schools to provide notice and due process to teachers before termination of their employment. Zamarro said the law’s elimination, along with of pay-for-performance schemes in school settings, gave her some pause about the plan’s possible consequences for attracting and retaining teachers.

“I think the overall increase in pay is positive, but there are some other components in there that I worry might have the opposite effect.”

Division on ‘education freedom’

But the policy shift that will draw the most scrutiny is the governor’s effort to extend school choice to every Arkansas family through the provision of what her administration has dubbed “education freedom accounts.” 

Typically referred to as education savings accounts, the school choice vehicle disburses some portion of the state’s per-pupil allotment to parents for their use, whether for private school tuition, tutoring, or other instructional costs. A clutch of Republican governors have pushed to establish ESA programs already this year, and Arizona’s universal eligibility is seen as the “holy grail” in conservative policy circles. 

Arkansas already features for private school choice: a direct voucher program that enrolls about 700 students with disabilities, as well as a tax-credit scholarship for low-income students to offset the cost of private tuition. The new accounts — which should be one of the most expensive items in a package estimated to cost $300 million — would be reserved only for needy families in 2023–24 before becoming available to all students by 2025–26. 

The potential shock to education finances, which could draw both students and funding from traditional schools, has already drawn criticism. Gardner, whose organization has warning public officials against “[creating] inequity with our public education dollars,” said they would likely not lend their backing to any legislation that included an ESA plank.

“We may be supportive of other things in the bill, but because of this ‘education freedom’ component, we couldn’t be supportive overall,” Gardner said. “It’s just going to be so detrimental to our public schools that we feel it’s important to stand up against the bill.” 

In one of the reddest states in the country, GOP opposition would be necessary to sink the idea. But that might not be as unlikely as it sounds: In 2021, a bill that would have widened access to the existing voucher system , with Republicans accounting for most of the “no” votes. One legislator, Republican Rep. Jim Wooten, said the legislation could act as the “final nail driven in public education in this state.”

In an email, Wooten said that, if passed, the new omnibus proposal “will forever change the landscape of education in Arkansas — at the expense of public education. Every dollar lost to school choice is a dollar lost to educating…over 400,000 deserving students.”

Some found it notable that the school choice provisions were linked to a roundly popular pay increase for teachers. With federal COVID aid swelling budgets, red-state governors have increasingly been willing to court teachers with raises, even as they simultaneously pursue contentious policies like vouchers or classroom content restrictions. The LEARNS plan includes a thus-far unspecified ban on what is sometimes called critical race theory, and at the press conference announcing its arrival, Huckabee Sanders vowed to “never subject our kids to indoctrination.” 

Other Republicans road-tested the approach, including Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, who just last month. But the Republican archetype for this strategy has been Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who committed significant new funding to public education over the last few years while clashing with educators over curriculum, parental rights, and the participation of transgender students in girls’ sports. 

Newly appointed Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva after a long stint in Florida, where he helped carry out DeSantis’s vision for public education. In about the LEARNS plan with Little Rock news station KTHV, he argued that if an overwhelming number of students used their “freedom accounts” to switch to private schools, “we need to have a hard, serious conversation about why parents are choosing other options.” 

The University of Arkansas’s Zamarro said that the poor performance of the state’s schools demanded action, but that the sheer scale of the governor’s reforms also called for careful evaluation.

“This is a state that needs to move forward and do something for kids. But how these things are going to be implemented will be key. I’m not sure there’s another state that has done so many of these things at once, so it’s going to be very important to track what is happening and whether it’s working.”

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a nearly $2 million National Science Foundation grant to support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education that will enable hundreds of students to participate in a peer mentoring program.

This is the largest grant the university has received from NSF.

Researchers will use the five-year grant to implement teaching strategies aimed at increasing student engagement and retention in undergraduate STEM education.

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There will be a special focus placed on historically underserved populations, first-generation students and Pell Grant recipients who are likely to encounter barriers to their success in their lecture-based STEM courses, according to a press release.

“Our main focus is to increase the number of underserved students who successfully complete STEM courses,” assistant professor of education Lundon Pinneo said in a statement. “We want to identify current barriers for faculty and improve support systems so campus-wide we can close the equity gap.”

An interdisciplinary team of faculty from the STEM Education Center, the School of Education and the Office of the Provost will collaborate on the initiative.

UA Little Rock will implement NSF-funded interventions including the expansion of the Mobile Institute on Scientific Teaching and the Learning Assistant Program in the Donaghey College of STEM. The university is the only higher education institution in Arkansas that offers these two programs.

MoSI workshops focus on active learning. shows students are 1.5 times more likely to pass courses in active learning classrooms than in traditional lectures.

The grant will provide a $500 stipend for 75 STEM faculty members to complete the workshop during the next five years. Faculty will be recruited to join the first cohort of participants starting in the spring 2023 semester.

The grant also provides a $975 stipend for 605 students to participate in the Learning Assistant Program, allowing greater access for students who previously couldn’t afford to volunteer for this leadership role.

The assistants will provide peer learning support for more than 9,000 of their classmates during the five years of the grant. Officials expect to support about 250 learning assistants per year by the end of the project.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

In , academics at the University of Rochester, the University of Colorado, and Duke University discovered that many winners of North Carolina school board races saw property values rise in their neighborhoods. The gains may have been generated by winners’ manipulation of attendance zones to sort whiter and higher-achieving students into nearby schools.

The findings also deliver an unmistakably partisan message: Board members registered as Republicans or independents yielded increases in home prices, while effects for Democratic winners were null. 

“The finding that non-Democratic — but not Democratic — school board members affect local school attributes in ways that raise home prices in their neighborhood…raises the question of self-interested, as opposed to public service-oriented, motivations for seeking office,” the authors write.

The study’s design offers a somewhat dark perspective on the linkage between school quality and the cost of real estate, hinging on the often-controversial power of local education authorities to determine which schools in their district enroll which students. To derive a clear picture of board members’ potential unspoken agendas, it combines data from a host of sources and examines three phenomena at once.

First, the research team gathered a comprehensive set of election results from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, focusing on all school board races between 2006 and 2016. While the vast majority of those races were nonpartisan (as are most such races around the country) they were able to determine the partisanship of roughly two-thirds of all candidates by matching them to county-level voter registration rolls, which also provided identifying information on race, ethnicity, age, and home address.

Next they built an index of home values throughout North Carolina at the level of the Census block using records from ZTRAX, a database encompassing all home transactions in the state between 1995 and 2016. The inventory, maintained by the online real estate marketplace Zillow, tracked not just sales prices and addresses, but also design and construction details such as square footage, structural condition and number of bathrooms. 

The combined figures clearly showed that property values in winning, non-Democratic candidates’ neighborhoods rose by an average of 4.2 percent — compared with the neighborhoods of losing non-Democrats — in the four years following a school board election. By comparison, winning Democratic board members enjoyed no bump in prices relative to losing Democratic candidates. Among winners registered as Republicans, who made up roughly 80 percent of non-Democratic candidates, the effects were even larger: a 6.2 percent increase in home prices relative to Republican losers.

“It could totally be possible that board members are increasing house prices across the whole district because they’re doing great things for schools,” said co-author John Singleton, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. “What we’re showing in this paper, though, is that the distribution of those effects across neighborhoods is related to where school board members live. It’s about how the pie is being divided, and it looks like it’s being divided in a more equal fashion by Democratic candidates.”

Controversy over attendance zones

But what could explain the higher prices?

To answer that question, Singleton and his collaborators introduced a final set of facts: records from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center, which included academic, residential, and demographic information on students and schools. Soon enough, they found that the schools serving the neighborhoods of winning non-Democrats seemed to improve in the years following their election to school boards.

Specifically, math and reading scores on the North Carolina standardized End-of-Grade Tests increased slightly for children enrolled in those schools between kindergarten and the eighth grade. At the same time, average years of teacher experience (a crude but intuitive measure of school quality) increased significantly, with the proportion of brand-new teachers dropping by 12.8 percent and the proportion of teachers with over a decade of experience increasing by 3.8 percent.

Singleton said that the marked increase in teacher experience could be linked to lower turnover. Whatever the cause, it would be one of the clearest signals to potential home buyers — along with climbing overall test scores — of elevated school quality, which would in turn push home values higher.

“That’s something that’s potentially very visible to people who are deciding which neighborhood to live in and where to send their kids to school,” Singleton said. “But it’s also going to be private information that’s not more widely known — it travels by word of mouth through social networks: ‘This school is good, they retain their teachers.’”

But the perception of better academic performance seems to have more to do with changes in school composition than actual improvement. While overall standardized test performance in these schools trended upward, scores derived from teacher value-added — by economists to isolate exactly what schools contribute to student learning — remained flat. 

Instead, the ostensible academic growth may have been generated by changes in the schools students were assigned to. Those patterns in school assignment are substantially decided by board members, who may have a personal financial stake in having “good schools” (often, those that enroll more advantaged students who are most prepared to succeed academically) located near their own homes. 

The process of drawing and redrawing school attendance zones is typically highly controversial for that reason. In recent decades, some education analysts have advocated the intentional construction of attendance zones that cultivate more racial and socioeconomic diversity in classrooms. Efforts to put such plans into action have sometimes been stymied by changing election results — including in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest school district, where to an ambitious desegregation plan.

Singleton and his colleagues found that in the years after local non-Democrats won election to school boards, the schools serving their neighborhoods became 3.5 percent whiter relative to those serving the neighborhoods of non-Democratic election losers; enrollment of high-achieving students (those scoring higher on state exams than same-aged children the previous year) increased by 3.6 percent. No such changes were detected among schools serving the neighborhoods of winning Democrats.

The authors also revealed that, compared with results measured in the year before an election, average test scores markedly increased in the schools enrolling children who lived in the same Census block as a winning, non-Democratic school board candidate; in other words, local kids were being assigned to higher-performing schools after their neighbor became a board member.

Eric Brunner, an economist at the University of Connecticut, said that factors like test scores operated as clear signals in real estate markets because of the “very limited information” that families can otherwise access. Previous research has shown that the school ratings included in sites like Zillow can lead directly to neighborhood segregation. 

“What buyers are given by their realtors, and the research they do themselves, is typically the average test scores in different school zones,” Brunner argued. “If [board members] were able to adjust test scores within the boundaries of the school zone such that they went up on average — even though students weren’t smarter, and it was just due to sorting — then home values will go up. People think it’s a better product.”

‘Normal people engaging in politics’

Brunner noted that the study builds by Singleton and another co-author, economist Hugh McCartney, which found that Democratic school board members in North Carolina tended to reduce school segregation by shifting school assignments. The latest paper takes that insight “one step further,” he said, by demonstrating the self-dealing that might follow from the massaging of attendance zones. 

He also took note of an interesting sub-finding of the newer study: The changes in school-level achievement and home values were driven not only by non-Democrats, but also by candidates elected on an at-large basis to represent an entire school district. 

At-large contests only made up about one-quarter of board races in North Carolina over the course of the study, but their structure could help explain its results, Brunner said. Marginal changes to school attendance zones would theoretically produce a small number of winners, but also some “losers”: those who live near a board member but see themselves as adversely impacted by school assignment changes.. Under new assignment patterns, such voters might see their own property values fall as their children are enrolled at relatively lower-achieving schools.

That kind of dissatisfaction would be a serious liability in a ward-based race, Brunner observed; but if the candidate was elected on an at-large basis, most of their voters would take no notice of minor assignment changes occurring in other parts of their school district.

“If you’re elected at large, you could do something that satisfies a very small, unique group of people without pissing off the other voters within your ward. You don’t need to be worried about satisfying the rest of your ward — you could satisfy a microcosm of it.”

Robert Maranto is a political scientist at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform. Between 2015 and 2020, he also held a seat on the Fayetteville School Board, which undertook several rounds of student redistricting during his tenure. Maranto noted that such policy changes were some of the most fraught he could remember, recollecting in an interview that certain constituents needed to be “grandfathered in” to attendance zones viewed as superior.

“When people buy a house, or sometimes even an apartment, they have the expectation that their kid will go to a certain school,” Maranto said. “So if you upend that expectation, it can be very controversial. Even if they’re redistricted to a brand-new school, people are usually not happy about that.”

He added that the magnitude and direction of the effects measured by Singleton and his collaborators was “very plausible,” but added that his own interpretation was “somewhat less nefarious” than what others might infer.

“Your constituents either want or, more often, don’t want boundary changes,” he said. “It could be for elitist purposes — ‘We don’t want our kids going to school with those kids’ — but you’re representing that on the board. For me, it seems more like normal people engaging in politics.”

Singleton himself added that he would like to see similar research conducted in other states to reveal more about the connection between district leadership, school outcomes, and home prices. Though the findings from North Carolina were suggestive, he noted, the “very distinctive flavor” of local politics — including a comparative abundance of private and charter schools, which could dilute the effects somewhat by partially de-linking home addresses from school assignment — meant that a similar experiment might yield different results elsewhere. 

Above all, he said, it was important to further explore the role of school boards as actors in a complex machinery of school governance because the difference between a good board and a bad one might be greater than is now understood.

“I think there’s mounting evidence that boards can be consequential players. And we’re just starting to learn more about the conditions under which these kinds of effects can arise.”