Early in my first college presidency, a battle erupted between the governor of Arkansas and the Arkansas Education Association over teacher-testing, which the Association adamantly opposed.
“As part of the education reform agenda, teachers were required to pass a competency test in reading, grammar, math, and subject-area knowledge, set at the eighth-grade-level. The state offered assistance programs and teachers could take the test repeatedly over a 27-month period.
“The highest number of those who failed the test were Black, fueling charges of racism. The test, however, was colorblind; it was checked carefully for racial bias by a committee that included 12 Blacks. Clinton argued that the Black failure rate simply revealed the woeful education provided Blacks in Arkansas, and promised that his reform package would change that. ‘If we can pull this off politically,’ he said, ‘it will make a statement to the whole country about the potential for real equality of performance between Blacks and whites.’
“To make his case, Clinton pointed to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), most of whose students were Black. In 1980, when a certification exam was first given to college graduates who wanted to teach, only 42 percent of UAPB students taking the test passed.
Chancellor Lloyd Hackley used the results to force through a total revision of the curriculum, which required all students to spend their first two years in a preparatory program to bring them up to speed, called University College.
Hackley, who is Black, argued passionately that discrimination was no longer the primary barrier holding Black students back; instead, he blamed low standards, low expectations, and practices such as automatic promotion from grade to grade.”
(From: Laboratories of Democracy, David Osborne, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 1988)
The 1980 test was a preliminary test. The “real” test was given in the fall of 1981 just after I arrived, and only 45% of UAPB students passed. Arkansas Law mandated that Arkansas high school graduates had to be admitted to a state supported university, and a disproportionate number of under-prepared students enrolled at UAPB. The shift of top Black students from Historically Black colleges to Historically White Colleges was well underway.
Employing the admission law, I argued in the General Assembly that the children had been ill-prepared by the K-12 schools, a fault of the state’s education establishment; and that the students and their families were not aware that their courses, grades and promotions did not necessarily indicate preparation for college-level success.
In order to remedy this new, ingenious form of Post-Brown racism, I asked that a funding formula be used to provide extra funds for students below a specific ACT score since it was more expensive to educate under-prepared students, their motivation notwithstanding. I recommended that the funding be student specific, not university specific; that the funds be appropriated for a finite time period; and that the state begin immediately to upgrade the K-12 system. I did not refer to UAPB when making my case.
However, I did state that while not acceptable to me, the 45% pass-rate was a better “teaching-learning” outcome than the pass-rates at the other institutions. Given our ACT average, the testing consultants had predicted that only 19% of our students would pass; thus, UAPB was adding significant value to students’ beginning abilities as compared with the other schools.
A special appropriations bill was passed and, as I anticipated, UAPB received the bulk of the funds. I used the money to hire 10 high school teachers for University College, not college professors, five in math and five in English. In addition, I lowered the class sizes, and reduced the credit hour loads especially for students least-well prepared.
All the test scores improved each year. In less than five years, 85% of the teacher education majors passed; nursing students went from a 20% licensure pass rate to 100%; and ROTC students achieved a 100 % pass-rate, the best in the region.
We were so sure about the quality of the education we were imparting that UAPB became the fifth university in the nation and the first Historically Black Institution to grant warranties with each teacher education degree granted.
The warranty covered both subject matter and teaching competency, and stipulated that we would send a team to the schools to work with teachers having problems, and even bring ineffective teachers back to the university for additional work.
We did not overlook the educational deprivation that had been the norm for many Black students in K-12 schools after desegregation ensued apace.
Educational deprivation and cultural deprivation are not the same and neither has anything to do with genetics. Real education, e.g., diligence in study in high-quantity/high-quality courses, will reduce, even remove, the effects of cultural deprivation.