From reading groups and guest speakers, to professional development for educators and media mentions by the White House, ACRE has had another successful semester of economics, education, and policy research. We hope you’ve been able to come to one of our events on campus, or read some of our many materials online.

Distinguished Speaker Series & Colloquium

Michael Munger (right) with Jeremy Horpedahl

Our final guest speaker for the Fall 2023 semester was Michael Munger from Duke University, who gave a public talk on “Monopoly Power, Political Power, and the Problem of Platforms,” and also joined UCA students in several classes. Munger followed two other speakers this semester: Emily Hamilton from the Mercatus Center, who spoke about housing policy and affordability; and David Bernstein from George Mason University Law School, who spoke about the history of racial classification in the United States. Professor Bernstein was also the keynote speaker for and a participant in our annual ACRE Colloquium, which brought students and professors from across Arkansas together for a weekend to discuss the ideas in Bernstein’s book.

Fall Reading Groups

Students in Dr. Jacob Held’s “Landmark Supreme Court” reading group

Our reading groups set an ACRE record this semester! More students applied than ever before, resulting in a wait-list to participate. One of those groups visited Southern Methodist University in October for a weekend discussion event with students at other universities, and keynote speaker Dr. Bart Wilson from Chapman University. Our Spring 2024 reading groups will be announced soon, and we look forward to having another good response from UCA students.

K-12 Programs

ACRE’s K12 program has hosted a number of professional development opportunities for educators across Arkansas. This past month’s engaging topics included: “Economic Mysteries in Economic History: What was Roaring about the Twenties?” and “The 2023 Economics Nobel Prize: Claudia Goldin, Women, & Work.”�� Looking ahead, the ACRE educator reading group will continue this spring. For a full list of K12 offerings, to sign up for the K12 newsletter, or request a classroom visit this spring, go to

Government Transparency in Arkansas

AFOIA in the State Constitution:

Lately in Arkansas there has been a lot of discussion about government transparency, both during the Special Session of the Arkansas General Assembly in September and in the aftermath of the legislative session, from which a citizen initiative emerged proposing the incorporation of Arkansas’s Freedom of Information Act (AFOIA) into the state constitution. ACRE Policy Analyst Dr. Joyce Ajayi has continued tracking these developments and offering her expertise to help support the public debate on the issue. In November, she participated as a panelist at a town hall meeting on this topic in Conway and also authored an op-ed, “,” published in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. In the piece, she elaborates on the consequences and implications of incorporating AFOIA into the state constitution, emphasizing the need for careful consideration of both advantages and drawbacks.

Looking ahead, Joyce, along with a team of researchers across Arkansas, is co-authoring the Arkansas Civic Health Index. This publication will offer a comprehensive analysis of Arkansas’s civic health, including aspects like web transparency. The report, set to be released in December, will provide insights into the civic and political engagement landscape in Arkansas, showcasing strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities.

Media

As part of my role as Director at ACRE and a UCA professor, I regularly appear in the media and write popular essays about economics. A few of those outreach activities stood out as especially interesting and important this semester.

• I once again appeared on PBS’s Arkansas Week program and how that relates to public policy, such as the state budget.
• The Charles Koch Foundation featured an essay I wrote explaining��. That essay summarizes a lot of the principles we use to think about fiscal policy at ACRE in our research and educational outreach.
• Lastly, a somewhat light-hearted blog post that I wrote about the cost of a , surprised me by getting picked up by a lot of media sources, as well as the a claim the White House made. I was not expecting that, but I am glad that someone is reading my work!

New Employees

ACRE is set to accomplish even more in the coming year with the addition of two outstanding individuals to our team. Elise Ormonde and Heidi Saliba each bring unique skillsets and perspectives to ACRE’s research and outreach. We are fortunate to welcome them, and you can read more about both here.

All of us at ACRE hope that you have a wonderful last few weeks of 2023, and we look forward to sharing more about all of our events, research, and student programs in 2024.

By Elise Ormonde, ACRE Research & Program Coordinator

UCA students participating in the ACRE Fall 2023 Economics Reading group had the exciting opportunity to travel to Dallas, Texas for a weekend summit hosted by the Southern Methodist University (SMU). This event was a collaboration between UCA, SMU, and Western Michigan University, featuring student reading discussions and a presentation by Dr. Bart J. Wilson on his upcoming book, Meaningful Economics.

The reading group program has provided students with the chance to investigate economics beyond the classroom and how it relates to this session’s theme:��Humanomics: Economic Freedom & the Not-So-Dismal Science.��Humanomics aims to incorporate human conduct into traditional economic theory and to answer questions such as: What are markets and do free markets promote the development of moral behavior? Are economists’ simplifying assumptions about human behavior and decision-making causing them to miss key components of the world? Students were already familiar with some of Dr. Wilson’s past work surrounding humanomics due to the inclusion of his and Vernon L. Smith’s book, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century, in this fall’s curriculum. Consequently, Wilson’s presentation on “Meaningful Economics” sparked relevant student conversation and many insightful questions.

The ACRE Economics Reading group will continue in the spring and focus on morality in markets.

During the legislative session ACRE staff are frequently focused on bills and testifying before committee. But our dedication to education and outreach to students is a pillar of ACRE’s mission and presents opportunities for student involvement year-round.

Recently, ACRE Policy Analyst Dr. Joyce Ajayi and ACRE Program Coordinator Terra Aquia lad an ACRE-sponsored travel opportunity to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. Four UCA students from the UCA College of Business (Madison Peyton, Sophomore Economics Major; Brenna Dobson, Junior Data Analytics Major; Sydney Klein, Freshman Marketing Major; and Mariah Manning, Sophomore Economics Major) attended the Women in Economics Symposium. This annual symposium began in 2018 at the St. Louis Fed, along with the with the goal of connecting young women with accomplished women in the economics profession.

At the 2023 symposium, speaker Stephanie Aaronson, a Senior Associate Director, Division of Research and Statistics for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Daryl Fairweather, Chief Economist at Redfin, shared personal experiences of studying economics and then learning where they wanted to apply their knowledge in the workplace. They answered several questions from student attendees about graduate and PhD programs, finding entry level positions in economics fields, what skills and talents to highlight, and how to navigate salary negotiations.

The student trip to the Women in Economics symposium is just one of the many ACRE programs for UCA students. ACRE sponsors a variety of university student programming to create engaging learning experiences for students and discuss economic ideas in a variety of academic settings. UCA business students can participate in the ACRE Cubs & Biz@Bear programs right from their residence halls. Every semester students from all UCA majors participate in ACRE Reading Groups where students meet weekly to discuss economics readings and topics. Students who excel in ACRE programs often apply for an ACRE Research Fellowship where they work with a faculty mentor to produce real, publishable research in topics related to ACRE’s mission such as occupational licensing, taxes, government spending, and more. For more information about any of ACRE’s university student programs, please visit /acre/undergraduate-research-fellows/ or reach us by email at��acre@uca.edu.

By Joyce Ajayi,��Mavuto Kalulu, and��David Lee

Year after year we are seeing more laws and initiatives go into effect to encourage local levels of government in Arkansas to have more online transparency. For example, Act 564 recently mandated all Arkansas counties to publish their annual budget and financial reports online. Why is this important? Local government transparency initiatives play an integral role in increasing citizen’s trust in government. We need more strategic transparency initiatives at lower levels of government as shown by a 2019 study by Mavuto Kalulu, Terra Aquia, and Joyce Ajayi “Creating an Index to Measure Transparency in Arkansas Counties” published in the Southwest Business and Economics Journal.��

School districts are a great place to focus transparency initiatives because they receive a lot of tax dollars and it is hard to know how those dollars are spent. A 2013 assessment of online transparency by Kristin McMurray “” published by the Sunshine Review revealed that lower levels of government such as counties and school districts are not as transparent as states. Yet, they are entrusted with billions of taxpayer dollars. From 2015 to 2019, school districts in Arkansas spent .��

Recently researchers at the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics (ACRE) began looking into how school districts in Arkansas are doing with regard to online transparency. We are starting with the school district’s procurement process. “Procurement” refers to the process of acquiring goods and services from third parties. Goods and services can range from contracts for work to be done, or services to be performed, or for equipment, materials or supplies to be sold to the district.��

The procurement process is governed by ACA §6-21-301 thru §6-21-306, which gives school boards the authority to formulate guidelines for the procurement process. The board can designate the purchasing authority to a lawfully designated purchasing official. For purchases equal to or greater than $20,000, the purchasing officials are required to solicit bids from potential suppliers. School districts announce intentions to purchase goods or services through a request for proposal (RFP)- a document that specifies details of sought goods and services including the criteria the officials will use to evaluate bids. The winning bid is determined by scoring each criterion and the bidder with the best score is awarded the contract. The criteria includes, among others, price, quality and delivery time. In the event all bids are rejected, purchasing officials can negotiate the contracts individually but they have to give an opportunity to all the bidders to enter into the negotiation to ensure the process remains competitive. Purchases less than $20,000, can be solicited without bids but purchasing officials are prohibited from splitting a purchase worth more than $20,000 to circumvent the bidding process. For example, on April 7, 2020, put out a request for quotation for paper supplies to restock its warehouse. The contract to supply the requested materials was awarded to DGS Educational Products, National Art & School Supplies, Pyramids School Products, School Specialty Inc. and standard Stationery Supply Co.������

With billions of taxpayers’ dollars, comes the responsibility of�� informing residents how they are spent. Government officials must be above suspicion in matters of spending and procurement ethics. They can ensure transparency by providing residents with easy access to information on the procurement contracts online. Publishing current and prior years vendors and the value of their contracts allows residents to see who is being awarded the contracts and eliminates the mistrust some residents may have in the procurement process. Especially for purchases that require competitive bidding, officials should publish online requests for proposals (RFPs) as well as bid winners so that residents can see what was requested and compare it with what was delivered.��

When residents are able to provide this extra layer of scrutiny, it encourages purchasing officials to adhere to the guidance set by the school district board resulting in reduced opportunities to abuse the system without getting caught. Good rules can also minimize the temptation for public officials to award contracts to preferred vendors through manipulating the requirements to favor certain vendors.�� This would also prevent even bolder misuses of funds like when Brandi Freeman of Westside School District stole�� $178,391 in 2017. Almost $68,000 of this amount was for unauthorized payments for personal expenses and payments to personal vendor accounts and a fictitious vendor. You can learn more about this case in the “”��

Transparency also saves money. A report by Rachel Cross, Michelle Surka and Scott Welder, “,” documents the cost savings various states have made by publishing contract information on their transparency websites. Because the information is public and easily accessible, contractors and vendors are less inclined to overcharge for the goods and services provided. In addition, when this information is easily accessible, it encourages more vendors to apply. Increased competition results in lower prices. For example, a and her colleagues reported that the launch of Florida’s contract database was partially responsible for saving $40 million during the period 2013-2014 to 2014-2015.

Current Arkansas laws do not address how residents can access the information regarding school districts’ procurement process or who ultimately gets the contracts so the online publication of this material is voluntary. While some of the information can be obtained through FOIA, publishing the information online facilitates a smooth flow of information between school districts and residents. As argued earlier, it reduces the number of requests as well as providing residents quick access to information.�� Our research team randomly selected 20�� of the 269 school districts for a pilot examination of online procurement information. The sample includes�� districts of varying sizes and population across the state. The table below shows the information that we found online for each of the school districts in our sample.

To ensure the accuracy of our online examination of the websites, we contacted all 20 school districts via phone and email to gather more insight on their bidding procedure. Eighteen out of the 20 districts responded. Only two school districts had not returned our call or emails by April 5th 2020. We learned that school districts keep bidding information for a varying length of time. According to Ark. Code Ann. § 14-59-114 “bids are counted as support documents, and must be maintained and archived for a period of four years”. Eight schools indicated they held the bids for about five years after the contract was awarded. One school district indicated that it actively destroys their records after completion. This is not only a breach of ��Ark. Code Ann. § 14-59-114 but also unwise considering the possibility that a vendor or other party may be unsatisfied and may seek documentation for a court case.
Fort Smith school district publishes more bidding information online than the other nineteen school districts.�� They include current and prior year’s requests for proposals and bid winners. Three other school districts, namely Jonesboro, Little Rock and Texarkana have sections for RFPS on their websites but none of the actual documents were in there when we examined them in April 2020.����

Billions of dollars are spent by school districts procuring goods and services. This information should be easily available and easily understandable. School districts already have an online platform and are already required to post other information online by the state. Alternatively, the state could create a�� transparency portal for school districts to publish their contract information. Missouri’s�� data portal provides Missourians access to expenditure data for both state and local governments. The data is searchable by vendor. While Missouri’s portal does not show data for school districts, it is advisable for Arkansas to consider expanding its state transparency portal to include school districts. These transparency portals do not provide all the information regarding bids such as bid amounts of other bidders but at least the residents can track down how the money is spent by their government. Although there is currently no state mandate for school districts to keep an online record of their bids or any information regarding them, it is a transparency issue and taxpayers and parents have a right to know how these processes are being conducted and the outcomes of the processes.

Mavuto Kalulu and Joyce Ajayi are policy analysts with the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics at the 51��¥ in Conway and coauthors of “Access Arkansas: County Web Transparency,” an annual report on the accessibility of fiscal, administrative, and political information in Arkansas counties.��

David Lee is a student worker and was tasked with the gathering of information from school districts through direct contact by phone and email. He also searched for the information on the school districts’ websites.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the 51��¥.

Does charter school competition harm students in traditional public schools?

According to research conducted by ACRE experts, the answer is no.

ACRE Policy Analyst Dr. Mavuto Kalulu, ACRE Scholar and UCA Associate Professor of Economics Dr. Thomas Snyder, and UCA Mathematics Graduate Student Saliou N. Ouattara were recently published in the Fall 2017 edition of the EJournal of Education Policy.

Their article, finds a “positive and statistically-significant relationship” between elementary charter school enrollment and traditional Iowa Assessment scores across school districts.

More specifically, improvements in traditional public school students’ math, reading and language test scores were greater in school districts that had a larger percentage of students enrolled in charter schools. The results suggest that test scores will rise over 1 point (1-100 scale) for every 10 percentage-point increase in charter school enrollment in a school district.

Kalulu, Snyder and Ouattara conclude:

“The number of open-enrollment charters schools in Arkansas is growing, and the performance of the charter schools have been positive. However, critics of charter schools typically say that the emergence of charter schools will harm traditional public schools. The charter schools may skim the best students and may leave those with special needs to traditional public schools. If so, the authors would expect to see charter school enrollment negatively affect the average student performance in traditional public schools. The evidence suggests the opposite. The study finds a significant positive change in test scores with charter school options.”

The rest of ACRE’s work on K-12 education can be found here.

When a charter school opens in the vicinity of a traditional public school, some people fear that the decreased enrollment caused by students transferring will cause the traditional public schools to shut down. When a public school shuts down, children are assigned to other schools, which they and their parents may or may not like. This fear about charter schools is based on the assumption that traditional public schools cannot adjust to the competition by improving their standards.

show that in the 2015–16 school year, 18 out of 1,037 traditional public schools closed down. Two out of the 18 closed schools were in a district that did not have a single student transfer to a charter school. Nine of the 18 schools were in districts that saw less than 1 percent of their students transfer to open enrollment charter schools. Pulaski County School District had the highest percentage of students leaving for charter schools at 14 percent. The school district, however, closed only 2 out of its 38 traditional public schools. The reason for the closure was the , which meant consolidation of some schools.

No evidence shows that charter schools in Arkansas are causing public schools to close down. Traditional public schools are able to adjust and offer an alternative to open enrollment charter schools. Rather than harming traditional public schools, open enrollment charter schools are helping traditional public schools to improve students’ performance.

An empirical evaluation of shows that open enrollment charter school students perform better than comparable students in traditional public schools in both math and literacy. While this outcome is a positive one for charter schools, it is not as gratifying if, in the process, open enrollment charter schools cause academic harm to students in traditional public schools. Some argue that open enrollment charter schools draw the best students from traditional public schools, leaving behind hard-to-teach students and leading to the loss of the positive peer influence from the good students. Others argue that the opposite is true: open enrollment charter schools mostly draw students who might not perform as well in a traditional public school setting and who might have a negative effect on their classmates. However, research shows that the entry of charter schools into the public school system is actually associated with improved performance for traditional public school students.

A study in Texas by examined the effect of charter schools on student performance in traditional public schools. The researchers found higher test scores for traditional public school students when there was a greater percentage of students leaving traditional public schools for charter schools. Similarly, a forthcoming study by the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics examines how the entry of open enrollment charter schools affects the performance of school districts in Arkansas. The results show that traditional public schools that face higher levels of competition from open enrollment charter schools experience improved test scores.

The introduction of charter schools in Arkansas creates a win-win outcome benefiting both charter school and traditional public school students. An added advantage of improved traditional public school performance is that students enrolling in traditional public schools will not have to compromise on their academics to have the opportunity to engage in extracurricular activities, such as football, that may not be available in charter schools.

Healthy competition among schools should be embraced. It incentivizes schools to provide a better quality education and students enrolled in both open enrollment charter schools and traditional public schools benefit. Concerns about increasing competition are well-meant but data shows that we have more to gain than we have to lose.

Dr. Mavuto Kalulu is a Policy Analyst at the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics. His work on education has been featured��in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette,��Jonesboro Sun,��and the��Log Cabin Democrat.

In contrast to traditional public schools, it’s true that some charter schools, such KIPP Delta, mostly employ nontraditionally licensed teachers, but that doesn’t make those teachers underqualified. show that some core academic subjects (English, reading and language arts, mathematics, science, foreign language, social studies, and visual and performing arts) in open enrollment charter schools are not taught by highly qualified teachers. The same is true for traditional public schools. A total of 215 schools in Arkansas have core academic classes not taught by highly qualified teachers Ninety one percent of these schools are traditional public schools while six percent are open enrollment charter schools. The other three percent are conversion charter schools. Table 1 depicts the top ten schools with the highest percentage of courses not taught bay highly qualified teachers.

Source: Arkansas Department of Education

Eight of the top ten schools that have core classes not taught by highly qualified teachers are traditional public schools while two of them are open enrollment charter schools. One can conclude that by the ADE’s definition of highly qualified teachers the worst affected schools in Arkansas are traditional public schools.

The real difference between traditional public school districts and open enrollment charter schools may lie in the routes that their teachers take to be licensed. Open enrollment charter schools may mainly hire nontraditionally licensed teachers. A traditionally licensed teacher has completed a formal teacher preparation program offered by a four-year college or university and has majored in education. In contrast, a nontraditionally licensed teacher has completed a degree in some other subject and has not majored in education. Arkansas offers a variety of , including the Teach for America program, the Arkansas Teacher Corps program, and the Provisional Professional Teaching License, all of which require professional experience in teaching or in the subject being taught.

One major concern is that nontraditionally licensed teachers lack classroom management skills and are therefore less effective at teaching students than traditionally licensed ones are. , however, shows that there is no significant difference in the ability to manage a classroom between traditionally and nontraditionally licensed teachers. Therefore, nontraditional routes to teacher licensing help schools to meet Arkansas’s teacher shortage without compromising on students’ education.

What’s more, open enrollment charter schools continuously evaluate their teachers’ effectiveness using various methods, such as classroom observation, teacher self-assessment, student growth, and parent and student surveys, some of which are very similar to the methods used by traditional public schools. If an open enrollment charter school does not meet the performance goals deemed appropriate by the ADE, it must close. Thus, charter schools actually have to prove their excellence in an even more rigorous environment.

Over the years, laws have been enacted to ensure that public schools are less segregated. For example, the Public School Choice Act of 1989 allowed for inter-district school choice, with a restriction that a student cannot transfer into a district that has a higher percentage of his or her race than his or her own residential district. The restriction was implemented because of the fear that white parents would transfer their students to predominantly white school districts, which tend to have more resources than predominantly minority districts.

Proponents of school choice argue that racial and economic divisions arise from the zoning system, which restricts the movement of students from their residential school districts into other school districts. School choice, they say, is the best way to allow minorities to transfer from poor-performing schools into better-performing schools, regardless of the racial composition of those schools.

Fast forward to May 2016, when a hearing on the expansion of charter schools in Little Rock revealed that concerns about school choice leading to segregation still linger. Charter school opponents argue that charter schools in Arkansas will worsen segregation. They believe that charter schools enroll mostly white and Asian students, leaving behind blacks and Hispanics in the failing traditional public schools.

To address this concern, the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics examined state-level data. Figure 1 shows the enrollment by race in both traditional public schools and open enrollment charter schools. Because some argued that Asians should not be included in the minority group during the Little Rock hearings on charter school expansion, our graph shows what open enrollment charter school enrollment looks like both when Asians are not grouped together with whites (green) and when they are (purple).

The graph depicts three different ways of looking at the same data. In all three cases, charter schools enroll a larger percentage of minorities than traditional public schools do. Using the Arkansas Department of Education categorization, which combines all races besides whites into the minority group (green bars), charter schools enroll a smaller percentage of white students (43.53%) than traditional public schools do (62.62%). When you exclude Asians from the minority group (purple bars), charter school enrollment is 47.73% white and Asian compared to 64.00% in traditional public schools. The third case, which perhaps is the main concern for charter school opponents, is the opportunity charter schools provide to Hispanics and blacks (blue bars). In Arkansas, half of the students in open enrollment charter schools are Hispanic black, while Hispanics and blacks comprise 32.32% of the total enrollment in traditional public schools. Thus, open enrollment charter schools in Arkansas are affording minorities opportunities to choose a school that best meets their children’s needs.

Arkansas offers two types of public charter schools for students seeking an alternative to traditional public schools. Conversion charter schools, first authorized in 1995, are public schools that are converted to charter schools. They have more autonomy than traditional public schools while still remaining under the school district’s control. Only students residing in a school district the conversion charter school is located in are allowed to attend.

Open enrollment charter schools, first authorized in 1999, are newly developed, publicly funded schools that are run independently by a government entity or a nonsectarian organization. As the name suggest, open enrollment charter schools are authorized to enroll students from anywhere in the state. The state grants them more autonomy than traditional public schools in return for greater accountability for performance. For example, the KIPP Delta schools in Helena–West Helena are exempted from the state requirements on start and end dates. The law requires that public schools open no earlier than August 19 and no later than August 26. For the 2016–17 school year, KIPP Delta schools started school on August 3. Its school calendar year has over 190 days compared to 178 days for the neighboring Helena-West Helena School District. Among other advantages, the extended school year coupled with extended school days allows KIPP Delta schools to have more time for activities like field trips and college visits without sacrificing classroom instructional time. Charter schools that don’t meet performance goals deemed appropriate for the charter school by the authorizer must close.

Charter schools are created to provide quality alternative learning and teaching environments, as required by the Arkansas Quality Charter Schools Act of 2013. People often debate whether charter schools are better than traditional public schools. What they overlook is that the two alternatives could actually complement each other, helping to achieve the goal of improving the academic performance of all students in Arkansas by acknowledging differences among students’ needs and learning styles. While some students may thrive in traditional public schools, others may not, and providing them with an alternative learning environment can help them to perform better.

Debates about whether charter schools or traditional public schools are superior often contain inaccurate information. In the blog posts to follow, the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics will examine some of the most common inaccuracies. Using data from the Arkansas Department of Education and empirical studies by academic scholars, we will dispel the following myths about open enrollment charter schools in Arkansas. We focus on open enrollment charter schools because unlike conversion charter schools, open enrollment charter schools operate independently of the school districts and draw students out of the school districts. Here are the myths that we will discuss:

Myth 1: Open enrollment charter schools don’t enroll many black or Hispanic students.

Myth 2: Education outcomes at open enrollment charter schools are worse than those at traditional public schools.

Myth 3: Open enrollment charter schools hire underqualified teachers.

Myth 4: Open enrollment charter schools receive more public funding than traditional public schools.

Myth 5: Traditional public schools will be forced to shut down because they can’t compete with open enrollment charter schools.

Academic research shows that teacher effectiveness plays a critical role in student learning. One study����shows that the difference between an effective teacher and an ineffective one can be as much as a year’s worth of learning.

In order to ensure the quality of teachers, states require teachers to pass��qualifying exams, Praxis I and/or Praxis II, to obtain a teaching license. If there is indeed a positive correlation between teachers’ effectiveness and the teachers’ qualifying exam scores, then policy makers can raise the bar on these exams to improve students’ achievements.

According to research findings by ACRE scholar Dr. James Shuls, simply raising the score needed to pass the licensure exams in Arkansas does not appear to be an effective strategy. He finds that in Arkansas, the relationship between teaching effectiveness and Praxis scores is very small to non-existent.��Taking advantage of the fact that Arkansas does have some teachers who scored less than the cut off score on the Praxis exam, Shuls addresses the question of whether or not students in classes with teachers who score higher on standardized tests perform better than students in classes with teachers who score lower. On the Praxis I exam, student outcomes are not significantly different for teachers who pass or fail the Praxis I exam.

The Shuls study is not the only one to have found that the current screening tools are doing little more than unnecessarily limiting the supply of new teachers. In an article for��, Chad Alderman��provides��evidence supporting��, which discusses��a lack of knowledge in how to properly train good teachers and alternative ways to test teacher effectiveness. In his follow up article, he cites Shuls’ research as well as another��, all of which have concluded��that instead of screening out ineffective teachers only, Praxis I exams are actually screening out some potentially high quality teachers. Thus in Arkansas, raising Praxis I cut scores will lead to some of our better teachers being screened out.

Praxis II, however, is an almost effective screening mechanism for both Math and the English Language Arts (ELA) exams. Shuls finds a statistically significant difference between teachers who pass Praxis II and those that fail. The magnitude is, however, so small that Shuls recommends Arkansas leaders and citizens would be better served by trying alternative approaches to improving student outcomes. Increasing the cut scores for passing the two Praxis exams is not a good solution.

The “easy way” solution of working within the current system but increasing the cutoff score for passing the two Praxis exams does not work. More outside the box thinking is needed. Stanford University education researcher, Eric Hanushek, suggests that schools remove the very worst teachers from the classroom ().��Another alternative, is to allow parents to choose the school to enroll their children. School choice generates competition among schools which tends to increase teacher quality (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2003).

Increasing cutoff scores on Praxis exams is not the solution.��Teaching is a��doing��profession, not a��test-taking��profession.