What would you do if you had 150 million dollars to spend on improving student learning outcomes in Arkansas?
That’s how much money Arkansas has spent on Solution Tree’s PLC at Work program, and our new report and policy brief examined what effect that investment has had on Arkansas students’ achievement and value-added growth.
The answer? No changes. Nothing. Nada.
Over the past several weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the program, and on Monday the Arkansas Department of Education terminated another proposed multi-million contract with Solution Tree.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, PLC stands for Professional Learning Communities, where teachers are organized into working groups to foster practice-based professional learning with aims of achieving improved student learning outcomes. While PLCs as a concept can look different in different schools, the PLC at Work program is an intensive three-year program developed by Solution Tree. Each school selected to be a PLC at Work partner receives up to 50 days annually of on-site professional development delivered by certified Solution Tree associates. In addition, a certified Solution Tree PLC at Work associate or site coach is assigned to coordinate program implementation. The stated goal is to improve student achievement.
Ninety schools throughout the state have applied and been selected to partner with Solution Tree and become PLC at work schools since the program began in 2017. To determine if participating in the PLC at Work program made a difference for students, we compared the performance of students in these PLC at Work schools with the performance of students attending all other similar schools that were not identified as PLC at Work schools.
We examined weighted achievement scores from the state-required ACT Aspire assessments of English Language Arts and mathematics given in grades 3-10. We found no statistically significant effect, either positive or negative, on student achievement. This was true for students overall and also among students who face economic disadvantages.
We also examined value-added growth scores from same assessments. We found no statistically significant effect, either positive or negative, on student growth. This was true for students overall and also among students who face economic disadvantages.
All the intensive work by teachers and school leaders led to no changes for student learning, and the ADE wisely decided that they were no longer going to support the program with millions of dollars. We’ve heard feedback from folks that believe in the program, and address common comments below:
“But it works great at my school!”
We hear from some school leaders that our results can’t be right- because they see that the PLC at Work program has had huge benefits at their school. That may be true, but since the results show no change overall, if their school is doing a lot better, another PLC at Work school must be doing a lot worse!
“They probably didn’t do it right.”
Poor implementation of a program is a common excuse for poor outcomes. In the first group of PLC at Work schools a study determined that the schools were implementing the program correctly. We still found no differences over the next five years in student achievement or value-added growth between these schools and similar schools that were not implementing PLC at Work. Also, there are Solution Tree experts on-site one a week on average (27% of school days) and a specific Solution Tree-related person whose job is to coordinate program implementation. In our opinion, that much support should be leading to proper implementation of the PLC at Work Model.
“Well, maybe it is making teachers happier and less likely to leave teaching.”
Keeping great teachers in the classroom is critical to student learning, but we are not seeing increased student learning across the PLC at Work schools.
Yesterday, however, the state released information on where we are seeing increased student learning. The Merit Teacher Incentive Fund Program that was created under the LEARNS Act to recognize and reward excellent teachers across the State of Arkansas, and there are 35 teachers slated to receive a $10,000 bonus for being in the top 0.5% of teachers for growth in student performance, and another 35 will get $9,000 for being in the top 1%. That’s the kind of reward that will make great teachers stay in classrooms.
Here at OEP, we are all about student growth and know there are excellent teachers in many Arkansas classrooms. You can check out this interactive map to see for yourself. Let’s reward the great teachers that are making a difference in student learning and say good riddance to multi-million dollar contracts that show no evidence of increasing student learning.