Arkansas Blog

The students with high grades and low test scores should not be penalized, but the fact remains that they are not ready for college. The fact that it is not their fault does not make them ready for college. They need a lot more than a scholarship, and they should get it---a real college preparatory high school education. Perhaps the universities could create academies for those students who are being let down by their local schools.

Here are the ACT college readiness benchmarks, which are based on actual college grades:

18 English
22 Math
21 Reading
24 Science
21 Composite

If you get these scores, then you have a 50% chance of getting a B or higher and a 75% chance of getting a C or higher in the corresponding college courses.

In my experience as a professor, these score cutoffs are optimistic. These kinds of scores will not prepare students to succeed in a difficult major that leads to a job.

A composite score below 19 is not even a middle school mastery level of performance. It is ridiculous to be talking about college scholarships for students who have not even mastered middle school.

But there is no way to fix the system at just the college and high school levels. It needs to be fixed at birth and in preschool, kindergarten, and primary school.

Not at all to dispute what Prof. Mann has stated, but still I wonder how one of my heroines, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, might have fared on the various components of tests like the ACT. Certainly, she had few educational advantages in the early years of her life. Here are a few excerpts from Ernie Dumas' excellent Arkansas Times story about her earlier this month.

"Born Minnie Lee Jones (she changed her name in college to Joycelyn, the name of her favorite peppermint candy), she was the eldest of eight children, which made her the foreman when each of them got old enough to help in the cotton fields that her daddy sharecropped. He also trapped raccoons and she helped him skin them. They ate the raccoons and he saved the money from the skins to buy swatches of land for himself, eventually accumulating 80 acres.

"School for blacks was a two-room house at Bright Star (the one in Howard County, not the one farther south in Miller County), where there were benches but no desks, no workbooks and few books. School was held when there was no work to be done in the fields. The school bus was an old truck chassis with a flatbed covered by a big plank box with chicken wire nailed over the window openings so the children wouldn't tumble out. High school was the training school for black children still farther east at Tollette although few went to high school.

" In 1944, she got a better chance. Her father got a wartime job in the Richmond Shipyards on San Francisco Bay and she and her mother and the smallest baby joined him for two years. For the first time she attended school with whites. The school tested her and placed her two grades ahead of her age group. She excelled for two years and she got the idea that she was as bright as white kids and might do something more than work in the cotton fields or even clerk in a dime store at Nashville, which had been her farfetched ambition. Only whites were store clerks in Arkansas in the 1940s.

"The family was reunited at Schaal after the war and she went to the training school for blacks at Tollette, graduating in 1949 at the age of 16. A Methodist official announced at the graduation that the church was giving a scholarship at Philander Smith College at Little Rock to the valedictorian, which was she. She had never heard of Philander Smith or been to Little Rock, but she wanted to go. Her father did not want her to go because she was needed for the cotton harvest in late September, but her grandmother persuaded him to let her go. When fall came the family did not have the $3.82 bus fare from Nashville to Little Rock. All the children turned out to pick early cotton until they had the fare.

"It was at Philander Smith where she met Edith Irby, the first black medical student at the University of Arkansas, who was invited to speak at chapel. Irby, later Dr. Edith Irby Jones, professor of medicine at the University of Texas, ended by reciting a poem about taking the high road. Minnie Jones was spellbound and decided that she would be a doctor, too. After college, she joined the Women's Army Medical Corps, received training as a physical therapist and finished as a second lieutenant and with eligibility for the GI Bill. Together with her Army savings, that enabled her to go to medical school. She would excel as a student, an intern and a resident and finally as a medical scientist."

If a student has a high-school GPA better than a "B" and needs remedial classes in college, the school district should pay the tuition?

I share durango's admiration from Dr. Elders and I'd say Obama should put her back in the Surgeon General's office.

I read today that the lottery money would give qualified lucky students scholarships ranging between 2500 and 5500 per year and that sounds groovy, but where can you go to college for 2500 to 5500 per year? My kid is living at home and a semester at UAFS is about 2200 without counting hundreds of dollars for books. The U of A at Fayetteville is easily twice that because freshmen are required to stay in college housing. So that's more like 5500 per semester.

This lottery money is some money for nothing....so why not set things up in a way that guarantees a lucky, qualified, kid can for sure attend a good college for 4 straight years without having to resort to prostitution to make ends meet? If a kid is poor and someone gives him 2500 bucks towards the 5000 he or she needs to attend college for 2 semesters a year...unless they're lucky enough to find some more free money....they'd be shit out of luck. You know how it is when the electric company guy is there to shut off your juice unless you pay him a hundred bucks...and you only have 72 dollars? You'll be sitting in the dark as if you had no money in your hand.

Is someone not doing the math right or is someone offering a plan in such a sneaky way that they know will reduce the number of kids that will actually take the money and go to school? That's sorta like all those rebates you get. The company offering the rebate knows less than half the people will ever mail their coupon in. Do this scholarship thing right! Make sure each kid has enough money to go to school, not some of the money or half the money or almost enough money.

The first thing I'd do is prohibit UAF, ASU, UALR and UCA from offering ANY remedial math or English classes.

Students who aren't prepared to do the basic course work at major colleges should spend time at local colleges until they have the foundations needed to succeed.

Reading the wonderful story of J Elders makes me wonder why It was chosen for this argument.

While the state provided her with the most miserable excuse for education she was two grades ahead by middle school.

Is there any reason NOT to have expected her ACT scores to be in the high 20's?

Just so you know, mudturtle, I did not post the Elders story for the sake of an "argument." Rather, I posted it to join Ernie Dumas in illustrating the fact that remarkable people like Elders can (and every day do) overcome educational barriers. My answer to your question is that there's no reason to expect that Elders would NOT have "scored in the high 20's" on the ACT. Nor, given the dire circumstances of her early life, is there any reason to expect that she would have. Thus, all we can do is "wonder" how she might have fared. On a related note, some have made the point on threads similar to this one that ACT text scores cannot always predict whether one will succeed in college. I wholeheartedly agree with their point of view.

Not everyone can overcome such a dismal early education.

Still, I think an 11 year old, who is moved up two years in class is doing pretty well.

Unless there are serious learning disorders, I would be willing to bet that most high school valedictorians meet the ACT "benchmarks"

Not everyone can overcome such a dismal early education.

Still, I think an 11 year old, who is moved up two years in class is doing pretty well.

Unless there are serious learning disorders, I would be willing to bet that most high school valedictorians meet the ACT "benchmarks"

The six year graduation rate from UAF is just over 55%. For minorities it is far lower. In fact if you omit Asians, the graduation rate of minorities would be in the 30's. While I am sure that some will claim, "they have to drop out for money problems", I suspect the rate of graduation will drop rather than increase as more money is available.

I am just not sure that returning to Parkin with a C in remedial English, and two D's in Western Civ. has accomplished much beyond enlarging horizons a little bit, something could be done in a variety of public service opportunities.

College isn't the only answer. Two years in a Vo-tech can give you the skills needed to land a $30,000 job.

Look at young adults who graduated from high school in 2002 and enrolled in college and see how many are doing better than that.