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Next-Gen Learning: Businesses Embrace Career AcademiesLock Icon

8 min read

Imagine learning high school geometry by welding a 90-degree angle, or mastering financial skills by working shifts at a real savings and loan on campus.

Those experiences could soon be commonplace as Little Rock-area schools accelerate a plan to put all 13,000 public high school students in Pulaski County on career-themed paths. The effort also aims to recast public schools as magnets for central Arkansas economic development, not impediments.

The multiyear initiative, called Ford Next Generation Learning, has a diverse mix of champions, including the Little Rock Regional Chamber, local industry leaders and one of the country’s most storied manufacturers, Ford Motor Co. of Dearborn, Michigan.

The comprehensive community endeavor has enlisted educators, employers and civic leaders as partners in a model that has transformed secondary schools elsewhere.

The Pulaski NGL program would create career learning academies at each of the county’s dozen public high schools. Eventually, it should give every student a pipeline to college or local jobs in high-demand, high-wage fields, advocates say.

The program has raised grades, attendance and graduation rates in several cities, including Nashville, Tennessee, the “poster child” for the local project. Superintendents and school boards in the Little Rock, North Little Rock, Pulaski County and Jacksonville North Pulaski districts have approved building the program over the next four or five years; seven schools are poised to start freshman academies next fall.

The academies will be geared to prepare all students “to be both college- and career-ready,” Chamber CEO Jay Chesshir said. “This historic partnership between the four districts has been tremendously energizing.”

The NGL model aligns students with career-themed paths that interest them. “The theme could be pre-college, with advanced placement and International Baccalaureate classes, or manufacturing or ROTC,” said James Reddish, whose experience with NGL in a previous job in Louisville, Kentucky, was part of his allure last year when he became the Little Rock chamber’s executive vice president. “Whatever theme you pick, you create a thread that weaves through science, social studies, English and math.”

The program, developed and promoted by the Ford Motor Co. Fund, which gets a portion of the automaker’s annual profits, will start with freshman academies next fall at North Little Rock High, Jacksonville High, the new Southwest High in the Little Rock district and perhaps Hall High School and others, for a total of five or six, Reddish said. The remaining county schools will start in 2021. In each successive year, new grades or schools would join.

“Instead of learning principles of geometry generically, you learn about a 90-degree angle because you’re about to weld a 90-degree angle,” Reddish said. “Then you take that welded metal to chemistry class and test the chemical integrity of the weld. All of a sudden the principles are directly connected to something the student is interested in. This answers the age-old question of ‘when am I ever going to need to know this?’ The answer is, next period.”

Businesses contributing time and resources to the project are set to hire some graduates straight into entry-level jobs, but are expected to hold positions for prospects who need a college education. Some employers may even pay university tuition.

School leaders are excited. Michael Poore, superintendent of the Little Rock School District, called the program “historic” (see Cheers From Educators and Job Makers below), and North Little Rock Superintendent Bobby J. Acklin envisions a vigorous collaboration with businesses. “We want our students to be ready for the careers that they desire,” he said via email. Pulaski County Special School District Superintendent Charles McNulty said the career and technical education initiative would “give students choice and give our communities a robust workforce for the future.”

Schools of Choice

One NGL goal is to restore public trust in public schooling, and to rev it up as an economic engine, Reddish said. But the program arrives against a backdrop of mistrust in the Little Rock District, which was wrested from local school board control nearly five years ago after the state labeled several schools as failing.

“For decades we’ve seen a population migration from Pulaski County’s core out to surrounding counties, growing communities like Benton, Bryant, Cabot and Conway,” Reddish said. “But if this goes on too long and is driven not by choice but by people trying to get away from something — in this case the public schools — then you end up like Jackson, Mississippi, a doughnut ring with nothing in the middle.”

The county’s four school systems must become “school districts of choice,” said Reddish, who has an economic development background and last worked for a Chicago-area education nonprofit.

“We don’t want families moving out of the county to get what they see as a workable public option.”

Danny Games, Entergy Arkansas’ economic development guru, underlined that point. “Public education is vastly important to the economic future of central Arkansas, and Entergy has been deeply invested. We had a chance to support something that will impact thousands of children.”

Entergy paid for a $52,000 “benchmark analysis” in January to start the program, and dozens of business and civic volunteers dived into the master planning process this fall, Reddish said.

AT&T Arkansas and the Arkansas Travelers baseball club joined Entergy with financial contributions. Other central Arkansas companies sent representatives to evaluate the program in Nashville, where graduation rates have soared under NGL from 58% in 2005 to 84% in 2018. Those businesses include Clark Contractors, Mainstream Technologies, Lexicon Steel, the Friday Eldredge & Clark law firm, Entergy, AT&T Arkansas and Baptist Health.

“We have two to three dozen companies with employees serving on planning committees,” Reddish said. “We haven’t formalized the partnerships at this point, but many of the companies have expressed an initial interest in long-term commitments.”

About 140 community volunteers are already enrolled, “business leaders, faith-based leaders, elected officials and nonprofits,” Reddish said. “They’re helping write the master plan.”

In return, businesses get a sense of ownership in the schools and real influence in shaping learning plans. Nashville schools rely on long-term business partners like Nissan and Gaylord Opryland Resort, which built a scale-model restaurant in one school. “Students literally learn on what they would work with on a Gaylord property,” Reddish said. Another academy has a working credit union on campus that employs students.

Reddish said that without the graduation boost seen with NGL, 12,258 students who would have dropped out ended up with diplomas in Nashville. Researchers multiplied that figure by the $8,000 a year extra that graduates earn as opposed to non-graduates, bringing the economic impact to $96 million a year.

‘Pretty Expensive’

NGL is admittedly a “pretty expensive process,” Chesshir said. Setting up state-of-the-art lab spaces for different industries — a blood-drawing station for health care students, for instance — makes industry financial support necessary. Ford also heavily discounts its consulting work. “They charge a tenth of what you’d probably see from leading consultants,” Reddish said, adding that local businesses in one NGL community committed $25,000 to the program before the plan was even written.

Each school will probably need to add one staff position, Reddish said, basically a liaison with businesses. Other budgeting needs might be met by shuffling existing positions and dollars. “All high schools currently have workforce programs. Reallocating or re-prioritizing those efforts will free up some resources previously used piecemeal,” he said.

Businesses will have three avenues for shaping coursework, said Kristi Barr, the Chamber’s director of workforce development and education. A “CEO Champions Board” will refresh curriculum plans yearly, looking at macroeconomic data and trending industries. Industry-specific councils will work with individual academies, tracking job needs and skills. At the school level, businesses will offer direct advice to specific industry academies.

“Instead of having to recreate a workforce development speech 10 different times, the same manufacturing group that advises one high school can also advise others, limiting the ask on the business community,” Reddish said.

Chesshir said all of Pulaski County’s schools have pockets of excellence, but he wants every student to benefit from a “wall-to-wall” approach. “We believe Ford NGL is the right model to help scale and spread that good work for the benefit of all students in the county.”


Cheers From Educators and Job Makers

For Little Rock School District Superintendent Michael Poore, the Ford NGL program is a silver lining in an otherwise dreary year.

His district remains under partial state control, the Little Rock teachers union staged a one-day strike this month after being stripped of collective bargaining power, and national articles blared that a city notorious for fighting school integration 60 years ago is flirting with a de facto replay.

But Poore waxed enthusiastic about Next Generation Learning, which over the next few years will put all Pulaski County high school students into career-themed academies where team learning will be overseen by teachers following the same set of students through to graduation.

He called the coalition behind the industry-involved initiative “historic.” “We have four school districts coming together, five chambers of commerce, six cities and the Teachers [Arkansas Education] Association —- all collaborating with the [Little Rock Regional] Chamber, for an unprecedented delivery,” he told Arkansas Business via email.

“We know that through this effort we will elevate a new level of engagement for our students and that will lead to a new level of students being prepared for post-secondary opportunities.”

Business leaders looking to shape the future workforce are also cheerleaders.

Laura Landreaux

Entergy Arkansas CEO Laura Landreaux told Arkansas Business that an educated, skilled and diverse workforce “is critical not only to Entergy Arkansas’ long-term mission, but also to the health of the communities we serve.”

Other executives who witnessed the Nashville, Tennessee, program were struck by how it mimics workplace teamwork and opens students’ minds.

Patrick Schueck, president and CEO of Lexicon Fabricators & Constructors of Little Rock, told Arkansas Business he’s passionate about the program. “Ford NGL has had great successes, and I believe it can take learning in Pulaski County to the next level. I’ve had a chance to see students in the academy model in other communities, and what struck me was the level of engagement and passion for learning. I talked with students who had a Plan A for the future, but also had a Plan B, and they were clearly all prepared for graduation.”

The curriculum makes sense to students, he said. “Rather than our typical consumption model of learning, where kids sit and listen, it’s a creative model that lets kids learn through projects.

“As the use of cellphones, iPads and computers has changed the way kids learn, act and communicate, Ford NGL has created a learning model that modernizes how we educate this next generation of technology-savvy kids.”

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