A company who pulled their bid for a multi-year exclusive contract with the state in May has now been hired to supply professional development training to educators and school districts under LEARNS.
Solution Tree, an Indiana-based company, announced their selection this morning via press release. Their announcement comes amid a pending legislative audit into past payments to the company and a study questioning the efficacy of Solution Tree’s prior work in the state.
According to their press release, Solution Tree is one of 17 qualified vendors selected “to directly support the implementation of Arkansas LEARNS through professional learning communities (PLCs).” A total of $16.5 million has been allocated to school districts around the state for “professional development grants” that will be used to pay the vendor or vendors that a district chooses to work with.
PLCs provide professional development by allowing “educators [to] meet, exchange ideas, talk about current issues and problems, and generally collaborate.” Their success, however, is debatable at best.
In June, the University of Arkansas’s Office for Education Policy published a study showing PLCs offered “no statistically significant improvements … in overall student achievement or growth.” Worse still, the study said, “there were concerning trends for economically disadvantaged students.” Overall, the study concluded, “The results raise concerns about [PLCs’] current effectiveness and suggest a need for enhanced oversight and accountability.”
That study came at the conclusion of a tumultuous six months for Solution Tree in Arkansas.
The company became a vendor in Arkansas in 2017 through a no-bid, $4 million contract for a pilot project designed to provide professional development training. This was shortly after some legislators attended conferences in Atlanta and Phoenix about the benefits of PLCs. For the next six fiscal years, Solution Tree continued to get no-bid contracts, in increasing amounts, to provide professional development services.
By this year, Solution Tree’s Arkansas footprint had grown from 12 school districts to more than 150 school districts and 300 schools across the state. In January, the state scrapped the no-bid approach and solicited bids for professional development services. Solution Tree was chosen as the sole provider under a contract worth $15.7 million in the first year and close to $100 million over the life of the agreement.
In February, legislators began asking questions about Solution Tree’s performance. Rep. Grant Hodges (R-Rogers) said state procurement laws may have been violated in awarding contracts to the company. The Legislature referred the company to auditors for a complete review of payments to Solution Tree, state contracts with the company and the efficacy of the PLC program to date. According to Kevin White with Legislative Audit, that audit is ongoing. Auditors “anticipate a final report by the end of the calendar year.”
Regardless of the audit, the Arkansas Department of Education initially proceeded with a new contract for Solution Tree, which was submitted to the legislature for approval in May. Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva asked lawmakers to pull the contract from consideration a short time later, however. The University of Arkansas study regarding the problems with PLCs was released a few weeks later.
In August, the Department of Education asked legislators to approve a new process for funding professional development services by authorizing multiple qualified vendors that school districts could choose from. Last month, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported 19 companies had applied to be qualified vendors.
While the approval of Solution Tree and 16 other qualified vendors will give districts a choice in who to contract with for professional development services, it is unclear whether this market approach will make a difference in student outcomes. If the non-Solution Tree vendors mirror Solution Tree’s “PLC at Work” program, it is difficult to see how their results would be any different than Solution Tree’s. And the U of A study summed those results up in rather stark terms:
The difference-in-differences analysis did not yield statistically significant evidence indicating effectiveness of the PLC at Work program for any of the outcomes examined across for students overall or for students facing economic disadvantages. In fact, the estimates suggest a negative association between PLC at Work participation and student academic outcomes. Specifically, students enrolled in PLC at Work schools exhibited a 0.721-point decrease in average weighted achievement compared to their counterparts in non-PLC at Work schools. This negative association was even more pronounced for economically disadvantaged students, with a decrease of 1.026 points.
Similarly, analyses of school-level value-added growth revealed negative associations for PLC at Work schools. Students in these schools experienced a 0.152- and 0.201-point decrease in overall value-added growth compared to students attending non-PLC at Work schools, for all students and economically disadvantaged students, respectively. Notably, the declines in growth scores were more substantial in mathematics compared to [English and language arts].
For more on Solution Tree and how the company came to do business in Arkansas, read Baker Kurrus’ Arkansas Times column excoriating the PLC at Work concept as the equivalent of paying tens of millions of dollars for “Magical Thinking Caps.” And for great blow-by-blow coverage of the University of Arkansas study and the rapid collapse of support for Solution Tree in the Legislature, check out Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter Josh Snyder’s reporting.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
