Slavery was abolished in 1865, and for the first time schooling was made possible for black people. From the end of theReconstruction era in the 1870s down to the 1940s, the state and local governments gave far less money to all-black public schools compared to the favored white public schools. However many private schools for black people were funded by Northern philanthropy well into the 20th century. Support came from theAmerican Missionary Association;[4] thePeabody Education Fund; theJeanes Fund (also known as the Negro Rural School Fund); theSlater Fund; theRosenwald Fund; theSouthern Education Foundation; and theGeneral Education Board, which was massively funded by the Rockefeller family.[5][6]
In the 1920s the state required all children to attend public schools. The school year was set at 131 days, although some areas were unable to meet that requirement.[7][8]
Arkansas is one of the least educated U.S. states. It ranks near the bottom in terms of percentage of the population with a high school or college degree. The state's educational system has a history of underfunding, low teachers' salaries and political meddling in the curriculum.[11] However,recent focuses on phonics education have led to an improvement in educational rankings over the past fifteen years.
Educational statistics during the early days are fragmentary and unreliable. Many counties did not submit full reports to the secretary of state, who did double duty as commissioner of common schools. But the percentage of whites over 20 years old who were illiterate was given as:
Arkansas ranks as the 32nd smartest state on theMorgan Quitno Smartest State Award, 44th in percentage of residents with at least a high school diploma, and 48th in percentage of bachelor's degree attainment.[16][17] Arkansas has been making strides in education reform.Education Week has praised the state, ranking Arkansas in the top 10 of their Quality Counts Education Rankings every year since 2009 while scoring it in the top5 during 2012 and 2013.[18][19][20] Arkansas specifically received an A in Transition and Policy Making for progress in this area consisting of early-childhood education, college readiness, and career readiness.[21] GovernorMike Beebe has made improving education a major issue through his attempts to spend more on education.[22] Through reforms, the state is a leader in requiring curricula designed to prepare students for postsecondary education, rewarding teachers for student achievement, and providing incentives for principals who work in lower-tier schools.[23]
Generally prohibited in the Western world at large,school corporal punishment is not unusual in recent Arkansas experience, with 20,083 public school students[a] paddled at least one time, according to government data for the 2011–12 school year.[24] The rate of corporal punishment in public schools is higher only inMississippi.[24]
As an organized territory, and later in the early days of statehood, education was funded by the sales of federally controlled public lands. This system was inadequate and prone to local graft. In an 1854 message to the legislature, GovernorElias N. Conway said, "We have a common-school law intended as a system to establish common schools in all part of the state; but for the want of adequate means there are very few in operation under this law." At the time, only about a quarter of children were enrolled in school. By the beginning of the American Civil War, the state had only twenty-five publicly funded common schools.[25]
In 1864 the chairman of the committee on education of the state legislature stated that the state government has:
mismanaged and squandered to a great extent the appropriations or donations made by the United States [federal government] to this State for school purposes. We have had over 1,000 acres of land appropriated in this state to purposes of education, but under the management of our public functionaries it has amounted to almost nothing.[26]
In 1867, the state legislature was still controlled by ex-Confederates. It passed a Common Schools Law that allowed public funded but limited schools to white children.
The 1868 legislature banned former Confederates and passed a more wide-ranging law detailing funding and administrative issues and allowing black children to attend school. In furtherance of this, the postwar 1868 state constitution was the first to permit a personal-property tax to fund the lands and buildings for public schools. With the 1868 elections, the first county school commissioners took office.[27]
In 2014, the state spent $9,616 per student, compared with a national average of about $11,000 putting Arkansas in nineteenth place.[28]
According to ERIC (1970), the story begins in 1871 with the founding of Arkansas Industrial University, a land-grant school renamed as theUniversity of Arkansas. The Branch Normal College for Blacks began in 1873; it became Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in 1927, andUniversity of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in 1972. From time to time several schools began as agricultural high schools, junior colleges or normal institutes (for training elementary teachers). Most expanded to their present status. The early ones were small and had very small budgets, and little or no state oversight.
^Joe M. Richardson,Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (1986).
^Stephanie Deutsch,You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South (Northwestern University Press, 2015).
^James Christopher Carbaugh, "The philanthropic confluence of the General Education Board and the Jeanes, Slater, and Rosenwald Funds: African-American education in South Carolina, 1900-1930" (PhD dissertation, Clemson University, 1997; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 9833440.)
^This figure refers to only the number of students paddled, regardless of whether a student was spanked multiple times in a year, and does not refer to the number of instances of corporal punishment, which would be substantially higher.
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