District wraps up four-day desegregation hearing

LITTLE ROCK — Attorneys for the Pulaski County Special School District on Friday ended a four-day presentation to a federal judge on district efforts to improve the academic achievement for Black students with a discussion on whether closing a racial achievement gap is legally required.

U.S. District Chief Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. is presiding in the court hearing this month on whether the 12,000-student Pulaski Special district has met its obligations in its desegregation plan, Plan 2000, regarding student achievement, student discipline, the condition of school buildings and self-monitoring of desegregation efforts.

The district is seeking a declaration of unitary status and release from further court monitoring of its operations in what is now a 37-yearold lawsuit. Attorneys for the district’s Black students who are known as the McClendon intervenors contend that the district has not met its obligations and is not entitled to be released from court oversight.

Devin Bates, an attorney for the Pulaski County Special district, recapped for Marshall the district’s multiple “exciting” initiatives, including the fulfillment of a $10 million commitment to a college-introduction program for high school students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Philander Smith College.

Bates said the work on student achievement is being done “by some of the finest teachers and leaders” that a school district can expect and that those leaders were praised earlier in the day by the judge’s desegregation expert, Margie Powell.

But Bates called the persistent achievement gap between Black and white students “the elephant in the room.” He argued that previous court decisions — including some in the current, long-running lawsuit — say that requiring closure of the gap has to be based on expert testimony that ties a constitutional violation of racial segregation by the district to an achievement gap between student groups.

“There has never been that testimony in this case and .. intervenors have no testimony of that now,” said Bates.

Bates also said that in the 1984 decision in which the late U.S. District Judge Henry Woods found the Pulaski County Special district to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution in regard to racial segregation, there was no finding on the achievement gap.

Scott Richardson, an attorney for the Jacksonville/ North Pulaski School District — which is also operating under court supervision on student achievement and discipline — added to Bates’ argument. He told the judge that a remedy must be related to a constitutional violation.

“Plan 2000 exceeds appropriate limits if it is aimed at eliminating conditions that do not violate the Constitution or do not flow from such a violation,” Richardson said, citing federal court orders dealing with school desegregation in Missouri.

He said there are a lot of causes for an academic achievement gap that come from outside schools.

Robert Pressman, an attorney for the McClendon intervenors, argued to the judge that the district’s own leaders — Superintendent Charles McNulty and Deputy Superintendent Alesia Smith — testified during the week that it was possible to close the district’s achievement gap, that the gap is unacceptable but not insurmountable.

Pressman recited the grade-by-grade percentages of black students who scored at the lowest level on the state-mandated ACT Aspire reading exams. Thirty-five to 55% of the black students scored at the lowest level, he said. He noted that many of the district’s current initiatives to raise achievement were only started in the past two or three years.

In her testimony Friday morning, Powell, the court’s desegregation monitor, called the Pulaski district’s team of McNulty and Smith the “dynamic duo” and that she is now optimistic about the district’s operation after a period of frequently changing superintendents in the first decade of the 21st century.

Powell said she has been surprised this week by the focus that has been placed on district efforts to comply with what is called the Ross plan when it hasn’t been the focus in the past two decades.

Powell said it was “common knowledge” the Ross plan with its goals for reducing the achievement gap between Black and white students was an unedited draft that was attached to the district’s Plan 2000 by accident. While she didn’t disagree with the sentiment of the goals, she called the plan “ambiguous.” That’s because it doesn’t include the definition of reducing the disparity gap.

In response to questions from Austin Porter Jr., an attorney for the McClendon intervenors, Powell said she was unaware that the district had discontinued the Formative Evaluation Process for School Improvement, which she had cited in her recent plan about the district’s efforts to raise student achievement.

Porter also questioned a section of Powell’s report on the Act Aspire test results between 2016 and 2019, saying that the gaps were not as large as those he had calculated using a report from the ACT company. Powell said she received the information from the district.

Wendell Brown, an official with the Advancement Via Individual Determination organization, described for the judge his program that was put into each of the district’s 25 campuses this past school year.

The 40- year- old AVID program, now in some 7,000 schools in 47 states, provides training to teachers on academic rigor and cultural responsiveness with the purpose of helping students — particularly students who are not performing at their full potential — to hone their reading, writing, inquiry and organizational skills to be better, more engaged learners.