An audit of a professional development firm and its multimillion-dollar work for the state hasn't yet been sent to the lawmakers who requested it in February, even as the Indiana-based company appears poised to be awarded another contract at the end of the month.
In 2017, Arkansas entered into a no-bid, $4 million contract with Bloomington, Ind.-based Solution Tree for a pilot project designed to provide professional development training. The state has continued to contract with the company, which has grown from working in the Prescott School District and 11 other schools to operating more than 150 school districts and 300 schools across the state, according to a Feb. 15 letter from CEO Jeffrey C. Jones.
A co-chair of one Legislative Joint Auditing subcommittee has said Solution Tree is receiving payments not just from the state and local school districts, but from educational cooperatives and higher education institutions.
The state's transparency website indicates Arkansas currently holds three con
tracts with the firm with a total value of $149.9 million.
On May 31, the Arkansas Legislative Council will review a new proposed contract from Solution Tree. If approved, the contract will last for one year at a cost to the state of about $16.5 million, with six optional one-year renewal periods at a similar cost. The contract would cost a total of nearly $112.5 million if maintained for the entire seven years.
AUDIT
Although the Legislative Council meeting is less than two weeks away, legislators say they have not received the results of the audit into Solution Tree and the outcomes of its work.
The audit was requested Feb. 8 by Legislative Joint Auditing's Executive Committee. Rep. Hope Duke, R-Gravette, said during the committee meeting that she thought the audit would need to scrutinize the money paid to Solution Tree, as well as how the contract was entered into. She requested a review of the state's procurement process, with special attention paid to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds being used for professional development. She also urged a review of expenditures, "including books, curriculum, trainings and conferences made by employees of the Arkansas Department of Education, education service coops, public school districts and public institutions of higher education in cases where those employees are also employed by Solution Tree Inc. or any company associated with it, or in cases where employees received any personal compensation from Solution Tree or any company associated with it.
"We have visited with legislative audit staff to how to narrow this scope a little bit to answer some of those questions and we're happy to do that," she said. "Whatever makes it work best for them as they look into this."
Committee member Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, told her colleagues she had asked for years of "summative evaluations" of Solution Tree's work in Arkansas schools.
"I can't find out how many children have moved from, or how many school districts have moved from an F school to a C school," she said. "And yet we are spending millions of dollars with Solution Tree."
Chesterfield added that she thought it was important for Arkansans to know whether their money was being well spent.
Rep. Grant Hodges, R-Centerton, who co-chairs the Legislative Joint Auditing Educational Institutions subcommittee, said that body had only in recent months become aware that Solution Tree was receiving payments from education service cooperatives, school districts and institutions of higher education. He said the audit would request details on "all expenditures to Solution Tree or any company associated with them, because we know that they do own other companies" in Arkansas.
"We just want a better sense of the contracts that have been entered into with those companies to kind of get an understanding of how those have come to be," he said.
With regard to procurement processes, Hodges said he wanted the audit to examine whether Solution Tree was in compliance. According to the representative, a school district told his subcommittee that the company had been encouraging districts to use Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds to pay in advance for professional development services, a practice encouraged on the firm's website.
"In talking with audit staff, we believe that might be a violation of our procurement policies," Hodges said.
He also said the audit should scan for potential conflicts of interest, as the company hires school district personnel to be consultants for them.
"To our knowledge they're not breaking any laws by hiring school personnel," Hodges said. "But we want to pay special attention to make sure if there are school district resources or education cooperative resources that are being sent to these companies, that those employees are not also working for the company."
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, said during the meeting that the audit request was about transparency, adding that the "number one responsibility" of the Legislature was to know how the state's money was being spent.
Sullivan, who is the other co-chair of the Educational Institutions subcommittee, said the lawmakers who initially requested the audit were be willing to narrow its focus to "the most important pieces" in hopes that it might be complete before the Legislative Council voted on the company's new contract.
The request for the audit was approved without any vocal opposition.
Education Department spokeswoman Kimberly Mundell said the agency would review the audit report once it is complete, but did not comment further on lawmakers' concerns.
Jones, Solution Tree's CEO, sent a letter to education leaders in Arkansas in response to the audit request, telling them that it "might impact Solution Tree's future work in Arkansas." The firm was "fully cooperating with the legislative committee, providing all necessary documentation," he said.
"Because of Solution Tree's commitment to providing research-based, results-driven services to educators for over 25 years, I am 1000% convinced that we will emerge unscathed," Jones said.
The CEO's letter included a statement he said he planned to send to the committee. In the statement, Jones described their approach to professional development as being customized for each education partner. The company contracts with nearly 600 educational experts, as well as publishes and manages the intellectual property of more than 800 authors, Jones said. Solution Tree reaches every state, every Canadian province and more than 20 other countries.
Jones said in his statement that Solution Tree's work in Arkansas, which included the establishment of an office and training space in Little Rock "to enhance the capacity and skills of administrators, teachers and school staff, had resulted in "significant achievements." During the pandemic, schools partnered with Solu- tion Tree "experienced less learning loss, a testament to the effectiveness of our programs," he said.
Calvin Daniels, chief marketing officer at Solution Tree, did not respond to a request for comment on the anticipated award of their new contract. An earlier email to spokeswoman Sarah PayneMills asking whether Solution Tree had been audited by other lawmakers in other states did not receive a response.
Speaking in an interview on Thursday, Sullivan said he wasn't sure whether Solution Tree would appear before the Legislative Council on May 31 to testify, and echoed Chesterfield's earlier concerns about student success as a result of the firm's work.
"It's going to be very difficult for me to vote to renew a contract that for seven years hasn't had significant outcomes and measurable outcomes," said Sullivan, who is also a member of the Arkansas Legislative Council.
Another Arkansas Legislative Council member, Sen. Reginald Murdock, D-Marianna, said he believed Solution Tree was a "great entity," and that he believed the company's work had succeeded in improving students' learning.
Murdock said he was among a group of lawmakers that made a trip to a Solution Tree conference in Arizona in 2016 and has had a chance to observe their practices "for many years." However, he added that he shared some of the other lawmakers' concerns.
"We should see results," he said. "That's how things are supposed to change."
Murdock said that he had "perused" Solution Tree's proposed contract but hadn't yet decided how he would vote.
"I'm waiting to hear a little more testimony on the situation," he said.
NEW PROPOSAL, OLD CONTRACT
Under Solution Tree's proposal for a new contract, the company would charge $16,497,619 for its first year of service. Year two would cost $16,442.807, while years three through five would cost $16,407,310. The cost would decrease slightly in year six, at $16,170,302. The seventh year would drop further, to $14,155,852.
A consensus summary score sheet from the Arkansas Department of Transformation and Shared Services lists a total of eight prospective contractors, including Solution Tree. The document lists an "average weighted technical proposal score" and a "cost score," which are added together to make a total score.
Solution Tree received the highest total score, at 750.41. It narrowly beat out MGT of America LLC, which received 748. Other notable scores included Carnegie Learning Inc., 717, and Bailey Education Group LLC, 638.
Only half of the prospective contractors received a cost score. Solution Tree easily received the lowest score, at 50.41, while MGT of America received the highest at 300. Bailey Education Group and Carnegie Learning received 218.03 and 248, respectively. Solution Tree said in its proposal that its PLC at Work program is "a research-based process that has sustained for over 25 years as it provides a structure and system of ongoing professional learning that is aligned to support district and state decisions around curriculum, instruction, and assessment." The company also said it would provide "at least 500 on-site occasions each year."
In 2017, then-Education Commissioner Johnny Key signed an agreement with Solution Tree President Ed Ackerman for the firm to provide consulting services to the department for $2,500, with the intent of supporting the planning and implementation of the pilot project for Professional Learning Communities. The step came before the state executed the $4 million contract with the company.
"Members of the Arkansas Legislature investigated a variety of strategies and determined PLC at Work process most effectively meets the needs of schools in Arkansas," Key wrote in a letter dated May 12 to the state's procurement director at the time, Ed Armstrong, in which Key made a pitch for awarding a sole-source contract to Solution Tree.
"Solution Tree is the only vendor that can deliver the PLC at Work process. The resources are copyrighted and the intellectual property of Solution Tree. The validity of the program would be compromised, and consistent evaluation, impossible, if another, concurrent vendor was implementing a separate program," Key said in his letter to Armstrong.
Rather than allowing Key's department to issue the solesource contract, Armstrong authorized the department to initiate "special procurement" of a contract with Solution Tree without seeking bids.
INITIAL REPORTS
According to the firm, 2020-2023 ACT Aspire data suggested that more students who were in PLC at Work schools in the state moved out of the bottom quarter than students in schools that did not participate in the program. It also cited a study by a group whose name was redacted in the form that reportedly found "improved communication, trust and collective responsibility among educators," which resulted in improved student engagement and learning.
In 2022, the state Bureau of Legislative Research published an adequacy study on professional development and teacher evaluations. The report analyzed of ACT Aspire score data from students across the professional learning community project's first three cohorts, in 2017, 2019 and 2021. It "did not find any consistent trends to indicate a positive or negative impact" of the program using ACT Aspire scores.
A 2021 third-party study conducted on behalf of Solution Tree and the state Division of Elementary and Secondary Education that studied schools in the first cohort found, however, that students in that cohort showed improved academic achievement and higher levels of engagement. The schools noted positive changes in instructional practices, as well as an improved culture of collaboration and collective responsibility for educators.
The bureau also surveyed teachers in spring 2021, asking them questions about the professional development they received and about its usefulness. Positive comments highlighted the benefits of collaboration with and without professional learning communities, while negative comments mostly "centered on professional development needs not being met, either because teachers did not have a say in their professional development courses or because not enough of the professional development addressed their specific needs."
A 2019 survey by the bureau was more favorable, however. Three principals at three different participating schools recommended the program and "generally spoke favorably about it," with two noting that "it was the best [professional development] or training they had received." The educators also said they saw increased student achievement, though they added that it was not always reflected in their ACT Aspire scores or school letter grades.
Mundell did not answer an emailed question about whether the Education Department had more recent data on the Solution Tree's effectiveness in Arkansas, stating the question should be referred to the company.