Oliva’s accelerated mindset: More 18-year-olds with degrees 

By STEVE BRAWNER

Secretary of Education Dr. Jacob Oliva wants more Arkansas high school seniors graduating with two-year associate’s degrees. Some could even leave high school as four-year college graduates.

Oliva touted an “accelerated mindset” in comments Tuesday before the Arkansas School Boards Association and the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators.

Oliva became Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ secretary of education in January 2023 after serving in various roles in the Florida Department of Education, most recently as interim commissioner, the top job. He started his career teaching elementary students with special needs.

He told the ASBA-AAEA Joint Leadership Conference that schools should design pathways for all students to achieve.

“We’ve created this culture and this mindset that we’ve got to focus on the bottom, which I agree,” he said. “Kids in the bottom need a lot of help. They need a lot of support. They need a lot of intervention. They need scaffolds. But while we’ve been focusing on the bottom, we’ve been holding everybody back. And our systems need to be designed to support all students, meet them where they are and push them as far as we can get them to go.”

Students across Arkansas can earn both high school and college credit through Advanced Placement and concurrent credit classes. Concurrent credit classes are free to students under the Arkansas ACCESS law passed in 2025.

Oliva wants students to go even further. He said 117 students graduated high school with a two-year associate’s degree in 2023. He’d like it to be 10% of students statewide.

The Hope and Texarkana school districts are among those leading the way. Those districts send students to nearby University of Arkansas community college campuses to take concurrent classes. Many have earned their associate’s degrees. Hope has been doing it since the 2018-19 school year, Texarkana the year after.

Greenbrier High School, meanwhile, employs enough teachers with master’s degrees that students can earn an associate’s degree on campus. This year, 29 seniors – 11.2% of the graduating class – are on track to graduate with an associate’s degree from the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton. Many other students are knocking out a lot of their college hours.

Oliva said Arkansas can do even better. When he was in Florida, a high school junior told him he was on track to earn his four-year biology degree the next year. He’d already passed the Medical College Admission Test and had lined up a residency.

“Are these kids not in Arkansas?” he said. “Do we say for these kids, there’s a path for you? Because one path doesn’t meet the need of all of our kids, but those kids are in your district.”

The key to this accelerated mindset is holding students to higher standards and then offering them opportunities to take accelerated classes regardless of where tradition says those classes belong. A second grader ready for fifth grade math should be placed in a fifth grade math class. He suggested that seventh grade students excelling in math be automatically enrolled in algebra that year unless their parents opt out. Freshmen scoring proficient or advanced on state tests in core subjects should automatically go into Advanced Placement classes unless their parents opt out.

Oliva experienced the need for a more accelerated mindset personally when he moved to Arkansas and enrolled his son in a ninth grade academy. His son had taken algebra in seventh grade and geometry in eighth grade in Florida, so he was ready for Algebra 2, and he also was ready to take Spanish 2 and Advanced Placement Human Geography, which covers geography and population trends. None of those were available because they were all “high school” courses. His son was happy to have an easy year, but his needs wouldn’t have been met. The school worked out some arrangements, but the incident illustrated the need for change.

Furthermore, Oliva found that 47% of Arkansas’ high school seniors left school before noon in 2023. He said the state has had a “rite of passage” that the senior year should be easy. But that mindset is not preparing students for the next phase of life.

Will more 18-year-olds be leaving high school with an associate’s degree, or even a bachelor’s? Undoubtedly things are moving in that direction, and why not? When students are ready to accelerate, schools and the state shouldn’t be hitting the brake. It’s time for a new mindset.

Steve Brawner’s column is syndicated to 24 news outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.