This year, Arkansas Tech University’s College of Education received the Frank Murray Award based on a thorough evaluation of the college.
The Frank Murray Award is a fairly new award given to colleges that score highly on their accreditation. The accreditation evaluates large amounts of data collected by the college itself. For Arkansas Tech, the Associate Dean of the College of Education, Dr. Tim Carter, was in charge of collecting this data and presenting it during a virtual accreditation visit.
“We probably ended up with three or four thousand pages worth of information that we shared with them,” Carter said. He added that out of all that data, the college had no actions needed or stipulations.
This award has the potential to attract prospective students to the Arkansas Tech College of Education. The college is looking forward to spreading the news about this achievement.
“If they are looking for schools, we definitely want to make sure that we let people know that we have received it. Anything that we can use to promote ourselves is better off then not,” Dr. Linda Bean, dean of the College of Education, said.
Moving forward with this award, the College of Education sees lots of potential to grow.
“Right now we have a great program, and we want to continue to have a great program. It’s not what we get, but how we can continue to do well,” Bean said.
When it comes to attracting the students to the College of Education, Bean said that was never the problem.
“We don’t seem to have trouble getting people to find this as a good major for themselves, but right now the numbers just aren’t there…but we hope to see that coming back up.”
This award was not given because of one single effort, Carter said.
“A lot of this is made possible because of our working relationships with multiple stakeholders and the public schools who host our interns, host our field experiences, and work with our students to continue to help them improve…that’s one of the reasons that we had no AFI’s or stipulations.”
