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Katy ISD benefits from Elizabeth Clark's mastery of curriculum management
By Jeff Carmack
 When Elizabeth Clark started working a night shift at a munitions plant at the tender age of 18, she had no idea that her work would one day shape her approach to public education. At first blush, detonators and grenade fuses would seem to have little in common with the classroom. But Clark says that in both occupations, controlling variables is the key to quality outcomes.
Until this past spring, Clark had been serving as the chief academic officer for Katy ISD. In April, she announced her retirement, effective Nov. 30, and she has since been serving as a chief officer and advisor to the superintendent. When she walks out the door in November, Clark will have left behind a legacy of what she refers to as “preparing the next generation of leaders.”
Her road to academic excellence was neither short nor simple. The eldest of three children from Texarkana, she spent but a semester at Arkansas State Teachers College before family responsibilities called her home.
“Mom and dad were struggling; they still had two kids in school, so I came home and went to work,” she says.
As a teenager, Clark took on a night shift as a quality inspector at the Day & Zimmermann Army ammunition plant outside Texarkana. During the day, she continued her education at Texarkana Junior College. The experience informed her thinking on quality control as she later moved on to a career in education.
“In education, you have to have ultimate control over the core work, just like in business,” she says. “How do you have control over teaching and learning? You use the same principles. You have to control all the variables so that you produce optimal learning.”
When Clark had earned all the hours she could at the junior college, she commuted to Southern State University in Magnolia, Ark. Once she earned her degree, her teaching career began. Clark and her husband, Jerry, left Texarkana for Fordyce, Ark. Jerry, a pharmacist by trade, took a job there, and Clark started teaching fourth grade in the nearby town of Rison. After a year, the couple moved to Stuttgart, Ark., where for three years Clark taught junior high. During her first year, the local chamber of commerce named Clark Teacher of the Year.
In 1975, Clark earned her master’s degree in education administration, and in 1978 she earned an education specialist degree. The following year Clark started working on her doctorate, an effort that took her only one year to finish.
In 1980, Clark became assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction in Hallsville ISD, near Longview. When she left for Katy ISD 18 years later, she was Hallsville ISD’s deputy superintendent of educational operations.
For her doctoral work, Clark and her professor, Marvin Fairman, developed the Organizational Health Instrument, an assessment tool that principals can use to gauge how their teachers perceive them.
“This [instrument] is based on the idea that organizations are organic — they’re based on peoples’ perceptions,” Clark says. “So how do you know what those perceptions are, and how do you improve the principal’s ability to see how he or she needs to adjust to maintain optimal organizational health?
“We have 30 years of research that shows that the healthier the organization is, the better it performs,” she says.
Clark is also a longtime member — and past president — of the Texas Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. While there, she helped initiate an automated curriculum system called the Alternative Blueprint for Curriculum Development. She developed curriculum for four content areas: math, science, social studies and language arts. The statewide project was the foundation of the work Clark has done during her 11 years in Katy ISD.
“We’ve automated our system because we have more than 4,000 teachers, and you simply cannot send binders to that many teachers,” Clark says. “You have to automate.”
Using the patented Katy Management of Automated Curriculum system, the district now has 400 online curriculum guides that staff can access.
For the past five years, Clark has been an adjunct professor at the University of Houston at Clear Lake. Upon her retirement this fall, she will open a new chapter in her life as an associate professor.
Looking back on her years in public education, Clark says her career has been “a joy.”
“It’s unbelievable that 39 years have gone by so fast,” she says.
JEFF CARMACK is a freelance writer in Austin.
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