LITTLE ROCK — LITTLE ROCK’S school district, which once bid fair to becoming the best urban school district in the country when it had a reform minded school superintendent named Roy Brooks, has since gone from just sub-par to sorry. Under its new superintendent and the old Gang of Four that sabotaged so many efforts at reform, the state’s largest school district developed a sure-fire formula for abysmal failure. It’s simple enough, and it works every time: Just combine inertia with arrogance.
Just keep resisting change and public participation in the school district’s decisions, and the most promising school district can be run into the ground. That rule applies no matter the subject at hand-charter schools, student discipline, or how classroom teaching is being shorted so the administration can go on padding the staff at district headquarters. Put patronage and politics above basic education, and there’s no telling how low a school district can sink.
Little Rock’s school district does have a citizens’ committee that was supposed to come up with a better way to do things-a Strategic Plan, it’s called in bureaucratese. But the two co-chairmen who were supposed to oversee putting it into action now have resigned. Why? You can sense their disgust with the current school superintendent’s management skills, or lack thereof, in the letter of resignation they sent Superintendent Linda Watson:
“You seem to be threatened by anything you do not control, and we’ve been unable to build the sense of trust that would allow us to overcome the obstacle. The important task at hand always seems to end up being surbordinated to your insecurities.”
The letter was signed by Terence Bolden and former state Senator Jim Argue, who has fought for better education not just in Little Rock but throughout the state. Their specific complaints? Among them, how consultants to the school district were selected, how the school district’s priorities were predetermined without consulting the public, and the school district’s reluctance to use federal stimulus money as a source of funds. Both co-chairmen came away with the impression that Superintendent Watson just isn’t fully committed to this plan to improve local education, not if it interferes with the status ever quo in the school district.
How long, one wonders, before these two reform-minded leaders who finally have had enough will be tarred as racists or worse-much like others who dared criticize the school district’s ossified leadership. What a shame, and what a waste of the $200,760 this educanto-laden “strategic plan” cost. Even if it were written in plain English, and made clear, sensible recommendations, what good is such a plan if the school superintendent snubs it?
By the time the school board “tweaks” it, this plan could wind up, like so many others, as just another dusty, over-priced volume on some bureaucrat’s shelf. It’ll be used for ornamental purposes only, or maybe to give cover to predetermined decisions. Meanwhile, public education in Little Rock languishes. And with it, another generation of innocent schoolchildren who deserve so much better.
Editorial, Pages 12 on 03/02/2010