Status Quo strikes back

THIS OUGHT to teach Dexter Suggs a lesson. He’s the still new school superintendent in Little Rock, and hasn’t yet learned that his school district should be run like your usual government patronage operation-a public till to be tapped by special interests like the teachers’ unions.

Dexter Suggs, naive newcomer that he is to local politics, seems to have been laboring under the misapprehension that schools ought to have something to do with actually kids. So he’s been seeing how he can reorganize his staff so that the school district’s emphasis is on things like one-on-one reading instruction in the earliest grades, not on inflated salaries for bureaucrats.

One immediate result of educating his plan should have been expected. He drew the fire of various members of the school board who, when it comes to his latest reform, would prefer to stick with the status mediocre quo, namely C.E. McAdoo, Dianne Curry, Norma Johnson and Tara Shephard. Not to mention the head of the local teachers-union-and-pressure-group. Not all of them are confirmed aginners, and maybe they’ll come to see the light where this reorganization is concerned. There’s always hope for school reform, no matter how many times it’s been frustrated in the past.

Last week’s gang-up on a reform school superintendent wouldn’t have been complete without John Walker, the state representative whose principal role in the long, long Little Rock school desegregation case, ordeal and distraction was to prolong it. As if he hadn’t raked in enough in legal fees over the years. The one group that has clearly profited from the decades-long turmoil, divisions and uncertainty in Little Rock’s school district has been the lawyers. On all sides. It was only to be expected that the Hon. John W.Walker, Esq., would be leading this latest expensive and expansive campaign against a school superintendent who dares show an interest in reforming the system rather than exploiting it.

It may be only a matter of time before Walker & Co. lead the school district back into Litigation Gulch in search of more victims. By one count we saw, Little Rock’s school district has had 20 superintendents since 1982. The best have been run off, the worst done in by their own no longer deniable problems. With that kind of turnover and turmoil, how maintain any kind of continuity, let alone a constancy of purpose in pursuit of anything as idealistic as quality education?

Now the usual backward-looking types are going after Dexter Suggs. His crime? Putting education before the interests of some of the school district’s entrenched bureaucrats. So he was hauled into a needless executive session closed to the public. The purpose of this star-chamber hearing seemed unclear except to give the school superintendent a little more trouble for daring to challenge the same old way of doing things in the school district. And which has resulted in Little Rock’s remaining one of the more troubled and less effective in the state. At least when it comes to educating kids rather than providing patronage for all these special interests and special pleaders.

LET US now praise those members of the school board who voted against harrying this school superintendent in secret: Greg Adams, who’s president of the board, plus Jody Carreiro and Leslie Fisken. It turns out the school board does have some members who put the kids and their education first on occasion. May their tribe increase.

If all this sounds familiar, maybe that’s because it is. Dexter Suggs wouldn’t be the first school superintendent in Little Rock harassed for doing too good a job. One of his predecessors was run off after setting out to make Little Rock the best urban school district in the country. Nothing seems to upset the naysayers and patronage-protectors on the school board than the possibility of quality education in Little Rock.

So if Dexter Suggs is hounded into exile, too, it will be the result of an all-too-familiar script. And one more defeat for the whole city. Because if Little Rock’s school district fails the next generation, so will Little Rock itself. Yes, public education is that important and that central to the whole city’s future. And by education, we don’t mean just another money pit for the kind of pols and seat-warmers who have exploited the school district for years. And who are now after another good man.