May we stipulate that things are not going well in the state Education Department's takeover of the Little Rock School District?
I am now persuaded that, at one point about a month to six weeks ago, Gov. Asa Hutchinson actually had bought into the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce's scheme to turn over the Little Rock public schools largely to a private nonprofit charter-school management system.
But a new law was needed for that, and, to the surprise of these powerful business forces, a bill to enact that law got bogged down in the House Education Committee.
Thank goodness.
I support charter schools generally and the KIPP ones specifically. But I like them in the context of introducing different methods of teaching, the successful of which might eventually be accepted and not resented by traditional public education.
What we need are traditional methods and KIPP methods blended in classrooms, some led by traditional educators and some led by Teach for America brigades, all working for good principals.
But essentially privatizing an entire urban school district because culturally challenged enrollments in six of 48 schools are not producing decent test scores--that is too much.
"Fix the six" should be the focus, the mantra.
After the legislative failure, the business reformers could fall back only on a pliable Little Rock superintendent.
Dexter Suggs was liked by these business reformers because they could get him to do as much as could legally and reasonably be done to advance this agenda:
• Erode the power of teachers' unions and lessen teachers' job insulations.
• Introduce more charter schools toward a theme of school choice, which improves some schools and decays others. It generally bestows an advantage on students willing and able to make informed choices and move. Thus it undercuts the principle of universal and equitable educational opportunity mandated in the state Constitution.
So you know what happened there.
Suggs made people mad by trying to fire teachers who were, by the authority of the principal and with fees paid by participating parents, using Jefferson Elementary School for a summer "reading recovery program." Suggs called that an unsanctioned misuse of district resources.
He then had to retreat after a public outcry and amid allegations that he was retaliating against one participating teacher who had filed an ethics complaint against a member of Suggs' central administrative staff.
Then somebody tipped Matt Campbell of the Blue Hog Report, which seems to claim a deserving scalp at least every six months or so, that Suggs' doctoral dissertation might contain blocks of text identical to blocks of text from somebody else's previous doctoral dissertation.
Campbell did research and ended up making a blog post in which he laid out some of these identical or very similar sections.
Because of the distraction if nothing else, state education commissioner Johnny Key negotiated a deal to get Suggs to go away. That's different from firing, which would have been the better option.
That deal was announced Tuesday. Suggs will get $250,000 in four installments in the next year or so--unless he gets his doctorate taken away, in which case he forfeits that taxpayer manna.
He agrees not to talk unfavorably about the Education Department, which agrees not to talk unfavorably about him. Those kinds of agreements are more common to celebrity divorces.
Naturally you might wonder why a guy gets a quarter-million dollars of your money--local district funds, specifically--to leave a job only after he was beset by public revelations that chunks of his doctoral dissertation were identical to chunks of another.
That's an especially relevant question considering that the state took over the district for academic failings, abolished the school board and kept Suggs on as its agent, not the agent of the non-existent local board that hired him.
The state Education Department replies that the state never made Suggs its employee. It says it therefore is bound by Suggs' contract, which provided that, should he be terminated, he was to be paid for the amount of time remaining between his last day and the end of his contractual period.
The state Education Department is honoring Suggs' contract with the "board of education of the Little Rock School District," which doesn't exist on account of the state Education Board's having blown it up.
In the business world, a company buying another normally assumes the debts and obligations, such as contracts, of the other. But the state didn't buy anything. It used statutory law based on constitutional law to abolish the board and declare itself in charge.
Meantime, I am overwhelmed by the hypocrisy: A state education commissioner tied to business reforms for public education including weakening teacher-employment protections gives an administrator who departs under a cloud of suspicion a cool quarter-million dollars.
Just think how many of these remarkably successful Teach for America kids could be put on the faculty at the failing Baseline Elementary School for a quarter-million dollars.
P.S.--None of the preceding contains chunks of text lifted verbatim without credit from someone else's column. So there goes my quarter-million dollars.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/23/2015