Today is a big day, perhaps long inevitable.
The state Education Board will meet this morning for an agenda that includes the question of its taking over the running of the historic Little Rock School District.
The issue is that six schools in the district are chronically failing to produce student performance that meets minimum state standards for academic proficiency.
Surely you grasp the social significance and historical context.
This very district was, in 1957, the site of the first local and state resistance to federal court-ordered integration. Over the decades the district has become largely resegregated, and majority black, owing to white flight to suburbs and to private, parochial and public charter schools. Now state government ponders having to take over the district because the generally less-privileged students left--at least in a few schools--don't get a decent educational opportunity, according to state government's statutory definition.
There are certain uncomfortable factors at play, and a candid discussion of them is perilous. But here they are:
Many conservative white people have abandoned the public school district and do not have a particular personal interest in what remains of what they have abandoned.
Some white community leaders who care tend to advocate alternatives to basic public schools, mainly charter schools. So that rules them out as advocates for the public schools as they now exist.
That leaves as the public schools' public constituency the black community and liberal-minded white people. And, to generalize dangerously, those groups have found themselves at odds.
John Riggs, a fairly progressive white community leader, has written a public commentary for this newspaper calling for the state takeover. Black leaders tend to say there is nothing inherently wrong with a majority-black district and that success could better be achieved with support and cooperation rather than abandonment and detraction.
So there you are. It's a problem not unique to Little Rock in America. But that doesn't make it less a problem. Nor does that make it any less a tragedy for youths to lose opportunity--whenever and wherever it occurs.
Through it all, year after year, woefully low numbers of students in six district schools meet minimum proficiency standards. A state law exists giving the state board the authority, indeed the responsibility, to take control in such cases.
The problem is greater than the students' poor performance. It extends to top-heavy administrative costs and other financial inefficiencies. It encompasses a pattern of dysfunction in relations between the local school board and its chief administrator.
Clearly the state has garnered the local school board's attention. All members but one--and that one has called for a state takeover--have sent the state Board of Education a letter accepting that unacceptable problems persist and outlining their many-pointed plan to address those problems if left to their local control.
So the question for the state board is whether to vote for a takeover or give the pleading school board members, two of whom are new, a chance to do better by the students.
At the very least, Sam Ledbetter, a Little Rock lawyer who is chairman of the state board, thinks the state should not take final action today.
He told local public radio that the board, if voting for a takeover, should attend to proper and fair procedure and give local school board members a reasonable period of time, if only a week or month, to stand advised of the likely action and formally respond.
Bear in mind that no state takeover is to be forever. The objective in all cases is to fix problems and reverse bad results, then return the district to local control.
Also bear in mind that a vote for a state takeover would almost certainly lead to a dreaded return to local school litigation. That's because there apparently is some difference of interpretation about the state's authority to take over a full district on account of the academic distress of only a fraction of its schools.
Good and well-meaning people are torn. Many hearts remain in the Little Rock Public Schools. But patience stretches very thin.
I have a solution. It's for the state, based on its plain and fully litigated constitutional responsibility to provide an adequate and equitable education to all kids statewide, to take over the ultimate responsibility for the administration of all the state's school districts.
I am not alone in that view. I once heard of one other guy who maybe shares it.
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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 01/08/2015