In six days, the state Education Board will meet to make a difficult and potentially historic decision on whether to take over the running of the Little Rock School District.
The high-profile drama grants us the timely opportunity to seek to disabuse ourselves of a popular but bogus and flawed assumption.
It is that local school governance is most appropriately and virtuously a matter of local control. It is that local governance should be ultimately the purview of democracy as practiced by voters residing in the district.
That is simply not the case. A good school is neither democratic nor a locally insular place. You don't vote by majority for good education. You teach it.
As written in the state Constitution and embraced by the Arkansas Supreme Court in the Lake View ruling, public education is the responsibility of state government--not the collective local board members and the local voters who install them.
On that basis the state has presumed to set a minimum local property millage rate. It has presumed to define through the Legislature the essential components of an adequate educational opportunity. It has presumed to assess the cost of that adequate educational opportunity. It has presumed to put state tax money into a pot to be distributed to local districts off the top of the state budget in a way that equalizes per-pupil funding district to district.
And the Legislature has presumed to enact a law saying that the state Department of Education may establish regulatory criteria to declare local districts academically distressed.
An Education Department rule defines academic distress by establishing a minimally acceptable proficiency level in student performance. The state Board of Education is authorized to affirm the department's finding and vote for the state department to assume direct control of distressed districts.
People have asked: What is the basis for this premise that the state could do better in improving student performance in these six chronically failing schools--Baseline Elementary, Cloverdale Middle, Henderson Middle and McClellan, Hall and Fair High Schools?
The answer is that any chronic failure is an implicit indictment of the status quo. It is that state government's constitutionally mandated authority could provide fresh eyes and cut through dreaded inertia and divisive or destructive local politics.
In the Pulaski County Special School District, state takeover has led to improvements that would not have been made as expeditiously, if at all, under the constraints of local board politics.
The state-run county district has a plan for dealing with the imminent loss of special state desegregation money.
The Little Rock district? Not so much. The school board keeps getting in the way.
It seems there are three likeliest options for the state board.
One is simply to accede to the letter of the law and the wishes of local business leaders and take over running the district. The state Education Department could keep the current superintendent or bring in its own appointee. The local school board would be dormant. Teacher contracts would have to be honored and the teacher fair-dismissal law would have to be obeyed. Otherwise, the new bosses from the state could call all the shots.
The second--a hybrid compromise--would be for the state to take over only the six failing schools. Some other schools in the district are doing splendidly. But that idea, initially appealing, has lost some currency because of concern that the state couldn't really improve those six failed schools from inside a box--without, for example, the authority to reassign teachers from better-performing schools.
The third option is that the local district essentially throw itself on the mercy of the state, concede the failings and embrace a full if subservient partnership with the state for an action plan--one that would let the local board stay in place almost as if on a kind of probation.
The usual societal, racial and cultural stresses are in play. Some local blacks see state takeover as an insult contemplated only after the district became majority black with a majority black school board. Litigation is threatened, of course.
But business leaders say disadvantaged black students happen to be paying the highest price for local dysfunction. They say their advocacy is based simply on the fact that chronic local school failure is the greatest threat to Little Rock's long-term economic well-being.
My view is that this is the state's responsibility already; that we're merely arguing about how hands-on the state will be; that some sort of multilayered authority is the last thing the district needs; that the real choices are to do nothing or take the district over entirely; and that, actually, doing nothing is unconstitutional.
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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 01/22/2015