A new education battleground has been opened. Whatever will the state do now that it has taken over the Little Rock public schools?
The fight pits the usual combatants, meaning turf-protectors and conservative ideologues.
Now that I have offended all participants in the warfare, allow me to define terms for the general readership.
The turf-protectors are traditional public school personnel, teachers and administrators, who believe they provide the only credibly trained professionals in the equation. They contend they are insufficiently valued by people who blame them absurdly for all school failings, even those plainly caused by irresponsible or incompetent parents and tragic cycles of poverty and cultural deprivation.
The conservative ideologues are generally successful businessmen or the academicians they endow or the foundations they found--like that of the Wal-Mart Waltons. They believe American public education is failing because it won't shake itself up--because of embedded practices that protect teachers' unions and general inertia at the expense of good new ideas such as theirs to open charter schools with longer school days, summer sessions, rote methods to catch kids up, strict discipline and new instructional blood using smart kids just out of elite colleges and volunteering for programs like Teach for America.
The turf-protectors say the conservative ideologues want to remake public education disastrously in their corporate discount-merchandising image. They say the occasional charter school that performs well benefits from select students from responsible homes and discards back to the regular public schools the kids who don't measure up.
The conservative ideologues say they simply are trying to show a stubborn and stagnant public education system effective new practices, but that the teachers' unions and other turf-protectors resent and resist. They say that, failing any incorporation of their ideas, they simply are left to pursue more charters and even privatization to give parents more choices and kids better opportunities. They extol the healthy competition they believe to be the root of all achievement.
The turf-protectors say competition is designed for a winner and a loser. They say equitable universal public education seeks to give everybody the same chance.
The conservative ideologues say the turf-protectors ought to work harder and longer. The turf-protectors say they work hard and long already. They say somebody is going to have to ante up if they're to lead classes from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on some Saturday mornings and for a few weeks in the summer. They say anybody in any field would rightfully demand remuneration for expanded hours and duties.
The conservative ideologues say they know kids in the Teach for America program who'll come in and work longer for less and introduce new methods.
The turf-protectors say those are parachutists who can't be counted on to sustain teaching year after year. They say you can't do education on the cheap and without continuity. They say teaching is a profession, not a youth volunteer stint.
And the beat goes on. And round and round we go.
The distrust and enmity are remarkable. The turf-protectors go so far as to say the ideologues are trying to privatize education to make a buck for themselves even at the expense of students left behind. The conservative ideologues go so far as to say the turf-protectors care only about their comfortable status quo, not kids. Both allegations are over the top.
The state's original idea for Little Rock was simply to try to fix the six failing schools with traditional methods and return the district to local control. But the conservative ideologues saw an opportunity and won the ear of the new governor, Asa Hutchinson.
So we had House Bill 1733 to let the state essentially privatize overtaken public schools. It went too far and died appropriately in the House Education Committee, stalemated between Democrats favoring turf-protectors and Republicans favoring conservative ideologues.
But the governor and his education commissioner could still pursue for Little Rock some part of the conservative ideologues' agenda.
It all takes me back to that day more than a decade ago when Mike Beebe, who always tried to split the difference in this debate, hauled me to the KIPP charter school in Helena to see the remarkable methods and results. The administrator, Scott Shirey, told me the idea was to produce enough demonstrated success that we'd reach a "tipping point" by which the traditional public schools would emulate by choice or duress.
If kids at a public KIPP charter school were catching up on long division and sentence-diagramming with group chanting tricks, as I witnessed that day, then why not try that over at the public school?
We shouldn't turn public education over to corporate "reformers." But we shouldn't squander good ideas and good results, either.
Something positive could come of this debate, but only by public demand, and then only by assembling the turf-protectors and conservative ideologues in Geneva or somewhere for delicate diplomacy.
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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 03/19/2015