Baker Kurrus tells the truth. The question is whether we can handle it.
The first part of handling the truth is not misunderstanding it.
So let's try to understand.
Kurrus is the tenacious, energetic and possibly heroic state-appointed special superintendent for the state-controlled Little Rock School District. He's a Harvard-educated lawyer, businessman and longtime school board member.
My instinct to the contrary, I will not declare him the last best hope for the Little Rock public schools. I call him only the current best hope, accepting, however improbably, that an equally good hope might come along later.
Kurrus went before the Downtown Little Rock Rotary Club a couple of weeks ago. As a result of his truth-telling, he found himself in a bold headline in the top right corner of the front page the next morning.
He told the Rotarians that Little Rock's public schools are in trouble. He said they cannot succeed unless they lure middle-class kids whose families have fled to private and parochial schools or lined up at proliferating charter schools.
The problem is one of economic class, not race, Kurrus stressed.
It's an essential point. Ours may not be a post-race culture in Little Rock. But the school problems seem to be.
Many black middle-class families have abandoned the public schools. Hispanic students whose families become upwardly mobile are doing the same.
Kurrus is hardly new to his point of view.
As a school board member in the 2000s, he fervently argued, often alone, for a new elementary school in western Little Rock. He advanced the notion that a public school district needed to serve its community by putting schools in all the places where children lived.
He has long had concerns about charter-school proliferation because--good charter schools and methods aside--the movement tends to take kids from parents with a strong education ethic and leave to regular public schools the rest.
Leaving the rest--that's the problem.
If the return of the middle class doesn't happen, then, Kurrus told the Rotarians, the Little Rock public schools will be left to try to educate all the special-needs children, meaning the economically and educationally disadvantaged, and not so many of those of average and advanced opportunity.
Segregating the advantaged and the disadvantaged is as unfair to the disadvantaged and corrosive to the community as segregating the black and the white.
Kurrus compared all of that to--brace yourselves--Detroit.
And there was the headline.
Detroit once was Motor City, Motown, George Kell and Al Kaline. Then it became the starkest American symbol of urban decay.
I've heard a couple of responses to Kurrus that amount to tragic misunderstandings.
One of those is that Kurrus essentially justified the rampant abandonment of the Little Rock public schools by saying the schools were as hopeless as Detroit's. The other is that Kurrus essentially dampened the spirits of the public schools' most noble warriors by predicting doom.
So let's clear that up: He did not say the Little Rock schools are in Detroit's predicament. He said they will get there unless we save them. And he did not predict doom. He said things already are looking up.
Kurrus bragged on Baseline Elementary School, one of the six academically distressed schools cited in the state takeover. A Teach for America alumnus now leads the school.
Kurrus told the Rotarians that Baseline has turned around.
So I look forward to visiting there with the superintendent this week.
I know for a fact that good things have happened for middle-class children at Baseline Elementary School.
I attended there for six grades in the late '50s and early '60s, when, alas, it was a white-flight haven as part of the so-called Pulaski County Special School District.
I learned to read and write and do arithmetic. I wrote the main front-page article in the mimeographed newspaper put out by sixth-graders. I was captain of the fire marshals. I learned to play the clarinet. I made and gave up touchdowns at recess.
My life was changed by teachers such as the late Judy Hankins, mother of local legend Craig O'Neill.
She walked teary-eyed into our fifth-grade classroom in November 1963 and wrote "thou shalt not kill" on the blackboard. She offered not a word beyond that, leaving to our parents the news that the president had been assassinated that day.
A lot has happened to Baseline in the near-52 years since that day. And a lot could happen in the next 52 years.
It's conceivable the Little Rock public schools could reverse the trend.
The option is to privatize and charter-ize the education of the advantaged and to leave the rest.
We need charter schools--in the mix. Their role is to help show the Baselines of the world new ways to save, not leave, the rest.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/15/2015