JOHN BRUMMETT: Kurrus' dilemma

Baker Kurrus says he won't take a paying job with the Little Rock school superintendent sent by the state to replace him.

He says, though, that he might work with Michael Poore in an unpaid but official role, but only if he can satisfy himself that Poore's agenda is one he can embrace.

That seems to mean that Kurrus won't sell himself to the new regime either way, but conceivably could offer himself to it under certain conditions.


Kurrus told a legislator-constituent gathering Monday that it feels kind of like a "shotgun wedding"--meaning this business of Gov. Asa Hutchinson and education commissioner Johnny Key firing him and then advocating publicly that, owing to the essential nature of his knowledge and skill, he please consent to ally with his supposedly superior replacement, this Poore, whom they've plucked from Bentonville.

It's safe to say that Hutchinson and Key believe in conservative education notions of more school choice, the idea of which is that all schools get better when they compete. It's not that simple, of course, because competing schools mean you have winners and losers, and losers are to be avoided under a constitutional mandate to provide equal educational opportunity.

But that is not to say that Hutchinson and Key are simply doing the bidding of the charter-championing Walton Family Foundation. That is the raging conspiracy theory in Little Rock.

It is entirely conceivable, and even logical, that Hutchinson and Key can like school choice without being puppets of the Walton Foundation in this particular personnel action relative to the state's control of the Little Rock schools.

It's possible Hutchinson and Key made this fine mess wholly on their own.

Kurrus nobly argues publicly that the pace of charter-school proliferation--as evidenced in the recent approval of significant expansion for two charter schools in Little Rock--is detrimental to the regular public schools.

Poore is an engaging and progressive fellow, but, as it happens, a bit slippery on the charter-school issue. He says his response to charter schools is that they are here and must be competed with. He says he can't say whether he agrees with Kurrus about the eroding effect on regular public schools from charter expansion because he hasn't studied the data that Kurrus compiled.

It may be that Poore doesn't want to say he agrees because his new bosses won't like it, and that he doesn't want to say he disagrees because his new constituents won't like it.

And that leaves Baker Kurrus--and the rest of us--to try to figure out what's what.

Kurrus liked Poore well enough in an initial meeting, but knows that Poore is a mere executive and that the higher policymaking authorities are Hutchinson, Key and the state Education Board.

He wouldn't mind helping Poore restore Little Rock's schools--would love it, in fact. But he doesn't want to risk having it turn out that he was helping a school-choice agenda he believes to be detrimental.

As it happens, there are no new charter applications for Little Rock currently pending for the next year. So Kurrus has to try to figure out what the local public-school landscape will look like after the next school year.

Meantime, I'm beginning to hear a little Republican grumbling that Kurrus is getting a bit haughty in his attitude toward Hutchinson and Key, who, remember, are still his bosses for a few more days. I'm hearing that perhaps Kurrus is making the issue himself rather than Little Rock schoolchildren.

I've thought through that grumbling and decided it is utter nonsense.

Kurrus was fired. Then, when Little Rock rose in passionate defense of him and the school district as he was leading it, the governor, Key and Poore decided Kurrus' magnificence was such that he needed to be re-recruited, or deployed, or co-opted, depending on your point of view.

Kurrus hasn't been haughty in his own behalf. He has been nigh unto canonized by others--the very others who fired him.

In response to that near-canonization, Kurrus has labored over what to do, considering his love for the Little Rock schools and his concern about what the state takeover portends without him. And he has decided that he could only be used by those who seek to use him if he can take advantage of his situation, at least to the extent that he can insist that their agenda is not, in his view, destructive.

If Hutchinson, Key and Poore want to say to heck with Kurrus, that's their call. But if they continue to say instead that they admire and need him, then his attempt to exploit his situation for what he deems to be good for the Little Rock schools is not so much haughty as heroic.

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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 05/05/2016

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