OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Eternal school challenges

The political story in Little Rock is the gulf in the tenuous alliance of black people and liberal white people. It is being brought into focus by the latest of the eternal Little Rock public school challenges.

A few hundred white liberals gathered at a west Little Rock Episcopal church several weeks ago to protest Donald Trump. One of three or four blacks in attendance said everyone seemed worried about losing something. But she said she didn't think she'd ever gained much to lose.

Another woman rose to wonder if anybody gave a darn about schools being closed south of Interstate 630 where blacks live.

"Absolutely," state Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock replied when I asked whether those were fair observations.


Elliott is a career public school teacher who is African American and represents in the Legislature a majority-black region south of I-630. She also is a woman of strong liberal consciousness.

It's worth noting, then, that she has declared that she will vote against a millage extension for capital improvements for the Little Rock public schools on May 9.

She said she'd never opposed a school millage before.

On social media and elsewhere, Elliott has called the current state takeover of the Little Rock public schools tyranny. She has said that asking the district's taxpayers to incur refinanced longer-term debt while their schools have been wrested from them amounts to taxation without representation.

She has asserted that local patrons cannot trust the now-controlling state Education Department, considering that it took over the entire district when only six schools were academically failing by statutory definition, and that it has subsequently closed schools in majority-black areas and blessed vast expansions of local charter schools.

Facts remain, though, that southwest Little Rock needs a new high school and that, throughout the district, roofs need repair and dingy corridors need brightening.

Isn't the most logical path to regaining local control a demonstrated local commitment to preventing the schools' decline? Isn't opposing needed school improvements in protest of the state takeover a matter of sacrificing pressing needs to political pique? Isn't it logical that, in a majority-minority district losing millions in special state revenue from the soon-ending desegregation lawsuit settlement, school closings are necessary and will logically affect inordinately minority-majority areas and students?

I got Elliott on the phone to ask those questions. I also wanted to know what, exactly, her position would accomplish other than send a signal to the state that local patrons won't support their district and thus may not deserve getting it back.

In pleasant tones, Elliott gave me an earful, beginning with her dismissal of this notion that her opposition was a matter of pique or spite. "When you are not in a position of power, then you are always in a position of responding to power, and that tends to get dismissed as spite," she said.

Let the state and controlling Little Rock groups shut down a school in Hillcrest--or anywhere north of I-630, she hastily amended--and then ask those neighborhoods to ante up in a millage election. Then, she said, you'll see who sounds piqued or spiteful.

Sure, the schools need these physical improvements, she said, but dedicating an extended millage to a laundry list to make facilities less substandard will do little to address long-term academic challenges.

She speculated that an underlying motivation for the millage proposal was to "cosmetize" Little Rock Central High for the coming 60th anniversary commemoration of its integration crisis. "I don't necessarily have anything against cosmetics," she said.

"But it's not a plan."

White liberals in the city are, at the least, torn between resentment of the state takeover and a long sense of obligation to public schools.

There was the man at the grocery store in Hillcrest who said he had never voted against a Little Rock school millage and couldn't imagine doing it but might feel forced this time.

He asked my advice. At the time I had none. Now I do. It's for the gentleman to keep his millage-supporting streak intact, because the state takeover hasn't stopped need, but to listen closely to the broader message of what Elliott is saying.

She is talking about a black-white political alliance holding Little Rock together by the rubber band of shared disdain for Republicans, and sometimes not much else.

That's enough to keep the city blue in a presidential election. But it may not be enough for the everyday epic local challenge.

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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 04/25/2017

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