IT TOOK a suspenseful time and more than one try, but Arkansas' Charter Authorizing Panel, in charge of determining the number of charter schools that will be allowed to open and operate in this state, now has given preliminary approval to three more applications--one from Little Rock and two from Pine Bluff--that brings to five the number of new schools the committee would let open for business in this small, wonderful state.
Arkansas is far from fulfilling its potential as an exemplar of what may be the most forward-looking movement in American education since public schools themselves were begun. But slow, painful step by slow, painful step the Diamond State is getting there.
The newest schools would be:
-- Friendship Aspire Academy-Little Rock, an offshoot of the Friendship Education Foundation headquartered in the nation's capital, which seeks to open a charter school for 600 students from kindergarten to the fifth grade in southwest Little Rock. It would start up in the fall of 2019. Good things take some time, and the best things even more of it, given the bureaucratic constraints of contemporary government. Indeed, the principal reason for charter schools may be precisely to avoid such constraints.
-- Friendship Aspire Academy-Pine Bluff, has been proposed by the same foundation, and is slated to serve 480 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, starting 2018-19. It's to be housed in a former church. It's a logical continuation in its own way: A school to prepare the soul for the next world is to become one to prepare students to grow and prosper in this one.
-- Southeast Arkansas Preparatory High School is to educate 220 youngsters in the ninth through 12th grades in the old Ridgeway Christian School on 73rd Avenue in Pine Bluff. Good things seem to be happening all over Pine Bluff at long last, rewarding those who long have hoped for the storied old river city to revive.
Joe Harris is the national executive director of the Friendship Education Foundation, and he says Little Rock is a particularly promising site for its next venture and adventure largely for historical reasons.
"Being here would be an honor," he says, after the Little Rock Crisis of 1957 brought the city to national attention and national contempt. Here's a chance for his outfit to give Little Rock and Arkansas a new and better reputation--one to be proud of.
But it seems the aginners we will always with us. Like the superintendent of the now state-controlled Little Rock School District, Mike Poore, who argues that Little Rock already has entirely too many seats available in its elementary schools because of families' rush to traditional, charter, private and home schools thanks to their having more choices rather than fewer, because now they can transfer their kids outside the old school districts to which they were once confined. If that's a problem, it's a good one to have. It shows this new wider array of school choices is having just the effect its sponsors hoped for as competition brings out the best in all, as all imitate the best practices of the best schools.
None other than Tim Griffin, the state's lieutenant governor, has signed on in support of the Friendship Aspire Charter School, noting that Friendship schools in Washington, D.C., have an impressive record of success, having been listed among the country's top 25 charter schools by the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation for encouraging their students to succeed and close the gap between high-achieving socio-economic groups and those who've lagged behind.
Great families make great schools, and here in Arkansas the Walton Family Foundation can be counted on to raise educational standards, particularly through charter schools. The populations of both Pine Bluff and Little Rock are much alike, and both stand to benefit by the Walton Foundation's exemplary efforts in education, which go back a couple of decades.
PERHAPS the best thing about the network of Friendship schools in Arkansas is that they offer a traditional liberal-arts education with rigorous standards for kids fortunate enough to benefit by them. These schools don't offer any snap courses. They're open from 7:30 a.m. to as late as 6 p.m. 190 days a year, as opposed to the conventional school year of 178 days. School buses will be on call to carry those kids who live beyond walking distance and take them home again at the end of their long school day. These kids are clearly out to demonstrate that a good education pays--not just for them but for the whole state.
The moral of this story, or at least one of them, is: No department of health, education and welfare can compete with the family. Especially if it's allowed to make its own choices instead of having them dictated to it by an officious, know-it-all government.
Editorial on 08/22/2017