The story last week for the Little Rock public schools was shouting, but not at recess and not by the children.
Members of the state Board of Education had the brainless idea they could hold orderly public meetings with passionate Little Rock advocates devoted to a return of their public schools to local control.
State board members seemed to think those advocates would disperse as directed into breakout sessions to brainstorm about how to help the state board implement a return to local control, then reassemble for pleasant reporting of their happy cooperation.
Little Rock school advocates are resentful of nearly five years of lost local control to a Republican state government seemingly interested in destroying regular public education in the city and replacing it with charter schools or other competitive forms. They deplore that their schools' oversight board has been, in effect, a single former right-wing state legislator and religious day-care owner named Johnny Key who lacked the qualifications to be state education commissioner until they were legally changed for him.
Little Rock advocates were never going to imitate sheep. These meetings offered them a chance to vent. They were not about to waste it.
The publicly ubiquitous judge-preacher-activist, Wendell Griffen, railed against the state board on Tuesday evening and wound up in a man-to-man yell-out with state education board member Fitz Hill, a football coach turned education administrator.
After the shouting, the situation remained as simple as one lengthy paragraph, which follows:
Pursuant to clear constitutional and statutory authority, the state took over the Little Rock schools because six of them were chronically failing academically by the applicable definition based on test-score measuring. After nearly five years, eight district schools have "F" grades in most recent compilations. The law says that, after five years, the district in question, if still failing, must either be consolidated with another district or returned to local control but only in a reconstituted way.
That's where we are. The Little Rock district can't easily be annexed to an adjoining district because of legal and other complexities. "Reconstituting" means at least that the old board or the current superintendent would have to be replaced, and perhaps as much as that new school board districts would have to be drawn.
The shorter paragraph: The locals failed their kids. The right-wing state failed the kids. Now, staring down a deadline about what to do next, Griffen shouts "we are not your slaves" and Hill shouts "this is not your court."
Meantime, parents and grandparents get their kids ready for school each morning. Dedicated, competent and underpaid teachers prepare lesson plans and endeavor to impart vital teaching.
This matter can be resolved only by passionate persons who can, at some point soon, compartmentalize emotion constructively to blend it with modulation, relevant experience and competence.
That's why I put on Twitter the other evening that I'd put the two state-appointed superintendents, Baker Kurrus and Michael Poore, both fine and able men knowledgeable of, and devoted to, the schools, into a room. I'd have them joined by the two most experienced and able sitting state legislators from Little Rock--Senators Joyce Elliott and Will Bond. I'd send in sustenance and nourishment until they emerged with a plan for restoring local control.
I got criticized for relying on three white men and only one black woman. Fair point. I'd of course accept suggestions toward diversity, though I doubt any effectiveness in putting Griffen and Hill in the room. I'd recommend Mayor Frank Scott, but, heck, the mention of his name drew a few boos from the Little Rock crowd the other evening.
That one woman, Joyce Elliott, might be all we need. She has the solution.
It's that it's not enough to cry that you want your schools back. It's that you must tell the state board that, after so much shared failure, the locals have a plan primarily to improve those "F" schools but more broadly seize this last best opportunity to rebuild a solid public-school district.
She wants "community schools" where those failing ones are. By that she means neighborhood activity and service centers for those troubled neighborhoods, with preschool, after-school, weekend and year-round programs designed to deliver disadvantaged children all the support they need for an equal chance--on nutrition and health care and day care and adult mentoring and countless other needs.
These community schools would cost more than regular schools, but, in Griffen's best moment the other night, he explained that "equal funding" is simple math, but that the real standard must be "equitable funding," which is fairness.
When the judge talks like that, with command and explanatory clarity, I'd like him in the room.
The final meeting of the week, on Thursday, was improved, with literal hand-holding unity. So, for Tuesday's column, Part 2 will explore the emerging notion that the shouting and raucous behavior were productive.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/01/2019