Amid uncertainty, emotion and misapprehension, the school situation in Little Rock remained in its usual disarray last week except for one possibly redefining development.
That is the powerful devotion to the city's regular public schools that galvanized in Little Rock in recent days against state government's blunder and arrogance.
Hundreds rallied for local control of their schools at Central High. City government stuck its neck out for those schools for the first time.
The devotion and galvanizing claimed an important if incremental and as-yet-undefined victory.
The state Board of Education backed away from its destructive plan to return only part of the district to local control next year and keep much of the minority part separate for different unspecified management because of its poorly performing schools.
The state board faced accusations locally and in emerging national media reports of seeking to re-segregate the very school district that stands as an international symbol of the struggle to desegregate. Against that pressure, and surely at Gov. Asa Hutchinson's dictate, the board voted to return all of the district to local control by 2021.
But it did so with conspicuous stipulations and curiosities.
It voted to bust the longstanding teachers' union, burdening the schools with employee unrest if not a strike, or so we can hope, for the time being.
It de-certified the teacher association as if part of a tradeoff: Little Rock could have local control, but the business reformers who influence Hutchinson and the state board, and who believe the teachers' union has stood in the way of their business-oriented reforms, would get the union's long-desired scalp.
And the state board would keep the district in the top category of distress, meaning, presumably, it could retake control at any time by any circumstance, such as if the restored local control re-certified the teachers' union, as we can hope it will, since teaching is an underpaid and undervalued profession that deserves organized advocacy if it wants it.
A veteran Little Rock public-school advocate and insider told me that everything will come down to the new local school board elections in November 2020.
All will hinge, this person said, on whether the "good guys," meaning the local activists devoted to saving and transforming the regular public schools, will stay fired up, get their politics in order and run and elect the right people.
The idea is that Little Rock might elect these good guys and right people to barrel ahead effectively in a way that would keep the wary state at bay.
There is great distrust of the state locally, which is to understate the obvious. It extends to the fear expressed by reasonable people that the state has sold Mayor Frank Scott and the advocates of local control in Little Rock a bill of goods.
And it may have done just that. But the worst immediate outcome has been averted. Everything being relative, less-than-worst could be deemed a positive development if the worst had seemed certain only days before.
Little Rock may confront a rare chance to elect a strong school board to work with this newly engaged mayor and city board of directors to open community schools in failing neighborhoods that would serve not only classroom academics but the needs of the culturally deprived that make classroom academics uncommonly challenging--nutrition, health, transportation and work-force opportunities.
It could even bring along state government, even if that state government was still opening charter schools galore and blaming teachers, as an acquiescent if uninspired partner.
The criticism by people who say the mayor and other locals who look to the bright side are being naïve ... they could turn out to be right.
But pragmatism has its strong place here.
The state Constitution plainly gives the state responsibility for public schools. The Lake View case plainly provides the precedent for the state authority that is being exercised over Little Rock. Local control is not by itself a virtuous concept, as some seem to think.
The point is that state government holds all the cards. In the face of those realities, you take your incremental victory and welcome new opportunities to achieve larger ones.
Yes, the state could still undercut local efforts and impose destructive policies. But the fact remains that galvanized local public-school advocates, through their devotion, got the governor and his business allies to back away last week.
The next step is to show them a reason to back away again, and again, and then to back down entirely on the clear indications that the locals, as they say, "have got this."
It will best serve that purpose if the teacher association does not strike for now and if Michael Poore, the state-appointed superintendent who'd thought of resigning if the state de-certified the union, will stay put, as he now seems inclined.
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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 10/15/2019