The state Teacher of the Year Award is, or ought to be, about a teacher in the current, winding-down school year. It should be someone who was nominated locally by peers for superior performance and extra-mile effort. It should be someone who stands above the other nominees in the well-considered assessment of a panel of qualified judges assembled by a credibly objective state Education Department.
It is not, or ought not to be, about Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She should have nothing remotely to do with it. She spent half the ongoing school year merely seeking the governor's office, then much of the second half of it passing legislation to undercut the public education that the Teacher of the Year was serving.
It has literally nothing to do with Sanders' LEARNS act to implement vouchers to pay parents if their kids leave the public schools and to newly subsidize those already forking over on their own to keep their kids out of public schools.
The Teacher of the Year should be entirely about a teacher who is the best in the year, not at all about a governor who is taking her best shot at being the worst in all of history, or at least the most authoritarian and absurdly self-extolling.
Yet it appears the next supposed Teacher of the Year will be worthy only of the Sarah Subservience Certificate.
Per usual, respected teachers this year have been nominated locally by peers who know them best. Then these nominees must fill out an application for submission to the state Education Department, which also is usual if odd practice.
But this year's application form contains two questions not included before. One calls for the applicant to use up to 750 words to explain how he or she will implement the LEARNS Act in the classroom and to expound on the positive impact LEARNS will have. The other is to describe the teacher's "platform" if chosen and elaborate on the ways that platform will "relate to LEARNS."
Let's say an applicant responds as follows: "I have no frigging idea how to implement LEARNS in the classroom considering that task forces are still at work right now trying to figure that out. I do not expect any positive impact from LEARNS because I think it amounts to horrid legislation for our public schools and our children. My personal platform if selected as Teacher of the Year will relate to LEARNS only in that I intend to use that platform to tell people at every opportunity that LEARNS is an existential threat to all that I have held dear in a career of commitment to teaching."
The person writing that could well be the right choice for Teacher of the Year, that performance having nothing to do with personal views of right-wing legislation.
The Sanders administration, through a Florida-infested state Education Department, is imposing something akin to the Heisman Trophy organization asking K.J. Jefferson to apply now for the trophy next year on the basis of a required essay explaining what a swell concept the award represents.
This person going by Alexa Henning who is said to be the communications aide for Sanders posted on Twitter that the "unhinged left" was responding with a predictable meltdown to a long-practiced process of Teacher of the Year selection; that LEARNS is a popular new law passed to fix failing public schools, and that such questions have long been asked on the application form.
As evidence, she posted a snippet from the form in 2020 that asked the award nominees to state what their platforms would be.
But, you see, asking applicants to provide their intended messages if honored is not at all like telling the applicants that, to win, they must tailor those messages to what the governor wants.
I feel sorry for the great teachers out there who can't think of anything glowing to say about the queen. And I suspect there are quite a few.
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.