By John Brummett

President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, nontraditional liberals on education policy, want states to approve more charter schools.

They theorize that public schools need competition and that parents and students need choices. They think American public education, substandard in a general sense in the modern global context, might be made better by experimenting with more charter schools.

But Arkansas always marches to a different drummer.

So it came to be last week that the state Board of Education got confronted by eight charter school applications and found its way to approve only one. That approval was merely of an expansion into Blytheville of the already existing charter for the stellar KIPP school of Helena.

KIPP, which has succeeded wildly in Helena and in disadvantaged areas elsewhere in the country, has made the happy decision to expand over the next decade throughout eastern Arkansas. KIPP is special and gets treated as such, appropriately.

Another application was merely postponed. It is an effort to open a charter school in the Little Rock School District targeting hundreds of males.

The state board may have been inclined to support the application, since there is a clear need for new tactics and strategies to reach inner-city male students. But the board got scared off for the time being by the lawyer for the Little Rock schools. He argued that a proliferation of charter schools in Little Rock could disturb the delicate balance of the district’s desegregation settlement and land the schools back in federal court, where they just spent a half-century.

That strikes me as simple-minded and outdated. We’re supposed to be in the post-race era. Desegregation has many different and complex shadings in today’s world.

If an African-American student from a regular public school that is 90 percent African-American enrolls in a charter school that is 60 percent white, then that African-American student has moved into a more truly integrated environment.

Anyway, I’m not sure how a civil rights lawyer could argue that an African-American student is aggrieved by being allowed to choose either the regular public school or a new charter school that promises to try to serve his needs especially.

Six applications got turned down. At least one of them should have been.

It is sad that the Gillett schools, long associated with the fabled coon supper, got absorbed and then closed by the DeWitt district on account of the dreaded fiscal inefficiency of its smallness. But for the people in Gillett then to turn around and try to stay open by reconstituting as a charter school represents an abuse of the charter school concept.

Another application seemed to have one gentleman both owning the school facility and renting it through his proposed authority to appoint the school’s board.

A semi-religious proposal in West Memphis was rejected on the basis that it wouldn’t do anything the regular public schools weren’t doing.

Similarly, a charter school from Oklahoma wanting to expand into Springdale was denied on that same basis — that Springdale’s regular schools were doing fine, thank you — as was a proposal for a charter school offering longer school days and after-school, nutrition and summer programs to serve the special needs of low-income students in Fayetteville.

There are two ways to look at this. Well, three, counting those of us sanely in between.

Charter school advocates, including a nest at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, believe the state board shows a bias against charter schools and an allegiance to revenue streams for the educational establishment.

They believe otherwise qualifying charter proposals shouldn’t be turned down simply because state board members don’t see a special need unmet by the local school. They think charter schools ought to be given a chance to live or die by their empirical performance and the free-market choices of parents.

Public school defenders think you do a disservice to kids by bombarding them indiscriminately with charter schools that may or may not make their transfer from the regular public schools worthwhile. They think public schools shouldn’t be subjected to competition for the sake of competition, or to erosion merely for the sake of erosion, but favored with support and fortification for the sake of all the children.

I’m thinking the charter school advocates are altogether too willy-nilly and that charter school foes are altogether too defensive. I’m thinking one approval in eight applications was too few while eight approvals in eight would have been an abomination.

As always, the answer lies in an ever-more impenetrable land of less stridency and more reasoning together.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.