By John Brummett
At best we confront a serious inability to communicate. At worst we confront open cultural warfare. Only thousands of kids are at stake.
You have rich businessmen — some of the Waltons and newspaper publisher Walter Hussman in Little Rock, mainly — who believe public schools in Little Rock are generally failed.
They believe the educational establishment defensively resists principles of competition and accountability that might make the schools better.
They don’t like the teachers’ union. They don’t like unions.
They think the best way to attack this resistance to change is with charter schools that will demonstrate many of the methods they favor.
Some say these businessmen want to privatize education altogether. I assume instead that they embrace the ideal that charters will demonstrate enough success to put pressure on traditional public schools to adopt some of their methods — longer school days, longer school years, alternative and innovative instruction, teachers graded by student performance, things like that.
They would like to break the teachers’ union. There’s not much doubt there.
But school officials in Little Rock tend to look askance at any suggestion that they should treat charter schools as models. They believe charters attract students who tend to perform better in the first place, thus leaving the traditional public schools to stand for unfair comparison.
Now the Little Rock School District has filed a motion in its never-ending litigation. This motion argues that the state government’s acquiescence to additional charters erodes the racial desegregation of the district for which the state, pursuant to a settlement, has long funneled additional compensatory money to atone for past practices that effectively promoted segregation.
This motion has sent the rich businessmen into a lather. Their hired hand who runs their foundation, Luke Gordy, went to the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce to ask officials to help spread the word to members about a new group, Speak Up For Schools, that would fight the school district on this issue.
Randy Zook, head of the state chamber, agreed to send out a promotional e-mail to members. His memo got leaked to the popular Arkansas Times blog. Anger ensued.
It turns out that the rich businessmen’s group had set up a Web site called speakuplittlerock.com. It showed a page with this headline: “Little Rock School District — A Wasted Investment.”
That’s a harsh and jarring thing to say.
Zook thought so, too, when I told him about it. He said he’d been away at a national board meeting of KIPP, which runs the best charter schools, when this brouhaha got started. He said his three grown kids got good public educations in the Little Rock schools.
What Gordy and the rich businessmen were meaning to say was that the tens of millions of additional dollars the state has poured into Little Rock year after year under this settlement to promote desegregation amounts to waste. That’s because, they say, black kids in the district, during that time, have fallen farther behind national norms and farther behind the white kids in the district.
Public school advocates aren’t much assuaged. To say that all the millions in special desegregation aid has been wasted diminishes every child whose life was helped over those years in a magnet school, they say.
Zook’s memo frames the issue as one in which the Little Rock schools are seeking by this motion to protect state money. But that’s disingenuous, a political tack seeking to capitalize on an anti-spending public mood. The issue is the spread of charter schools.
Zook, seeming a tad harried Monday afternoon, told me he hadn’t actually written the memo over his signature, but merely signed and passed one on.
This may be simply another and large step in the business establishment’s abandonment of public education in Little Rock.
If not, the businessmen might be so kind as to make clear that their purpose is to save and improve public education, not replace it. And the educational establishment could quit scoffing at all charters and look for innovations to embrace.
Ideally the schools would drop their legal motion and the businessmen would blow up their Web site.
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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.
