It begins in Little Rock's schools
Editorials
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
WHO’S AGAINST quality education? Little Rock ’s school board, apparently. By votes of 7 to 0 and 6 to 1. Those were the the near-unanimous margins by which the school board went on record the other day against various charter schools being proposed for Pulaski County. Typical of the bias against quality in Little Rock ’s public schools were the comments of Baker Kurrus, an otherwise sensible, even idealistic, member of the school board:
“If these [applications for charter schools] pass and they are successful . . . and we lose 1,000 students, we will be closing low-enrollment schools. The public will come and scream at us when they ought to go to the Department of Ed. You cannot take 1,000 students out of our district and still expect us to provide a quality education to the students who remain. It’s a double whammy. The students who go to charter schools are not those of great need but have support at home and are relatively high-achieving. Everybody get ready.”
There are so many basic misunderstandings in that outburst, we scarcely know where to start unraveling them. To begin with, charter schools are public schools. By supporting them, Little Rock ’s school board would be offering its students a quality education—not denying them one.
Public charter schools give families an opportunity to get the very best education for their kids, one designed with their interests and needs and potential in mind. But Mr. Kurrus sounds as if he wants to hold these students hostage to schools that aren’t meeting their needs now, let alone raising their expectations. He talks as if the school district’s interests were opposed to the kids’—when the only reason we have school districts is to serve the best interests of those children. That is the idea, isn’t it, Mr. Kurrus?
Private schools may look attractive compared to public schools because they may seem to offer a better quality of education. But there’s no reason public schools can’t compete with private ones when it comes to offering kids new opportunities, and their teachers and principals a teaching environment they would relish. See Central, Hall and Parkview high schools. All public, all in Little Rock . Quality education is nothing to fear. On the contrary, it’s something to seek.
Instead, Mr. Kurrus sounds more concerned about keeping schools open than opening the minds of students. Nor does he seem to realize that, once failing schools are obliged to compete with charter ones, they might stop failing. Spurred by the need to keep and attract students, they might start meeting their students’ needs. If they don’t, they should be closed.
ARE WE supposed to believe that competition will raise standards in every other endeavor—in business, in the professions, in the arts and sciences—but not in education? Please. Providing competition within the public school system is one of the basic reasons to have charter schools. With the help of such schools, Little Rock ’s school district could not only do a better job of educating its students but keep more of them enrolled in public schools.
As for good charter schools’ draining high-achieving students from the school district, Mr. Kurrus doesn’t seem to realize that enrollment at these charter schools would be open to all students—rich or poor, black or white, high-achieving or low-achieving. Many if not most charter schools serve lower-income, black students. See the KIPP school in Helena , an outstanding example of a charter school. Wouldn’t Little Rock be fortunate to have that kind of school producing that kind of result? And wouldn’t the kids be, too? And isn’t that the important thing?
The rules and regulations governing charter schools in this state are clear, if too restrictive. In approving charter schools, the state’s board of education is supposed to give preference to those proposed for (a) school districts that have a higherthan-average percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches, (b) school districts that have been classified as in academic distress, and (c) school districts found in the greatest need of academic improvement.
Little Rock’s school district would seem to qualify for these proposed charter schools on all three sad counts, yet its school board objects to giving these schools—and the kids who would like to try them—a chance to succeed.
The school board’s message to kids who would like to try a charter school is simple: Don’t you dare! Wasn’t that the crime of the Little Rock Nine, too—that they were ready for an academic challenge, that they wanted to attend the best school they could find? Even if they knew the surroundings would be unfamiliar and the work challenging. The powers that used to be tried to bar their way, too. How little things have changed after 50 years.
Even a member of the school board like Mike Daugherty, who hasn’t been exactly a beacon of progress on the board, saw some good in having a charter school take over the vacant Rightsell School . He may have voted to get rid of a reform-minded school superintendent who was actually interested in raising academic standards, but even Mr. Daugherty saw some good in one proposed charter school, the Learning for Life Academy . Its purpose: to help failing kids catch up on the fundamentals so they’d be ready to go on to college. What’s so terrible about that?
THE THREE charter schools proposed for downtown Little Rock would have a curriculum built around math, science, technology and engineering—disciplines that not only the state but the country needs in today’s competitive world.
But these schools would be about more than technological competence. They propose not just to train their students but educate them. The elementary school would offer Latin. Goodness, a real grammar school, not just one in name only. Wow! What an inestimable advantage for any youngster who wants to understand how language works. Spanish would naturally follow in the middle school, just as any romance language follows Latin. And then—an exotic touch—Chinese, the standard Mandarin variety, would be offered in high school. Who says East is East and West is West and the twain shall never meet? Why not in downtown Little Rock ? Especially since China is becoming an economic powerhouse in the global economy.
The middle and high school curriculum of these schools would resemble that of a classical academy—Aristotelian logic and rhetoric would be taught alongside the usual core of academic subjects. Why would anyone want to deny a kid a chance at a real education like that? In order to keep faltering old schools free of competition? If that’s the reason, there’s something awfully wrong with our priorities.
The lone vote against opposing these promising charter schools for Little Rock came from Larry Berkley. How about that? The man actually seems willing to give quality a chance when it comes to education. “We need to start viewing ourselves as being in a competitive environment, and start behaving that way,” he said. “We need to stop having a kneejerk reaction to all attempts to offer innovative ways to improve academic achievement.”
Goodness. The guy sounds as dangerous as Socrates, and we all know what happened to him. Or should. Let radicals like Larry Berkley have their way and these kids could start reaching their own conclusions on the basis of the best ideas of the past. They might even come to love the noble as opposed to the base, and begin by discussing how to distinguish between the two. Before you know it, they’d be asking just what virtue is, and how best to attain it. They might even start staging . . . Symposia! Oh, the horror! Giving kids ideas can lead to trouble. Right here in River City . Dangerous things, ideas. They could get in the way of the important things—like keeping old school buildings open instead of opening young people’s minds.
Speaking of the noble and the base, it’s pretty clear which side won these lopsided votes on or rather against charter schools. It turns out we may not be all that different from the ancient Athenians after all. Maybe we should just be grateful nobody offered Mr. Berkley a hemlock cocktail.
