Editorial
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sunday, May 23, 2010
IT’S LONG been a mystery to some of us why the argument that a lawyer submits to the courts should be called a brief, since it tends to be anything but.
The crux of this latest 97-page brief filed by Little Rock’s school district is simple enough: Since we can’t compete with charter schools, we’re going to ban them. Or at least keep any more from being formed hereabouts. A lawsuit used to be the last resort of a failing enterprise; now it has become the first.
Naturally the decision to file suit was okayed by the usual 4-to-3 vote of a school board that may be divided but remains determined to hold on to its captive market. Rather than educate, litigate! It’s so much easier.
What a sad development in a long, sad story. It’s always sad when any enterprise can’t succeed unless it calls the law on its competition. The rational for this lawsuit: Those danged charter schools are draining away the most promising students—often white, middle-class ones—from the traditional public schools. So those students shouldn’t be given any alternative but to stay in failing schools. Hold ’em hostage instead.
Never mind that all it takes is a look at the figures to note that charter schools generally attract just as many poor, black kids as the regular ones do. But, what matters is that the school district stay on the state teat. It’s all about money, as usual. To the tune of about $70 million a year doled out to Pulaski County’s three school districts.
Naturally enough, the state’s taxpayers—not to mention its governor and attorney general and Legislature—have grown tired of carrying these school districts. What all of them seem to want at this exhausted point is out. And as it happens, the interests of the taxpayers in this case coincide with those of families who want a better education for their kids, the kind they believe charter schools can offer. Maybe the regular schools would offer a better education, too, if they had to compete with charters.
This is not to say that this “brief” doesn’t offer some moments of high comedy here and there, or at least irony. For example, the school district demands that the state pay for new programs that will provide “equal opportunity for an adequate education to all students attending high-poverty schools.” Those who crafted this brief don’t seem to be aware that the state already offers such programs in Pulaski County. They’re called charter schools.
Before this latest round of legal obfuscation is over, the different briefs from the different levels of government involved in this over-litigated fracas aren’t likely to be brief. They’re likely to be as long as they are ill-tempered. And any light they might have shed will have been lost in all the blare and glare of their lawspeak.
Meanwhile, kids in Pulaski County, especially young black boys whose needs and potential are being specifically addressed by the latest charter school being organized in Little Rock, must wonder when the grown-ups are going to start acting like grown-ups.
