EDITORIALS

On your marks . . .

Get set . . . go, teach and learn!

— WAIT uh minute now. Something doesn’t add up. At least not if you’re agin charter schools in Arkansas.

An outfit out of Texas has come into God’s Country with hopes of opening a string of charter schools in these parts. Earlier this month, it even got approval from the state’s Board of Education to open three of them.

Oh, the horror! If you’ve been listening to the anti-charter folks, and there are a lot of them out there, you might have heard that these charters cherry pick the best students from the public schools, leaving the traditional schools with the hard-to-educate kids while the charters skate to prosperity teaching Biff and Kaylee from the good (and white) side of the tracks.

Except . . . .

Except this outfit, Responsive Education Solutions, will open a high school in Little Rock that promises to target high school dropouts and those at risk of dropping out.

Why, that sounds downright noble.

But it’s not anything new. Charters often target kids most at-risk.

Which doesn’t fit the anti-charter line, not at all. What next, opening charters in districts with lots of poor black kids, too?

Oh, yeah, we forgot. The KIPP folks in Helena and Blytheville do just that.

Not to mention the e-STEM school in downtown Little Rock.

Also, Little Rock Prep out by Children’s Hospital.

And the LISA academies that are spreading around; they recruit black, Hispanic, and poor kids.

Plus a handful of others.

In fact, charters are a natural fit for neighborhoods with lots of poor, black or Hispanic kids. Because parents need and welcome them. And, yes, this Texas outfit-Responsive, etc.-is opening a charter in Pine Bluff, too.

Those who rail against charter schools are going to have to come up with different talking points soon.They will. Because they’ll be just as desperate to keep the status unsatisfactory quo. And keep all that public money flowing into school districts with lots of failing schools.

THE GOOD thing-well, one of the good things-about charter schools is that they have few rules. Which is the point, or at least a point, about the charters.

Responsive Education Solutions is set to open up its Little Rock school at Arkansas Baptist College next year. Along with a school in Pine Bluff. But it’s also opening up something called Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy in Bentonville. That school is to feature classes on logic and Latin-with some Aristotle, Plato and Socrates thrown in. Be still our sorta geeky hearts. It sounds a little like the small liberal-arts college we once attended. The curriculum wasn’t highly specialized, just highly educational.

Strange as it is, school boards still send lawyers to badmouth charters whenever one is proposed to the board of education. When it came to the classical academy in Bentonville, however, the Bentonville’s school district had no objections to the idea. Which says something, something good, about those running Bentonville’s school district, and what they think about their schools, and how they feel about education. That is, the more quality on offer, the better, whether by their schools or the competition.

Bentonville’s attitude also says something, by contrast, about those running school districts elsewhere (like in Little Rock) who oppose charters because they might take some state money away from their little political fiefdoms.

A request: Please invite the press to the first day of classes at the classical academy, y’all. We’d love to sit through the first logic class. We might learn something. What a pity those opposed to charter schools don’t seem to have much use for logical arguments.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 11/26/2012

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