Asa Hutchinson so wanted to be governor. He had a plan.
He would cut taxes for a more business-friendly environment. He would tighten the inertia-driven state government budget. He would delve into the complexities of health care. He would try to fix the prisons. He would obsess on job creation. He would reward long-suffering Republicans with jobs and appointments long denied them. He would introduce a general pragmatic conservatism to prove Republicans can govern.
So then Asa looked up a few hours into his governorship and found, quite to his surprise, that he had become czar of the Little Rock public schools.
That hadn't been on the agenda.
People came to him and wanted to know how he would feel if the state Education Board took over those Little Rock schools.
He had no idea. That was a decision to be made under the law by a board to which he had appointed no one. The education commissioner who would become the de facto school board for Little Rock via a takeover was not his appointee.
So the board voted 5-to-4 to do the takeover. The decisive vote came from the liberal Mike Beebe-appointed chairman, Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock, whom Hutchinson presumably will replace when his term expires in June. The commissioner, Tony Wood (the de facto Little Rock school board) was a Beebe-era leftover whom Hutchinson had already said he would replace in time after attending to higher priorities.
So to put the situation in its simplest form:
The departing Wood and Ledbetter had a plan for the state takeover. The state would install the respected businessman-lawyer Baker Kurrus to fix the blundered and bloated district budget. The state would rearrange personnel to get good people and proven methods into the six specifically failing individual schools. It might, or might not, keep the superintendent, Dexter Suggs. It would get the schools returned to local control as soon as possible. That's usually the point. The state Education Board gave local control back to Lee County last week because its schools barely--by a fraction--met the minimum threshold for proficiency.
But Little Rock, by size and prominence, may be a special case. The Walton Family Foundation and other business-community "reformers" of public education want something grander. The district, or at least its distressed schools, would be privatized, essentially, perhaps under a charter-school management system with which the state would contract. Teacher fair-dismissal protections would be waived. Smart post-college kids in the Teach for America program would be brought in for new instructional blood.
So which shall it be, governor?
It's completely up to him, effectively. He has now nominated his new commissioner, the conciliatory conservative with a bipartisan nature, former state Sen. Johnny Key. And he'll replace Ledbetter before long with a new decisive vote.
Here seems to be Hutchinson's answer: Neither and both. Don't rush me.
He wants Wood to stay in the job until legislation can be passed allowing Key to hold the commissioner's post without a master's degree. He wants the local district budget emphasis to continue, because, either way, that's the first urgency.
Meantime, he supports legislation backed by the Walton types--House Bill 1733--to allow the state to set up an "achievement district" by which a private management firm could be brought in and teacher fair-dismissal laws relaxed. I'm told he supports that bill not necessarily to impose it, but simply to have that tool available as he wends his way to a decision.
Ledbetter, by the way, told public radio last week that, if he had known HB1733 was coming, he would have voted the other way on the takeover.
I'm told that what Hutchinson--and Key--eventually will choose will almost assuredly be a "blend."
Where we have we heard that before? How about keeping the private-option form of Medicaid expansion for now and doing away with it later? How about rejecting a big new prison for several smaller fixes?
The following is merely my speculation: Hutchinson believes some of the Walton-type reforms are needed, but that they can't be enforced in full scope because the public will not support it. So he will embrace only some increment.
That most likely will mean making some of the six academically failing schools charter schools in an "achievement district"--KIPP-like schools, I suspect, patterned after those turning out college-prepared kids in Helena-West Helena--and getting rid of the existing traditional faculties of those schools to bring in energetic, short-term Teach for America brigades of smart recent graduates of elite colleges.
Traditional public education defenders would sound an alarm about abandoned public education and corporate evil.
Walton-type reformers would lament that a rare broader opportunity in the state's vital urban center had been ... not lost, just underplayed.
And Little Rock's public schools?
Amid the public education establishment's resentment of Walton-type reforms--and amid the equal disdain that Walton types hold for the public education establishment--we might keep in mind that better learning for children is the point and conceivably even attainable from a Solomonic governor's blender.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/15/2015