Key to education

On the morning after he'd bought off Dexter Suggs as the school superintendent in Little Rock, state education commissioner Johnny Key stood at the Kroger deli in Little Rock's midtown picking up fried chicken for a staff lunch.

I told him we'd just been talking about him over at the LifeQuest class on current events that I lead for retirees on Wednesday mornings.

There I had assailed Key for that quarter-million-dollar payoff to the discredited Suggs. Key explained that the arrangement had amounted to a "negotiated separation" to get Suggs removed without lingering worries about litigation over contractual disputes.

Some in the LifeQuest class--not I--had been critical of him for holding his position without classroom experience or academic credential. Those qualifications had been waived in his behalf by passage of a bill after Gov. Asa Hutchinson nominated him for the job.


I felt it important to take the moment to convey to Key my view of the uncommonly powerful position he found himself in.

A former Republican state senator from Mountain Home who had a chemical engineering degree and previously owned a religious day-care center was now the de facto school board, practically the autocrat, for the state's largest and most storied school district. It had happened by the coincidence of his gubernatorial appointment and the state's barely preceding takeover of Little Rock's district on account of academic distress in six schools.

I presumed to advise him that he needed to communicate with the public. I generously and self-servingly offered to help him with that through this column, if he ever wanted to sit down for an interview.

I emphasized that I was not a knee-jerk defender of the traditional education establishment or structure or the teachers' union, but one who believed in some charter school methods and wanted those blended with traditional methods, not deployed to ridicule or replace traditional methods.

And he said, as I recall, "We're on the same page there," then took off with his chicken.

So maybe we were--and are--on the same page.

On Tuesday, Key announced that Harvard-educated lawyer and businessman Baker Kurrus would become the superintendent.

Kurrus served a dozen years on the Little Rock school board, until 2010. It is clear from that service that he believes both in preserving traditional public education and challenging it when needed.

I celebrate the selection although it means, you know, that the Little Rock schools are now run by two men who never took any education courses or taught in a classroom or served as principal of any school.

And that's fine with me.

The jobs of state education commissioner and Little Rock superintendent cry out for command of public policy on education, an understanding of the political complexities of that policy, an ability to understand and respond to public pressure, a command of management and budgeting and a respect and appreciation for what teachers and principals do even without ever having been one.

We require our federal defense secretary to be a civilian. Our president is commander in chief, with or without a personal history of military service. I was a very good newspaper reporter, if I do say so myself, but I was a horrible brief editor.

And here's the most important point: It is not being disrespectful to teachers and what they do to consider a non-teacher a splendid choice for education commissioner or Little Rock school superintendent.

It is as important that good teachers teach as that adept managers lead.

Yes, someone like Nancy Rousseau, successful principal at well-performing Central High, might have been a worthy choice as superintendent. But Kurrus' dozen years on the school board and his recent appointment to head a budget advisory committee provide, in this case, broader and more relevant experience for the monumental superintending task at hand.

So where does Kurrus fall on that polarized battleground of traditional public education and the so-called reform movement pushing charter schools and alternative teaching methods?

It might be instructive to point out that, as a school board member, Kurrus took on the establishment to argue that the Little Rock public schools shouldn't withdraw from the changing community, but instead adapt to it by opening an elementary school in the more affluent white-flight western reaches of the city where lots of children were.

I suspect he'll support the effort championed by his friend John Riggs to convert some teaching positions in the distressed schools to Teach for America positions.

And Kurrus might even go for making a charter school of one or more of those schools.

Generally, though, he will do what he did on the school board for a dozen years, which is champion the salvation of public schools with a fierce devotion to his community.

So I applaud Kurrus, and Johnny Key who hired him, and Asa Hutchinson who let Johnny Key hire him.

As a member of the LifeQuest class said last week, Kurrus will succeed or go down hard trying.

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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 05/10/2015

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