I told my retirees' class in a program called LifeQuest that their special guest presenter Wednesday morning was heroic.
His hard work, long hours and clear passion in a daunting job merited such lofty praise. Even those who fired him said he was special.
I warned that he might become emotional as he talked about kids in the Little Rock public schools.
The crowd of 250 or so gave Baker Kurrus a respectful standing ovation at the start and a longer earned one at the end.
A woman put on Facebook that she'd found her candidate for governor. But I'd prefer for Kurrus something more important, which is reinstatement as Little Rock school superintendent.
I say that with all due respect to Michael Poore, who seems nice enough and well-intended and able. But he is, after all, an agent of state officials who are pushing charter-school expansion in Little Rock at the very time they're taking over the regular public schools supposedly to lift a half-dozen of them from academic distress.
Some charter schools, such as the KIPP schools in Helena-West Helena, have been heroic themselves. Good ones can show regular public schools better ways, if the regular public schools will take heed.
But the issue in Little Rock is new state approval of vast charter-school expansions at a time of state control of regular schools on account of academic distress. The expansion, Kurrus told the class, is turning the eStem system in Little Rock into one of the state's largest school districts, with 5,000 students--all within the regular Little Rock district.
"We have to reach for a higher calling for education," Kurrus said. He said there were many components to such noble aspiration, but that the wise use of our community's limited public education resources had to be one of them. And creating separate new charter districts within a distressed regular district--and letting those new charter districts explode in size and peel away the most advantaged students from the regular public schools--is not a wise use, he argued.
We learned last week that, pursuant to state approval for adding 600 students this fall, the LISA Academy charter school sent thousands of promotional mailers to the high-demographic areas of the city, but none in the section both south of Interstate 630 and east of Interstate 430, meaning the hard neighborhoods.
Caught by the press, the charter school said it had made a mistake and would promptly send mail into those hard neighborhoods, which, it said, it was intending to reach some other way.
By licensing charter-school expansions that erode the district containing academically distressed schools, and that market themselves by demographic discrimination until caught, the state is violating its own constitutional requirement to provide an equitable and adequate educational opportunity to all kids.
By a scoring system Kurrus has devised to assess local schools' annual performances according to a "par" that he sets based on the economic status and skill levels of the student bodies, most of the regular Little Rock schools outperform the charter schools, he said.
It's grading on a curve, but you get his point: Public schools, many of them, do more with less advantage than charter schools do with more advantage.
A retired physician asked Kurrus why the Waltons, through their education reform foundation, were so interested in charter schools.
"That'd be a good question for the Waltons. I wish someone would ask them," Kurrus said.
If the Waltons are interested in better education for kids, he said, then they should come with him into Little Rock public school classrooms. There, he said, they should let their hearts be touched by the challenges and the effort. Then, he said, they could lend their vast resources to an ambitious partnership.
He lost his composure only a little.
So I spoke up to offer that Walton Foundation people say competition makes everyone better and that consumer choice improves everyone's opportunity.
I wondered if Kurrus accepted that.
He said--and this is important, both to understand and not misrepresent--that capitalism hasn't been accepted generally for the public sector.
We have one regional water public utility. We don't cherry-pick its underground sprinkler-system customers for special charter water districts.
As Kurrus noted: Wal-Mart succeeded. But Magic Mart didn't. We can't have winners and losers in education, at least by structural design.
A source close to Jim Walton told me a few weeks ago that the Waltons want only to work together in the joint interest of improved education.
So let's see some of that, shall we?
Baker Kurrus has a poem from a regular public school fourth-grader that he'd like to read for the Walton Foundation.
But we must act quickly. Gov. Asa Hutchinson and education commissioner Johnny Key have dumped Kurrus effective at the end of June.
Heroism is up against a hard deadline in Little Rock.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/15/2016