Allow me to highlight a couple of lines from Gov. Asa Hutchinson's news release announcing a bill to allow him to spend $3.5 million annually for "school-choice" scholarships.
After detailing the level of poverty and restriction of residence required of recipients--that they must qualify for the free- or reduced-lunch program and live in a singularly specified county, Pulaski--the news release explained a further narrowing of eligibility: "Student attended a public school in the previous year. ... The school chosen must be an accredited non-public school."
Got that? Your state government is saying it wants to spend $3.5 million a year in extra taxpayer funds for special educational opportunities and devote the money entirely to kids in Pulaski County alone, and then only if those children will flee the public schools.
That's not school choice. That's school restriction of the one. It's school favoritism for the other.
It's also decidedly odd, siding with the private option to a public responsibility that is specified clearly in the state Constitution, meaning an equitable educational opportunity for all children.
This bill, SB620, defies logic by being purposely inequitable at the very time the state government has taken control of the Little Rock traditional public-school district. The state has taken over presumably to lift the district from supposed failure. It did so under authority growing out of the Arkansas Supreme Court ruling in the Lake View case that demanded adequacy and equity in educational opportunities for all kids. Yet now the state presumes by breathtaking contradiction to pay kids extra to leave that public-school district to inequity, to wither.
That's competing with yourself rather than focusing on the constitutional imperative at hand. It's spending an extra $3.5 million to exacerbate rather than attack the problem. It's weakening rather than fortifying the foundation from which the problem arose.
It reminds me of common remarks by the first state-appointed Little Rock superintendent, Baker Kurrus, who served until the Hutchinson administration fired him for threatening to be too successful.
Kurrus insisted that Little Rock could lift its public schools if the state would stop expanding charter schools in its region, essentially building separately one of the state's biggest school districts to drain the main district's resources, undercut its public mission and compete next-door.
Now Asa and the self-described "school reformers" want to leave behind the thousands of children in excess of the lucky 500.
That's unless what they really want is to go full New Orleans on Little Rock with an all-charter public system. If so, let's make the case and get on with it. Public education divided against itself cannot stand.
We'll need to get started on a constitutional amendment. We'll need the voters to endorse constitutional phrasing mandating inequitable educational opportunity by installing a delivery system that competes with itself rather than standardizes an underlying equal opportunity for everyone.
Competition that encourages innovation in delivery systems to provide smarter customer choice--I get that.
If the Internet can get faster to the point that it makes streaming of video as clear and universal as the old cable-television system, and do so with savings for the smart customer, then that's good. It's the free market. It's America.
When I overheard those millennials talking disparagingly about these old people who still live by actually strung TV cable and DSL lines, I was offended to the point of educating myself to, and availing myself of, the customer options.
But the offensiveness of smug millennials talking about clueless older people in their television-viewing dinosaur-ism pales against the offensiveness of state government paying to install state-of-the-art streaming in a few old folks' homes and leaving the rest behind, metaphorically speaking.
The right to an equitable cable-television opportunity is not anywhere in the state Constitution. Nor should it be. But public education is a universal command, a universal moral imperative, a plain constitutional mandate.
State government's assignment on elementary and secondary education is to focus, not dissipate; to serve all, not favor some; to adhere to constitutional and moral responsibility, not to winner-and-loser concepts perfectly suited for the free market.
State government's assignment also ought to be using any effective innovations demonstrated by private or experimental charter schools--and there are some--to make the public schools as good as, ideally better than, the innovators.
The better school-reform war would be waged against any elements of the public-school establishment resisting charter-demonstrated improvements.
Speaking of metaphor: Let's say the assignment is to improve the 2-10 Razorback football team.
Should we take money from the Razorback Fund to build a second football stadium for a second team to be made up of players lured from the existing roster by supplemental scholarships?
That's supposed to make the remains of the original team better?
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/26/2019