Pressured to Prevaricate: Lies and Silence in Little Rock Schools
“Education Reform” has Arkansas in its grip. Our first charter school law took effect in 1995. The following year, President Bill Clinton spoke in favor of charter schools at his State of the Union address: “I challenge every State to give all parents the right to choose which public school their children will attend and to let teachers form new schools with a charter they can keep only if they do a good job.”
Since then, Arkansas has invested heavily in public charter schools. Not only have we increased the number and type of charter schools in Arkansas, we have offered charter-style “waivers” of state standards to traditional public schools.
The boundaries are blurred. The laws aren’t enforced. The public is getting pushed out of public education, but the operators are keeping our money. We are still required to pay for public schools, even while our voices are being silenced and our eyes are being covered.
Yes, we still have elected legislators crafting education bills in our state Capitol. However, political appointees come right behind these elected legislators and waive these laws as soon as they’re written. With 10,004 waivers currently in effect — and discretionary non-enforcement of other laws — all of the real power rests with Governor Asa Hutchinson and his appointees: Education Commissioner Johnny Key and the overwhelming majority of our State Board of Education members.
This unchecked power is especially autocratic in Little Rock, where the Little Rock School District (LRSD) has been under state control since 2015. LRSD doesn’t have an elected school board — only Johnny Key.
LRSD is under artificially intensified pressure to report improvement in student achievement, in order to avoid total dismemberment (as we’ve already seen in New Orleans) or extreme deregulation and stagnation (as in Michigan.) As one-man school board, Johnny Key is at the helm: steering the state’s largest school district toward the deadline (currently January, 2020) by which its fate must be decided.
How’s Johnny doing? Depends on his goal. I don’t want to assume he and his boss are acting in bad faith, but LRSD is definitely not getting better — and the school-to-prison pipeline is getting high-tech updates and high-dollar rewards. If bad schools and overflowing prisons are the goal, then Asa Hutchinson and Johnny Key are doing a wonderful job.
When the state took over LRSD in 2015, it was because six of the district’s 48 schools were judged to be “failing” by the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE.) Since then, the number of “failing schools” in LRSD has risen from six to 22 — because the ADE changed the way it grades schools, not because students have stopped learning things.
Student test scores aside, what do we really want for our schools?
In the last 2 1/2 months before state takeover, Jim Ross joined the LRSD school board. Dr. Ross campaigned — and won — on a four-plank platform: Financial transparency, teacher-created curriculum, educational equity, and administrative streamlining.
Last week, Dr. Ross told me the elected (but deposed) school board had been working on curriculum first. Wouldn’t it be nice if Governor Hutchinson’s education czar were implementing teacher-created curriculum, like the school board would have done if the ADE hadn’t taken over? What if the ADE subpoenaed all of LRSD’s raw financial data and audited more than just its special education finances?
But no. Johnny Key’s approach to LRSD has been obstinately hands-off. Aside from hastily firing and installing superintendents, Asa Hutchinson’s Department of Education (ADE) has resolutely neglected LRSD. For the first four-and-a-half years of state control, the ADE kept secret the “exit criteria” by which LRSD would ultimately be judged.
Last month, the ADE published their exit criteria for LRSD. At the same time, however, LRSD Community Advisory Board chairman Jeff Wood was working with AR Senator Kim Hammer to draft legislation extending state control an extra four years. Their bill got defeated yesterday, but only by one vote.
What happens when an all-powerful leader takes a negligent approach to a public school district like Little Rock?
- Mothers like Carol Roddy (also a substitute teacher) must direct their time and energy to state-level advocacy. As Ms. Roddy said at the Dec. 20, 2018 meeting of the SBoE, “…we will turn this State Board into the Little Rock School Board, if that’s what we have to do, by showing up, telling you what’s going on, and getting you involved in giving us back our schools.”
There’s really no point in stakeholders going to the “local” LRSD Community Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. The CAB has staged votes before allowing public comment. CAB Chairman Wood (although he is not a legislator) also helped draft a narrowly-defeated bill for the General Assembly to extend state control over LRSD from five to nine years. When a “local” leader like Jeff Wood attempts to write laws for the entire state like this, it becomes clear that LRSD’s “Community Advisory Board” is just another puppet group standing in for Asa Hutchinson.
So, instead of having parents, teachers, and supporters engaged in making schools better across a broad spectrum of issues, the state of Arkansas is cornering LRSD’s stakeholders into a single-issue fight — while at the same time waiving school standards that very few of us want to sacrifice.
2. The teachers’ union cannot protect the rights of individual teachers because their focus is on lobbying at the Capitol. Unfortunately, Asa Hutchinson’s waivers quickly sweep away whatever legislative “wins” the teachers achieve. Meanwhile— in sort of a “good-faith” gesture of “professionalism” toward the these same lawmakers— the Arkansas Education Association (AEA) defends LRSD administrators when they are threatened with disciplinary action. The AEA represents corrupt administrators even when that pits the AEA against its own subsidiary, the Little Rock Education Association (LREA) representing teachers in a grievance.
Clearly, Asa Hutchinson’s approach to educators is “Divide and conquer.”
3. Government employees who embezzle, commit fraud, cover up physical abuse of children, and retaliate against the teachers who try to stop them are allowed to continue in their bad behavior, creating a culture of criminality and silence. Yes, Karen James and Sabrina Stout have both recently been removed from their positions. However Freddie Fields (Director of Student Services,) Robert Robertson (HR,) Kelsey Bailey (CFO,) Sadie Mitchell (Deputy Superintendent,) Shoutell Richardson (former Director of Elementary Education/Current Principal at Rockefeller Elementary,) and other administrators — who have been reported to multiple superintendents (and the AEA) for unethical behavior — remain firmly ensconced in their positions.
In fact, Superintendent Mike Poore has promoted several of these disreputable administrators, and mentioned three of them specifically when he spoke at the December 20, 2018 meeting of the State Board of Education. Although board member Ouida Newton successfully moved to waive Fair Dismissal for LRSD that day — so that bad administrators could be removed without due process — these administrators are still in charge. Mike Poore isn’t stopping them.
What kind of power do these administrators have? Two UniServ directors (Tim Greene and Monica Norwood) from the AEA actually named their names in 2015 to Superintendent Baker Kurrus (who is now on Mayor Frank Scott’s transition team for education)— attempting to report them for falsifying documents and other bad behavior — and Kurrus interrupted them before they could finish their sentence.
Both UniServ directors stopped working for the AEA shortly thereafter, just as Superintendent Kurrus was removed from LRSD. But those administrators? They’re still working for LRSD.
4. Teachers become demoralized, and either leave the district or stop doing their best work for students.
5. Students with good academic records and parental support leave the district, and their abandoned, “underutilized” schools close.
5. Overall education quality drops.
6. Children fall through the cracks. Even when teachers and parents attempt to report physical abuse of students, the AEA handles misbehaving LRSD employees administratively (without criminal prosecution) and Johnny Key ignores them. The abused and underserved children go directly to jail — despite the best efforts of their families and teachers — before they even have the chance to graduate from high school.
Asa and Johnny sure must be proud to approve and expand “virtual” charter schools that will serve these incarcerated kids.
Virtual schools have lower overhead costs than schools that need buses, buildings, and textbooks — but Asa Hutchinson’s new “Omnibus Transformation Bill” will require us to fund them at the same rate as traditional public schools. Yes, some homeschooling families appreciate this model — but it’s the for-profit prison industry that will supply most of the students and generate the real payday.
Is this what we want for Arkansas? If not, I recommend organizing ourselves in OPPOSITION to this trend — not in conciliatory cooperation.
