The Scalpel Is a Lie.
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, an uncredentialed political appointee of Governor Asa Hutchinson, made headlines when he refused to allow members of the public to attend a press briefing he hosted last Tuesday. By preemptively excluding teachers from the conversation, Commissioner Key set off warning bells among Arkansas teachers and the Little Rock Education Association (LREA.)
The teachers were right to be worried. It turns out Johnny Key is seeking a waiver from the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act for the 22 schools in the Little Rock school district that are currently deemed to be “failing.” (Up from six when Key took office.) In his press briefing, Key said that waiving the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act will help students by giving administrators this right to fire any teacher, at any time, for any reason.
The Arkansas Department of Education posted a video of Key’s press briefing. I’ve edited it down to the salient parts about waiving the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, because I’ve had personal experience teaching in a school with the same waiver.
Key asserts that taking away teachers’ rights to due process “would not be drastic,” and that waiving the Fair Dismissal Act would be a tool for administrators that “wouldn’t be used as a chainsaw — it’d be more like a scalpel.”
Note Key’s use of the subjunctive mood. If you’ve had good teachers, you know that “wouldn’t” and “it’d” are both verbs in the subjunctive mood — describing situations counter to fact.
What are the facts?
When a school district applies for an Act 1240 waiver from Arkansas state law, the school’s administration submits a written waiver request to the State Board of Education. Seven members of this nine-person board are appointees of Governor Hutchinson, serving the same master as Johnny Key. One member of the board, Dr. Sarah Moore, has previously served as Governor Hutchinson’s education policy adviser. Dr. Moore* also worked at the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, which publishes articles actively promoting school deregulation like “The Waivers Sought by Arkansas Charters: Should They Be Extended to All?” The article concludes, “We won’t know unless we try.”
That article, by the way, was published in 2015 — while Johnny Key was working in government relations at the University of Arkansas during his year between holding a State Senate seat (on the education committee with Senator Alan Clark, who would later change state law on Key’s behalf, allowing an uncredentialed person to become Education Commissioner) and taking the Education Commissioner job.
Now that Hutchinson has gathered such a tightly knit, overlapping crew of political appointees into positions of authority, the State Board of Education seems eager to approve anything Johnny Key requests.
Rather than speculating about what’d happen if the Arkansas Board of Education approved Key’s request for a waiver from the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act, let’s examine what has actually happened in another district that received this waiver nearly 20 years ago.
Arkansas Arts Academy, where I used to teach, is an open-enrollment public charter school in Rogers, Arkansas. Arkansas Arts Academy received a waiver from the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act on November 13, 2000. Their teachers have been “at will employees” for 18 years, with another ten years to go before the waiver expires.
In 2012, CEO Mary Ley took over as superintendent of Arkansas Arts Academy. In their 2012 charter renewal packet that same year, Arkansas Arts Academy (formerly Benton County School of the Arts) used their existing waiver from the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act as the rationale behind their requests for three other waivers: Layoff procedures, Grievance procedures, and Personnel Policies requirements.
The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) approved these waivers, and helpfully suggested additional waivers that the school might need if they wanted to be truly free from state oversight and regulation. The school didn’t even apply for those other waivers, but they got them anyway.
By the time I started working for Arkansas Arts Academy in 2017, the school didn’t have a Personnel Policies Committee — or even written policies for its employees. That meant every teacher was potentially subject to different employment rules, depending on the whims of the administration — and subject to change without notice, even after the fact.
We also had no established grievance procedure.
You know how the ADE says we count on stakeholders within schools to report issues up the chain of command, so that we can work together to improve schools for everybody? If teachers (the adults with the most significant, direct knowledge of a school’s inner workings) don’t have access to a grievance procedure, they can be fired for “complaining” when a school is violating state law.
For example, in the three months I worked there, Arkansas Arts Academy violated laws regarding supplemental duty (when teachers have to teach extra classes,) non-instructional duties, mentorship for new teachers, and pay for additional days. I wasn’t the (only) victim of all of these violations, but it’s a matter of public record which teachers were forced to work outside the boundaries of state law.
But did any of us complain? Not very loudly. We were “at will” employees. We did what we were told, and quietly planned our escape routes. (Or, in my case, we loudly escaped without any planning at all.)
Who suffers when good teachers quit? Who suffers the most when conscientious teachers feel they cannot speak up about things like facilities issues and support staff? It’s always the students who suffer.
Johnny Key and the State Board of Education are definitely wielding a chainsaw here. They are trying to target the Little Rock Education Association (which is bad enough) but chainsaws are terrible with targets — especially in unskilled hands. We should expect a lot of collateral damage to our children and our public money if we don’t vote Asa Hutchinson out of office.
- Oh my gosh, there are so many opportunities for puns here. “Key to Little Rock Schools: Moore/Poore.” Amiright?
- I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Little Rock doesn’t have to do the whole “desegregation” thing any more, so there’s no one holding Key accountable if families self-select themselves into schools separated by income and race?
