How to demolish a school district

Robert F. Kennedy is remembered for saying, “Some men see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream things that never were and ask, “Why not?”  

George Bernard Shaw said that same thing many years before Kennedy. I am reminded of both of them now, as the Little Rock School District embarks on budget cuts and school closings. This sort of funeral prearrangement happens when the money runs out.

It is hard to forecast the real trajectory of the Little Rock School District. Overall enrollment is declining, even as new buildings such as Pinnacle View High School are being constructed. I saw the need in northwest Little Rock when I was superintendent. In 2015 I walked around the old Leisure Arts facility on a Sunday, and went back to my office and drafted an offer to purchase it. The makeover was spectacular, and Pinnacle View Middle School is a success.

The new high school will probably keep some students in LRSD who otherwise might have left. Roberts Elementary and Pinnacle View Middle certainly did. 

The district will come out of this process with familiar pockets of excellence, but with lots of surplus real estate, more discontent in the central part of the city, and a sad sense of impending doom. 

The school board has its own issues. Some members are spending thousands of dollars on travel, conventions and district-provided cellphones. The money is probably not significant in the grand scheme of things, but the message and the mindset are demoralizing. Imagine that you are an employee who gets a pink slip, while you know that board members are traveling to glitzy conventions at district expense.

Speaking of closings and pink slips … Carver Elementary, once a crown jewel of the inter-district magnet program, is slated to be closed as an elementary school. Students will be transferred to Washington Elementary, a cavernous building currently enrolled at about 36% of capacity. Brady Elementary may be closing. Bale, Western Hills and Terry Elementary are substantially under-enrolled. If current trends continue, more school closings are inevitable. In the last few years, Rightsell, Franklin, Baseline, Meadowcliff, Geyer Springs, Booker, Wilson, Romine, Dodd, Woodruff, Henderson and Rockefeller have ceased to be used as regular schools. 

Mann and Dunbar middle schools, both once high-performing campuses, have lost enrollment over the last 15 years or so. Ditto Hall and Parkview. The slow drip, when it continues over a long period of time, results in a great deal of damage.

The sad fact is that these schools did nothing by themselves to end up here. The state Legislature, the state Board of Education and the city of Little Rock condemned these institutions. I have said before that schools are trailing indicators of neighborhood health. The new Southwest High School and the Lacey K-8 are certainly positive, needed and beautiful, but the overall student performance in those schools won’t change dramatically unless the children who attend those schools are nurtured, supported and encouraged through stable family circumstances that exist when people have affordable housing and living wages.

In 1999, when the state Legislature was considering open-enrollment charter schools, I testified to the Senate Education Committee that charters would take students from traditional school districts, with severe negative consequences to those districts. On the other side, charter proponents promised that charters would create healthy competition as districts vied for students, and that this competition would raise the performance of all schools.

The state opened its doors to charters, and Central Arkansas is now swamped with them. But those charters has not improved test scores for either the students who transferred to charters, or for the districts that were supposed to get better as they competed for students. Regardless of these facts, charters continue to drain a lot of high-performing students from the Little Rock School District. 

Parents made choices, and presumably did what they thought was best for their children. I think most of those parents were seeking a different peer group for their children, or perhaps a longer school day and school year to save on childcare expenses. 

Important questions and consequences were never seriously considered. Should a successful student be given a publicly funded alternative that’s not necessarily better, even if the consequence is the isolation, segregation and stigmatization of children of greatest need who remain in traditional public schools? 

What Arkansas did, when the state allowed nearly unfettered proliferation of public charter schools, was to create publicly funded redundancies. Public charter schools have their own administrations and facilities that require funding. These duplicate options mark a retreat from the efficiencies of larger districts that can offer more robust curricula and resources. 

The truth is that charter schools were the creation of people who preferred school vouchers, but couldn’t get that done politically in the late ’90s. The whole construct of a charter school was a ruse, a fraud, conceived to push public money to a school that could curate its enrollment, operate independently, and exclude unionized teachers or staff. 

The “open enrollment” requirement said that anyone could apply and be admitted to a charter by lottery. The fact is that students who don’t speak English, students who don’t have access to private transportation, students with physical, learning or behavioral disabilities, and students who don’t have advocates able and willing to negotiate through the enrollment process don’t end up in most charter schools.

When the “competition” excuse for charters proved unsupportable, charterizers switched to cheerleading for “school choice.” 

No matter how it’s being marketed, the proliferation of charters ignored the state’s constitution and our history of common schools funded by public money. Our history of segregation should never be forgotten. The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet overruled Brown v. Board of Education. Its primary holding was that separate schools can never be equal. When we have separate schools we lose the opportunity to build a culture of acceptance, civility, empathy and understanding. 

Unfortunately, Arkansas is now diving headfirst into the shallow end of the pool with unrestricted vouchers. I can find no credible data which supports overall student achievement gains through the use of vouchers. Vouchers move some students around, and the Arkansas plan is certainly a huge subsidy to families that already have students in private schools. But there is no magic in a voucher. A poor kid cannot go to an $18,000-per-year private school, even with a $7,000 voucher discount.

And so, most vouchers are being used by students who already attended private or church schools, which are already largely segregated by race and income. The recipient schools will mostly be in urban areas, especially places like Little Rock.

Meanwhile, traditional public schools continue to go without the community support they need.

When Little Rock was released from federal court supervision in 2007, all of the community support that had been discussed if LRSD could just “get out of court” never materialized. Instead, opportunistic charter entrepreneurs swept into Little Rock and recruited magnet students from Mann, Dunbar, Carver, Booker and other high-performing schools.

Pulaski County now has about two dozen charter schools, with more on the way.

In 2016 I presented proof to the state Board of Education on behalf of LRSD that both LISA and eStem were taking high-performing students from LRSD at the very time the state Department of Education was in charge of LRSD and asking the district to raise its average test scores. The state continued its expansion of charters despite the evidence.

The changing federal courts have thrown out years of precedent and found reasons to allow vouchers for church schools and regular private schools. State courts interpreting limitations in state constitutions are now beginning to hear voucher cases. 

In Kentucky, voters overwhelmingly decided that public money should not be spent on vouchers and private school tuition. We need to vote on that same issue here in Arkansas. You can bet the state and voucher proponents will use all of their power to keep that issue from the voters. 

The Arkansas Constitution certainly appears to require that public money only be spent for “a system” of “common schools,” and not for multiple systems of private and church schools. I hope Arkansas judges will decide the issue on the basis of the words in our state constitution. 

As I survey the civic carnage and waste of poorly performing charter schools, voucher subsidies for wealthy families, struggling traditional districts that are losing enrollment, and neighborhoods losing anchor schools, I am disappointed, but not surprised. All of this was predictable. This was not a natural disaster. We did it to ourselves.

Within a stone’s throw of Carver is eStem East Village Elementary School, an open enrollment charter school. The eStem “system” came on the scene early, with grand plans and promises to innovate, compete and reshape the educational landscape in Little Rock. The system is large now, with a number of schools that perform just about like LRSD and NLR schools with similar demographics. eStem East Village is rated by the state as a “D” school, the same as Carver. 

Some people dream things that could have been and ask, “Why not?”

I see things as they are, and simply ask, “Why?”