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Barclay Key: The Tragedy of Little Rock, Sixty Years After Eisenhower Sent in the 101st Airborne to Protect Nine Black Students

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2017 //
18

In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, accepted nine black students, while white parents jeered and protested. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to safeguard the students and to carry out the order of a federal judge.

That was sixty years ago.

How much has changed? Now Little Rock’s public schools are segregated again. At the behest of the Walton Family (which owns Arkansas), the public schools were taken over by the state. The man in charge is not, never was, an educator. The ostensible reason for the takeover was that six of the city’s 48 schools were “failing.” Since then, three of the 48 schools have been closed. More are on the chopping block, including schools with a long and honorable history.

Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, writes the sad story of the past sixty years here. (What! The Walton family forgot to buy the history department!)

It appears that the Walton family wants to turn Little Rock into the next New Orleans, the next Memphis. It wants to wipe out public schools and replace them with charters. It wants to silence the voice of local citizens and give them no role in determining the future of their schools.

Key writes:

The two most striking parallels between the past and present are the insistence by white leaders that they know what is best for Black families and students and the recurrent role that local white business leaders play in undermining the public school system and prioritizing their prerogatives for the city…

Sixty years ago Little Rock epitomized desegregation struggles in the South, but the city now follows a path worn by New Orleans, Memphis, and other cities wracked by the proliferation of charter schools. Like they have over the past sixty years, politicians and business leaders presume to know what is best for public schools, and their decisions reflect a preoccupation with the latest trends in business rather than research-based pedagogy. The replacement for the elected board, state education commissioner Johnny Key, was appointed by the new Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson despite having no experience as an educator. Key appointed a superintendent who was generally trusted by the city’s white elites, but that superintendent was promptly replaced when he openly criticized the inefficiency of expanding charter schools in a district that has been gradually losing students for years. With the exception of reconstituting one school, the state made no substantive changes at the distressed schools.

“Reflections of Progress” will serve as the theme for the sixtieth anniversary of the desegregation crisis. Things have certainly changed, but the standard is too low if we measure progress by events that unfolded in 1957. Reflecting on progress since 1967 would be more appropriate and sobering. White men again make all decisions for the school district. They act with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and, today, the Walton charter school lobby controlled by the state’s powerful Walton family. Since the state takeover, many of the same bureaucrats have their six-figure salaries. Many of the same children cannot read. Little Rock periodically commemorates the 1957 controversy, but it constantly relives 1967.

The Walton Family Foundation is engraved on this blog’s Wall of Shame. It doesn’t stand alone, but it has a place of pre-eminence on a wall that lists those who have used their money and power to betray democracy, public schools, and the American dream.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Segregation, Wall of Shame, Walton Foundation

Join the Fight to Save Public Schools in Arkansas!

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2017 //
2

Save Our Schools Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas are sponsoring a showing of “Backpack Full of Cash” on Thursday September 7 from 6:30-8:30 pm at Philander Smith College (M.L. Smith Auditorium) in Little Rock. The event is sponsored by the Schott Foundation for Public Education and SOS Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas.

All who are concerned about the future of public education as a basic human right are encouraged to attend. Join the Fight to stop privatization of what belongs to all of us!

Parents, educators, students, and other concerned citizens are urged to attend.

In response to the lobbying of representatives of the Walton family, the Legislature stripped Little Rock of local control. The pretext was that 6 of its 48 schools were low-performing.

Learn about the struggle to restore our democratic rights and save our public schools.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Arkansas: State Board Renews Failing Charter School But Won’t Restore Local Control to Little Rock Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2017 //
9

This is a shocking story, by Max Brantley, one of the leading journalists in Arkansas and an outspoken critic of the Waltons, who use their billions to dominate the state and the University of Arkansas.

Get this: the State Board of Education just renewed a charter school that has failed to meet standards for nine years in a row. But the state board refuses to relinquish its takeover of the Little Rock School District, which lost control because only six of its 48 schools were not meeting standards.

You have to read the whole thing to see the powerful tentacles of the Walton Family at work.

“Faced with a solid recommendation by a panel of state employees to revoke the charter of Covenant Keepers charter school in Southwest Little Rock, the state Board of Education voted again last week to forgive the school’s poor academic and financial record.

“Again, the state Board of Education accepted excuses it won’t tolerate from the Little Rock School District.

“The board took over the Little Rock School District two years ago and won’t let go, though 45 of its 48 schools exceed the performance of Covenant Keepers and the others are easily in its league academically.

“Covenant Keepers, 9 years old this August, has NEVER met proficiency standards. The grade 6-8 school showed about 28 percent of its students meeting the standard in reading and 20 percent in math in the most recent tests. It’s also been in a persistent financial mess.

“The school had a huge negative fund balance, in part because it was in arrears to the state for taking money in excess of its 160-student enrollment. (You wouldn’t think counting to 160 is high-order math.) Proper tax forms weren’t in evidence for employees and contractors. It failed to provide requested documentation for credit card charges, including out-of-state trips. Its director, Valerie Tatum, is paid a whopping $135,000, or better than $800 per student to run a 160-student school. No comparable school leader in Arkansas comes close.

“What’s the rub? Covenant Keepers has powerful friends. The Walton Family Foundation provided cash infusion to fix its red-ink-bathed books. The money was passed through an opaque, unaccountable charter management corporation. Jess Askew, a tall-tower Little Rock lawyer who lawyers for Walton-supported school “choice” initiatives, pled the case for Covenant Keepers. The head of the Office of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas — a charter school-promoting operation that owes its existence and pay subsidies to the Waltons — testified that Covenant Keepers was, well, doing a bit better and used the Little Rock School District as a whipping boy. She said Covenant Keepers in the most recent year of testing did as well as some nearby Little Rock district schools. Valerie Tatum said she’s getting valuable support from the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, another charter school advocate underwritten by, yes, the Walton Family Foundation.”

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Arkansas: Voucher Bill Fails in Legislature

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2017 //
8

Vouchers, also known as education savings accounts and tax credits, failed in the lower house of the state legislature in Arkansas.

The legislator who sponsored the bill hails from Bentonville, the home of the Walton Family (Walmart) corporation.

Given the accumulation of research showing the failure of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, you have to wonder why Tea Party Republicans are still pushing the same phony claims.

House Bill 1222 by Rep. Jim Dotson, R-Bentonville, received 37 votes in support and 47 votes against in the House. The bill would create a four-year pilot program allowing the establishment of “education savings accounts” that parents could use for certain expenses related to a child’s education, including tuition, fees, textbooks, tutoring services and contracted services with a public school district.

Under the measure, people and companies could donate to nonprofit organizations and, starting in the program’s second year, receive a 65 percent tax credit. The total tax credits provided in the second, third and fourth years of the program could not exceed $3 million per year.

The donations could fund accounts for up to 694 students. Each year, an account would be worth an amount equal to the state’s per-student spending on public education, which for this school year is $6,646.

Families could apply for the accounts regardless of whether they make donations.

Opponents of the bill knew that it was a voucher bill, that the limits were only an opening bid, and that the vouchers would do grievous damage to their community’s public schools.

Legislators who spoke against the bill raised concerns about accountability, fairness, the impact on public schools and implications for the future.

“Right now there is this train going down the track, and while it’s going at a slow pace, it stands to pick up pace and we stand to sooner or later become a voucher community, with those vouchers destroying public schools while the public schools decay and are not being improved,” said Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock.

The camel put its nose under the tent, and the majority of legislators kicked the whole darn critter out of there.

Way to go, Arkansas!

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Funding, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire: Why School Choice is the White Choice

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2017 //
7

Two years ago, when Jennifer Berkshire interviewed a senior staff member at the Walton Family Foundation, the staffer explained that vouchers were not right for Arkansas because a) there were not enough private schools in the state, but more importantly, b) school choice was so closely associated with segregation academies that it was a toxic topic in a state like Arkansas.

But now, with DeVos running the U.S. Department of Education, segregation academies are just swell!

The Walton family is pushing two voucher programs in the Legislature.

Fast forward two years and the Waltons are backing a controversial bill that combines two new school choice faves—1) *tax credit scholarships* that would let well-heeled Arkansans and corporations claim hefty state and federal tax deductions for donating to a nonprofit, which then disperses funds to choice-seeking parents in the form of 2) an education savings account, which lets parents pay for private school tuition using a *backpack full of cash.* So what’s changed? Not the number of private schools. Arkansas has just 230 of them, and that’s before you cross off the schools that charge well in excess of the $6K voucher amount. And not the legacy of racism that gave rise to many of these schools in the 1960’s and 70’s

Marvell Academy, the segregation academy in the Delta which opened in 1966, still has an entirely white student body in a town where the local high school is more than 90% Black. Nor is Marvell the only *white academy* that’s still going strong. There’s the Desoto School in nearby Helena, which prides itself on schooling students in *an understanding of our cultural heritage* and whose current enrollment stands at 257 white students and 1 Hispanic kid. The site of the largest number of segregation academies wasn’t the Delta but Pulaski County, home to LIttle Rock, where resistance to what white parents called *forced busing* led to a surge in the creation of new private school *options.* Like Central Arkansas Christian, formed in 1970 by *a core group of dedicated families and church leaders from all corners of Little Rock.* Today, just over 17% of the students who attend the Little Rock Public Schools are white. At Central Arkansas Christian High, that figure is close to 90%. Miss Selma’s, founded in 1965, continues to offer dynamic, quality education to parents who would prefer not to experience the fact that 40% of Little Rock’s residents are Black. Pulaski Academy, meanwhile, has made great strides towards integration since it opened as a private school for white students in 1971. Of its 1,078 students, 54 are Black.

The worst of the South is rising again. Segregation will soon become possible with the blessing of the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Justice Department (remember the Attorney General is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama), and the U.S. Congress.

How fast can we reel backwards into the past, before the Brown decision? Watch the Arkansas legislature.

Categories Arkansas, Racism, Segregation, Walton Foundation

Charter Advocates Slip Legislation Through Without Notice in Arkansas

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2017 //
16

The Trump-DeVos privatization agenda is moving fast in the Deep South, where some people long for the good old days of segregated schools.

In Arkansas, charter advocates said there would be no action on a bill to turn public facilities over to charters, then introduced the bill with no opponents present, and passed it without debate. Word is that the same legislation was introduced in Missouri, though I don’t yet official confirmation of that.

Click to access SB308.pdf

This bill requires local school districts to hand any underutilized buildings over to charter operators.

The charter operators get free public space that was paid for by local taxpayers.

This sounds ominously like ALEC at work. ALEC is a fringe-right organization that writes model legislation and gives it to its members (state legislators), who fill in the name of their state, and lobby for privatization and deregulation. The beneficiaries of ALEC legislation are corporations and alt-right folk.

ALEC opposes local control. It supports vouchers, charters, state takeovers of school districts, high-stakes testing, and opposes unions, tenure, and any rights for teachers.

No doubt the Walton family helped this legislation along, perhaps with the help of their paid-for academics at the University of Arkansas, endowed by the billionaire Waltons.

Categories ALEC, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Missouri, Privatization

Arkansas: Judge Rejects Effort to Block State Takeover of Little Rock Schools, Expansion of Charters

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2016 //
12

Plaintiffs in Arkansas sued to block the state takeover of Little Rock public schools. Plaintiffs argued that the expansion of charters was racially discriminatory because the public schools are predominantly black, and the charters are predominantly white. The judge rejected their request.

“The plaintiffs, led by civil rights lawyer John Walker, had sought to reverse both the takeover of the LRSD and the granting of permission to Little Rock charter schools to expand their student populations. The suit named as defendants the state Board of Education (which gave final authorization to the takeover and the charter expansions), Education Commissioner Johnny Key and the Arkansas Department of Education. Marshall said the plaintiffs had failed to make a case against the state, though the school district itself must still face a trial on the merits of a complaint about unfairness in facilities.”

The plaintiffs didn’t prove that the plan was intended to cause segregation, even though it did.

In his decision, the judge wrote:

“And there’s no real question about disproportionate effect: more than 65 percent of LRSD students are black; a majority of the dissolved Board was black; and the students at the growing charter schools in Little Rock are (to generalize) whiter and wealthier than LRSD’s students. But the settled precedent is clear; discriminatory effects alone are insufficient to show discriminatory intentions.

“What’s missing are pleaded facts that show the intention to discriminate based on race, that show foul thoughts becoming harmful actions.”

So much for “saving poor kids from failing schools.” How about “opening segregation academies with state funding for affluent white kids?”

Categories Arkansas, Civil Rights, Segregation

School Takeovers, Concentrated in Black Districts, Take Away Democracy

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2016 //
4

Thanks to Mike Klonsky for calling attention to this article about state takeovers of districts and schools. A takeover nullifies parent and community voice. A disproportionate number of takeovers have been inflicted on African-American communities. As we know from the failure of the Achievement School District, these takeovers have a bad track record. What do they accomplish? They nullify parent and community voice.

In New Jersey – which, in 1987, became the first state to take over a school district – Camden is among several urban districts that have come under state control. The state hired Camden’s superintendent, while the mayor appoints school board members – a practice that predates the state takeover of the district in 2013.

A judge last week dismissed a lawsuit from Camden residents seeking the right to elect school board members, questioning the rationale for electing a board that has been stripped of its power by the state.

In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia School District is governed by a five-member School Reform Commission, with three members appointed by the governor and two by the city’s mayor. The Chester Upland district is also under state control. Camden, Philadelphia, and Chester Upland have large minority populations.

Be sure to read the descriptions of districts where democracy was snuffed out.

They are districts hollowed out by poverty, deindustrialization, and white flight. The state takeover didn’t help. It stripped away one of the few ways in which residents had a voice. Now they have lost that too.

This is how the story of Highland Park, Michigan, begins:

“Highland Park, Michigan, a small city within Detroit’s boundaries, was once called the “City of Trees.” Thick greenery lined suburban blocks crowded with single-family homes built for a growing middle class. Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line at his automobile plant on Woodward Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare. The suburban school district was considered one of the top 10 in Michigan, according to a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1962.

“Today, most of Highland Park’s trees are gone. Overgrown, empty lots and burned-out houses outnumber occupied homes on some blocks. The Ford plant stands empty. And parents say Highland Park’s once-proud school district has collapsed, hastened by four years under state control.”

As you read these stories, ask yourself the question: seeing the problems, why was state takeover of the schools supposed to be a good idea?

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Michigan, New Orleans, Poverty, Race, Segregation, Turnaround

Jeff Bryant: Little Rock, the Return of Segregation, and Walton Money

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2016 //
17

Jeff Bryant writes here about Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock was the scene of one of the crucial battles in the movement to integrate public education after the Brown decision of 1954. When city and state officials refused to integrate Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent in 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne to enforce the court order to admit black students.

Jeff interviews a large number of citizens of Little Rock, who tell the story of the district. For a time, it was successfully integrated, or at least parts of it were. But the resistance never went away.

At present, the Walton Family Foundation is behind a state takeover of the entire district, even though only six of its 48 schools have been declared to be “failing” schools.

State Senator Joyce Elliott said to Jeff:

“We are retreating to 1957,” Elliott believes. Only now, instead of using Jim Crow and white flight, or housing and highways, the new segregationists have other tools at their disposal. First, education funding cuts have made competition for resources more intense, with wider disparities along racial lines. Second, recent state takeover of the district has spread a sense throughout the community of having lost control of its education destiny. Parents, local officials, and community activists continuously describe change as something being done to them rather than with them. And third, an aggressive charter school sector that competes with local public schools for resources and students further divides the community.

And lurking in the background of anything having to do with Little Rock school politics is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization connected to the family that owns the Walmart retail chain, whose headquarters is in Bentonville, Arkansas.

State Commissioner Johnny Key terminated Little Rock’s superintendent, Baker Kurrus:

The disenfranchisement of Little Rock citizens became especially apparent recently, when Commissioner Key suddenly, and without explanation, terminated the contract of Baker Kurrus, until then the superintendent of the Little Rock School District. (Key had originally appointed Kurrus himself.)

As veteran local journalist for the Arkansas Times Max Brantley explains, Kurrus was initially regarded with suspicion due to the takeover and the fact he was given the helm despite his lack of education background. But Kurrus had gradually earned the respect of locals due to his tireless outreach to the community and evenhanded treatment of oppositional points of view.

But many observers of school politics in Little Rock speculate Kurrus was terminated because he warned that charter school expansions would further strain resources in the district. In advising against expansions of these schools, Kurrus shared data showing charter school tend to under-enroll students with disabilities and low income kids.

He came to view charter schools as a “parallel school system” that would add to the district’s outlays for administration and facilities instead of putting more money directly into classroom instruction.

“It makes no sense” to expand charter schools, he is quoted as telling the local NPR outlet. “You’d never build two water systems and then see which one worked … That’s essentially what we’re doing” by expanding charters.

Kurrus also came to believe that increasing charter school enrollments would increase segregation in the city.

In a state where the Waltons have their headquarters, it is unthinkable that Little Rock have a superintendent who isn’t committed to the magic of charter schools. That contradicts the Walton philosophy. Kurrus had to go. Interestingly, one of the two charter chains (LISA) in Little Rock is identified by Sharon Higgins as Gulen charters.

A report on the academic performance of charters throughout the state of Arkansas in 2008-2009 found, “Arkansas’ charter schools do not outperform their traditional school peers,” when student demographics are taken into account. (As the report explains, “several demographic factors” – such as race, poverty, and ethnicity, – strongly correlate with lower scores on standardized tests and other measures of achievement.)

Specifically in Little Rock, the most recent comparison of charter school performance to public schools shows that a number of LRSD public schools, despite having similar or more challenging student demographics, out-perform LISA and eStem charters.

There’s also evidence charter schools add to the segregation of Little Rock. Soon after the decision to expand these schools, the LISA network blanketed the district with a direct mail marketing campaign that blatantly omitted the poor, heavily black and Latino parts of the city, according to an investigation by the Arkansas Times.xxx

In the state board’s vote to take over the district, as Brantley reports for the Times, members who voted yes had family ties to and business relationships with organizations either financed by the Walton Foundation or working in league with the Waltons to advocate for charter schools.

In another recent analysis in the Times, reporter Benjamin Hardy traces recent events back to a bill in the state legislature in 2015, HB 1733, that “originated with a Walton-affiliated education lobbyist.” That bill would have allowed an outside non-profit to operate any school district taken over by the state. The bill died in committee when unified opposition from the Little Rock delegation combined with public outcry to cause legislators to waver in their support.

So what the Waltons couldn’t accomplish with legislation like HB 1733 they are currently accomplishing by influencing official administration actions, including taking out Kurrus and expanding charters across the city.

The Waltons recently announced that they plan to spend $250 million annually to expand charter schools. They selected 17 urban districts that they would pour money into. One of them is Little Rock.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Arkansas: $6 Million for TFA, from Republican Governor and Businessmen

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2016 //
8

Governor Asa Hutchinson announced that the state would put up $3 million to hire inexperienced Teach for America recruits and the Little Rock business community would pledge another $3 million for a total of 2015 TFA.

This investment is supposed to end educational inequity in Arkansas. TFA kids have been teaching in Arkansas since 1991. The achievement gap should be closed pretty soon with so many of these youngsters arriving for their two-year commitments.

At the press conference, there was some confusion about whether TFA would fill vacancies or would replace veteran teachers from local communities.

The governor declined to name the business people who out up the private $3 million.

Categories Arkansas, Teach for America
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