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Little Rock: African-American Minister Protests Plan for More School Closures

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2018 //
7

Dr. Anika T. Whitfield is a minister in Little Rock who speaks out against the steady encroachment of privatization. She recently wrote this letter to the State Commissioner of Education Johnny Key and Little Rock Superintendent Mike Poore. The district was taken over by the state because six of its 48 schools had low test scores. The State Commissioner Johnny Key is an engineer and a former legislator; among his notable positions: he voted to reduce unemployment compensation benefits, he opposed abortion, he voted to allow handguns on church property and to allow university staff to carry concealed weapons and to forbid the release of information about the holders of concealed weapons permits. He was appointed Commissioner of Education in 2015.

Dr. Whitfield writes:


Mr. Poore and Mr. Key,

There is great community concern about your recent announcement about more plans for school closures within our beloved LRSD.

No genuine, earnest efforts have been made on your behalf to engage the largest and most invested stakeholders in the LRSD: students, parents/guardians, in developing plans together before you have already developed plans and made impactful decisions of your own. And, to add insult to injury, you continue to deny students, parents and guardians the a viable opportunity to provide their wisdom and insight with you, and other LRSD administrators. Their wisdom and insight should be considered invaluable to you as the Little Rock School District Superintendent and appointed LRSD Board member and chair.

Your latest press conference, Mr. Poore, was another indication of your lack of respect for the true value of building healthy community relationships through direct open lines of communications, frequent meaningful experiences, and transparency. Your approaches lack all and most importantly, trust.

Mr. Poore, it is not acceptable that you, someone who has shown a personal lack of commitment to the well being and welfare of our city and county by choosing to not become a registered voter in the over two years with which you have resided in our community, continue to make decisions without making sincere efforts to work with the LRSD community that was unwillfully disenfranchised. Willfully exercising absolute power and authority over persons who have been wrongfully denied their rights to voice their vote is not mark of excellence in leadership, nor a sign of strength. It is an indication of fear and weakness.

Mr. Key, both you and Mr. Poore have continued to deny students, parents, guardians and the greater LRSD community the opportunity to make decisions about our children, our schools, and our community without just cause. We understand that the AR State Legislators empowered the State Board of Education to assume control over public school systems based on criteria that have become lawful. And, we are clear that the State Board of Education, prior to your appointment, decided to take over our entire district (48 schools), rather than voting to assist the six schools that were designated as being in academic distress instead.

We know that Governor Asa Hutchinson has been following the playbook of the charter school funders who have used similar tactics to take over public school systems by appointing persons who like you, Mr. Key, who have no certification nor experience as an educator nor as an academic administrator, to become Commissioner of Education.

What remains unclear is why you both have chosen this fate?

Why are you both willing to evoke violence against the most vulnerable children and families in our city? Why have you chosen to come to the largest city in our state with the largest population of students in a public school system who are African American and work to destroy their hopes, dreams, and aspirations along with their families by going along with a slow, but steady plan to destroy the Little Rock School District.

Where is your moral consciousness? Where is your moral character? Why are you choosing to aid in assassinating the hopes, dreams, and potentials of innocent children and their families?

It is beyond understanding how you could/would endeavor to work so diligently to destroy the LRSD community, one of the cornerstones of the city of Little Rock.

We are not unaware nor are we complacent. Systemic racism and poverty are alive and unwell in America, and right here in the city of Little Rock. We are working on both the cure and the sustainability plan of wellness to prevent the recurrence of these man-made epidemics.

This letter is an appeal to whatever remaining hope of justice lies within you. We ask that you release the LRSD community from bondage and free yourselves from bloodying your hands anymore.

Rev./Dr. Anika T. Whitfield

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Little Rock, Privatization

Sixty Years After Little Rock, Racism Prevails–in Little Rock, in Jackson, and Elsewhere

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2017 //
6

This past week marked the 60th anniversary of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne to safeguard the nine black students who entered that school and defied the taunts of the white mob and the defiance of Governor Faubus.

Now, the Little Rock public schools are again segregated due to white flight and are under the control of the state board of education, thanks to the efforts of the Walton family, which pretends to care about children but cares only about union-busting and school choice.

The white power structure in Arkansas has reasserted control of the public schools.

The same story is playing out in Jackson, Mississippi, where white state leaders are taking control of the Jackson public schools. This effort was carried out behind closed doors. It attained a special urgency due to the election of a progressive black mayor in Jackson.

Jeff Bryant tells the story here. It is a story that shames our nation. Or should.

The truth of Little Rock repeats itself over and over in communities throughout the South and across the country.

Jeff Bryant writes:

More recently, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, researching a story about the current effort of the state to take over the local school district there, much in the same way Little Rock schools were taken over. Jackson is similar to Little Rock in that it is a school district populated predominantly by non-white students.

For two days, the Mississippi Department of Education staged a series of meetings that illustrated once again how white elites continue to define education opportunities for black and brown communities.

The racial symbolism of the events was inescapable.

MDE officials, who were predominantly white, presented their case in a room limited in seating and closed to the public over an hour prior to the meeting’s announced start time. Members of the State Accreditation Commission and the State Board of Education, who were predominantly white, decided the fate of Jackson schools in separate closed-door sessions completely sequestered from public view.

Some 100 local citizens, who were predominantly black, were relegated to an auditorium, where they watched events unfold on a live stream video that was often interrupted and garbled during transmission, and then they waited for hours to have decisions announced to them.

Local school officials, who had had a mere seven school days to muster a defense, presented detailed documentation of their recent and ongoing efforts to correct problems in the district, but the thick binders they presented were generally left unread on the meeting room tables as commission and board members convened in closed chambers to cast their votes.

Should the governor agree that Jackson schools are in a state of “extreme emergency,” as the state contends, the district’s school board is dissolved, the superintendent is dismissed, and an appointed conservator, reporting directly to the state Board of Education, is put in place to oversee the schools. In fact, the conservator has already been chosen.

The day the State Accreditation Committee decided to yank the district’s accreditation – a necessary step before proceeding to the Board of Education’s hearing the next day – Jackson’s recently elected progressive mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told those gathered on the sidewalk outside of MDE headquarters that they had just witnessed a “perfunctory exercise” in which “every commissioner who stepped into that room had already reached a decision.”

He declared “the burden of proof” in the state’s case “was not met.” And he called for ‘turn[ing] the page in Mississippi” and departing from the state’s history of denying black communities control of their schools. “We will not stand silently as they rob our children of an education.”

In D.C., we have a president who assails black football players who express their objection to racism; Trump portrays his attack on the athletes as a “defense” of the National Anthem. He would have us believe that he is patriotic and those who exercise free speech are not.

And we have a Secretary of Education who thinks that black colleges were created because black students wanted to exercise “choice.”

Has racism diminished since 1957, when the Little Rock Nine entered Central High School, protected by federal bayonets?

In many ways it has. We elected a black president. We see black actors on television and in the movies.

But in many ways, racism remains as virulent as it was in 1957. The selection by Alabama Republicans of Roy Moore as their Senate candidate reminds us that racism thrives; Trump reminds us daily that racism is alive. The efforts by the Waltons and other white elites to strip black communities of any role in their community public schools–and to offer them school choice instead–reminds us that racism comes in many forms.

Categories Little Rock, Mississippi, Racism, School Choice

Sixty Years Later, Little Rock Is Under Attack Again!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2017 //
4

Sixty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to protect the brave black children who dared to integrate the public schools of Little Rock.

The students withstood taunts, jeers, even stones. They persisted, with the dream and hope of one day having a school system that welcomed all children.

Now, Little Rock activist Anika Whitfield writes, Little Rock is under attack again.

Now it is the Walton family and other billionaires who are intent to closing public schools, opening privately managed charter schools, and dominating black and brown children.

Like many major metropolitan cities in the United States, Little Rock is experiencing the evils of unfounded and manufactured fear about black and brown children that translates beyond white flight (as we experienced soon after the Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954) and into a calculated systemic effort by U.S. billionaires, like the Walton Family ― who are natives of Arkansas ― to create a new form of discrimination: charter (private-public) schools and voucher systems. And, as they have been successful in doing so in many vulnerable cities like Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, they have also been successful in increasing their prison industrial system to meet the demands of their calculated systems of racism and classism. Together, these systems have been intentionally created to fester more criminal activity in the very neighborhoods and communities that are now absent of public schools.

The Waltons engineered a state takeover of the Little Rock school district. Their hand-picked managers have closed schools in black and brown communities.

If they get their way, public education in Little Rock will be a memory.

We won’t even remember why those brave children fought to integrate the public schools in 1957. Because there won’t be any public schools.

Racism comes in many forms.

Categories Closing schools, Little Rock, Walton Foundation
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