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Today marks the 62nd anniversary of The Little Rock Nine, and parents, educators and community leaders there say the state's new plan for its schools would catapult Little Rock back into an era of school segregation. usnews.com/news/education…
"This is our 1957 in 2019, and people will look back and judge this moment the same way we judge people's actions in 1957. Don't repeat 1957. Don't be the person sneering in the photographs."
Here's what's happening: The State Board of Education voted in 2015 to take control of Little Rock schools, in large part justifying its decision on the results of a new state accountability system that showed that six of the city's 48 schools were not meeting academic benchmarks
The reasoning bewildered many since other states adopted much higher thresholds for such intense interventions. (Ahem, Memphis, which at one point was home to 69 out of the 83 worst schools in Tennessee and the state still didn't step in to run the entire K-12 system.)
But the decision to take over the schools, which came down to a deciding vote cast by a former board member who now says he regrets his decision, also capped a 25-year period of leadership upheaval in a district that cycled through more than 20 superintendents during that time.
Like so many other stories of district-wide takeovers that fail to move the academic proficiency needle in any significant way or don't prioritize community outreach, Little Rock now has more schools on its lowest performers list than it did in 2015.
And its black and Latino communities say they feel bulldozed.
Education policy experts have long underscored how difficult it is to fix schools that have been failing for generations. Academics aside, such schools are often also hampered by decades of underfunding and racial and economic segregation.
Little Rock, with Interstate 630 as the dividing line between majority black schools located south of the highway and schools with the highest enrollment of white students north of the highway, is no different.
OK, fast-forward to last Friday, when the governor-appointed State Board of Education approved a plan to relinquish partial control of Little Rock schools during a meeting announced only hours before it occurred.
The plan establishes three categories of schools tiered by academic performance, with Category 1 schools being the city's highest performers and, therefore, granted local control.
Category 2 schools fall somewhere in the middle. The state board would decide which Category 2 schools qualify for local control and which do not, though there is no concrete language that outlines exactly who would control the schools the board deems unqualified.
Category 3 schools are those that fail the state math and reading assessments, and they would operate under a different type of leadership entirely.
Parents, educators and community leaders are calling foul on the plan that they say will allow the best schools (those concentrated in the north and west parts of the city that have the highest enrollment of white students) to be run by a locally elected school board...
... while the worst schools in the city (those concentrated in the south and east parts of the city that have the highest enrollment of black and Latino students) to be run by the state or some other outside entity.
The framework, residents argue, would create a two-class system in which some parents, teachers and community members have a say over their schools and others don't.
"I absolutely reject the proposition that this is resegregation of the Little Rock School District," Gov. Hutchinson said Monday. "That is wrong. It is not based in fact. And it is really trying to resurrect an old history that has no application today."
But former members of the State Board of Education, state legislators, community activists and educators describe the decision as a slap in the face to the citizens of a city where the Little Rock Nine are memorialized permanently at the foot of the Statehouse.
