EDITORIAL
EYE ON ARKANSAS
Rare bird
S
No songs
aline County gave us “The Ballad of Joe Broadway” (not to be confused with Broadway Joe, the quarterback) and “The Official Arkansas Waltz,” so designated by the state Senate years ago. Broadway was an outlaw who kept robbing the same bank; the ghastly “Waltz” was written by friends of a senator from Benton who demanded the endorsement of his colleagues. At a minimum, Saline County has done enough for Arkansas musically. We need to get this current Saline County situation resolved before somebody dashes off a “Ballad of Bruce Pennington.” Pennington is a hard-riding renegade sheriff who’s thus far eluded a posse of public officials, taxpayers, journalists and conventional law-enforcement officers. He was arrested in June outside a bar after witnesses reported a drunken man clambering into a car. When police arrived, a belligerent Pennington took a swing at one of his fellow lawmen. He was subsequently convicted of public intoxication and resisting arrest. That’s not the sort of conduct that inspires public confidence in a sheriff, as a sober Pennington seemed to realize. He gave notice to the Saline Quorum Court that he would retire Oct. 1. But then something got into him, and he recanted his resignation and said he would run for re-election. He’s made conflicting announcements since, and now nobody’s entirely sure what he’s going to do, possibly even the sheriff himself. Whatever, a song won’t help. 6
SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
BRIAN CHILSON
R
ockefeller Republicans in Arkansas have dwindled like ivory-billed woodpeckers, and are even more sorely missed. Until this week, the only one we knew of was Bob Scott up in Rogers, once an aide to Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, still a loyalist and an idealist after all these years. Now there are two, apparently. Bob Johnson of Jacksonville, a member of the Pulaski County Quorum Court who was elected as a Republican, has announced he’s joining the Democratic Party and will run for state representative next year as a Democrat. He said: “I grew up as a moderate Republican, my father was very close to Governor Rockefeller … the last several years, the party has just moved too far to the right and is dominated by people that say ‘no’ to everything. Because of that, I am better described now as a conservative Democrat.” Gov. Rockefeller and the small band of legislative Republicans during his administration said “yes” to a lot of things — aid for the underprivileged, equal rights for minorities, openness in government, fairer taxes. Most of what they supported was disapproved by the legislature, but that was because of opposition from old-line Democrats, the reactionaries of their day, no better than contemporary Tea Baggers. The descendants of those benighted Democrats turned Republican. Rockefeller would be shocked at what his party has become. Now that it finally has the legislative majority he sought, it could really help people, and it doesn’t want to.
LEARNING NEW THINGS: Arkansas fans attempt to “throw the A” Saturday at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. Arkansas defeated Samford 31-21.
Schools: Winners and losers
I
spent some time last week with a political consultant who’s part of the growing army of people funded by the Walton family and other wealthy Arkansans to reshape education in the billionaires’ image. One objective is to destroy the Little Rock School District as it currently exists because it has a teachers’ union. It happens that the consultant moved to her job in Little Rock not long ago, but chose to live in Cabot and commute. Why? The first reason she cited was to avoid placing her high-school-age daughter in the Little Rock School District. I pressed for her thinking, but couldn’t really get to the nub of it beyond a general reluctance. She also had friends in Cabot and Cabot has a good school district. Fair enough. Cabot students happen to be whiter and better off economically than Little Rock public school students, but I’ll take her word that these were non-factors. Still, many things the consultant said — including about “failing” Little Rock schools and misinformation about school assignments in the Little Rock district — demonstrated how effective the Billionaire Boys Club has been at selling a poisonous narrative about the Little Rock School District that many don’t investigate on their own. Like most things, it’s not so simple. The Waltons are, for example, financing a lobby group that is attempting to balkanize the Little Rock School District into innumerable independent school districts — quasi-private schools in that they are unaccountable to voters but operated with public money, sometimes by private money-making corporations — known as charter schools. The group is currently pushing to build a charter middle school that would grow into a high school to serve the affluent white neighborhoods of western Little Rock. They want to open before Little Rock can get its planned new middle school built. The battle cry: Avoiding the “failed” schools of Little Rock. Many of the “failed” schools are actually making progress, as measured by inching-up test scores, with
the predominantly impoverished populations they serve. And they’d do a lot better if they could have a dose of the economic integration that is a proven boon to student achievement. A shared MAX commitment to the entire disBRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com trict would be beneficial to more children than the charter movement, which has failed nationally to demonstrate its superiority. One of the proven charter laggards, in fact, is the private Texas charter operator chosen by the Walton lobby to run the proposed Chenal Valley charter middle school. The school first must be approved by the state over the Little Rock District’s opposition for its segregative impact. All schools aren’t failing. Consider conveniently situated Parkview Arts and Science Magnet, which had four among Arkansas’s only 150 National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists this year. Any parent who wants to see the American public education system at work should turn on the cable TV educational access channel the next time they replay the March on Washington program by Parkview students at the Clinton Library. Beautiful singing, speaking and orchestra. The students were very nearly the red, yellow, black and white of hymn — Martin Luther King’s dream fulfilled in inspiring harmony. Parkview is not alone. Those parents who want a new west Little Rock high school (some of them, I’m told, find the county’s nearby Robinson High unacceptable on class grounds) could motor a few more minutes east on I-630 to Central High School, which provided 24 — one in every six — of Arkansas’s National Merit semi-finalists this year. Central was, for whatever reason, an uncomfortable choice for the Walton hired hand I lunched with. So I don’t expect her patron’s organizing effort to be pushing people in THAT direction. It doesn’t fit the anti-LRSD narrative. A successful Little Rock charter movement will inevitably destroy it, too.