e y e on a r k ansas
Editorial n The national pundits seem to believe that Mike Huckabee’s move to Florida is more about presidential politics than tax avoidance, but they may be unaware of Huckabee’s aversion to parting with his own money, his fondness for getting things for free. Florida haberdashers and sporting-goods stores will soon be learning about that. Arkansans can easily believe that hanging on to more of the big bucks Fox News pays him is sufficient to lure Huckabee to a state with much sunshine and no income tax. But it’s possible that he’s multi-tasking, solicitous of both his billfold and his political opportunities, and in that case, we worry. For him. He didn’t ask the Times — we seem to have drifted apart — but if he had, we’d have advised against this move, and not just because Arkansas is a better place to live. Our insects are of a manageable size, and so too is our Republican party. Huckabee is always at his worst when he gets around big bunches of farright Republicans, too weak to resist their evil importunities. Such people are rife in Florida, and the state is crucial to the party’s hopes for winning the presidency. In Arkansas, Huckabee as governor worked with a Democratic legislature to produce a reasonably moderate and productive administration. He’s been apologizing ever since. Seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Huckabee has courted the Religious Right passionately, and with some success. Militant televangelists have warmed up to their fellow preacher, shedding their suspicion that he might be somewhat lacking in bias. He’s taken up gay-bashing, bloodily and enthusiastically. He’s renounced the progressive principle that taxation should be based on ability to pay, and now supports a national sales tax that would be good for the rich and near-fatal for the poor. He’s raised the volume on his condemnation of abortion rights. In short, he’s been in steep moral decline, a worse man now than when Arkansas first elected him. He was never Nobel Prize material, to be sure, but he wasn’t a Dick Cheney or Ann Coulter either. He hangs with them now. A recent presidential poll showed Huckabee leading his chief rival, Mitt Romney, in Florida. But what good is the presidency if you lose your own soul? Huckabee won’t find salvation in Florida. Nor Florida in him, for that matter. The athletic Mrs. Huckabee, on the other hand, looks like a good fit for Florida. Maybe she and Mike could work something out on living arrangements. Wrestling alligators, swimming in synchrony, playing a spirited game of beach volleyball, Janet would give a good account of herself. And the worst she could lose would be a limb or two.
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14 april 22, 2010 • ARKANSAS TIMES
brian chilson
Out of Huck
REMEMBERING: Angela Turner Everett and Sophonda Turner of Monticello read the name of their brother, Larry L. Turner, at a memorial Monday for the victims of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Larry Turner worked on the third floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, destroyed April 19, 1995, by a bomb detonated by Timothy McVeigh. The memorial was at the Clinton Library.
Charter schools: Who chooses? n In the popular 1989 movie “Lean on Me,” about a Paterson, N.J., ghetto high school, Principal Joe Clark has all the troublemakers and under-performing students gather on the stage and he then kicks them all out of the school. With only the most serious students remaining, he restores his high school to its once proud position. The movie, based on a real life situation, reflects pure fiction. Or does it? Is it possible to exclude the undesirable students and just skim off the best students to make elite, selective and even racially segregated schools? Can In Arkansas we, under current law, develop one school system we call for the “haves” and another privately opersystem for the “have nots?” ated charter If you think this isn’t possible, just look care- schools “open fully at the charter school enrollment movement and its more schools.” In extreme sibling, voucher reality, are schools. In Arkansas we call these schools privately operated charter truly open schools “open enrollment schools.” In reality, are enrollment? these schools truly open enrollment? Does every child have an equal opportunity to enroll? The first ingredient is that the child must have a parent who truly cares and monitors his or her education. It is far less likely that children from an impoverished single-parent home will have a parent who is aware
Paul Hewitt guest writer
of the enrollment hoops they must jump through to enter a charter school. How about the child whose parents are drug addicted or don’t have the capability to enroll them in the charter school? From the very beginning, a charter school limits its enrollment to only the children of parents who are actively involved in their child’s education. Any teacher can tell you that these are the children who will also be the most successful in a regular school setting. This produces a very subtle form of discrimination. In some cases the discrimination may not be so subtle. Arizona has been in the forefront of the charter school movement and is a state with a wide range of ethnic diversity. Gene V. Glass, regents’ professor at Arizona State University, is a critic of how charters have been implemented in his state and describes several instances of charters in neighborhoods dominated by Hispanic families yet with high percentages of white students and few Hispanic students. One example he cited was Fees Middle School in southern Tempe, Ariz., which enrolled 50 percent minority pupils while two blocks away the Tempe Prep Charter Academy enrolled only 17 percent minorities. He also found that of 1,012 charter schools, nearly half exhibited evidence of substantial ethnic separation Given the racial sensitivity of Arkansas, this situation couldn’t happen Continued on page 16