OPINION
School grades flunk
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he Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s veteran education reporter, Cynthia Howell, wrote this week about the third-year use of a new standardized test, ACT Aspire, for judging public school students. A key factor was missing in the discussion about Little Rock schools. Howell reported that a change in the “cut” score, or what’s determined to be a passing grade in English, is likely to have a negative impact on school grades in the coming school year. Use of the A-F scale to rate schools is already a folly. These grades mostly measure the type of student a school receives. Poor students have the lowest scores and race is a factor, too. Howell noted that some schools, such as Baseline Academy and Stephens Elementary, struggle, with 11 to 12 percent testing at acceptable levels in literacy and 22 to 25 percent in math. She continued: “Other schools such as Jefferson Elementary, Forest Park Elementary,
defy expectations of demography. schools, eStem and LISA.Yes, LRSD The state doesn’t provide ready lagged overall, but the chart omitted access to breakdowns of poverty per- context. Booker Magnet centages by school, but the LRSD is 67 While Little Rock has a 67 percent Arts Elementary, percent low-income overall. It’s a safe poverty level, eStem’s is 40 percent and Don Roberts Elebet the high-scoring schools have lower LISA’s is 52 percent. LRSD is 63 percent mentary and Forpoverty percentages than Stephens and black, against 53 percent at eStem and est Heights STEM Baseline. 44 percent at LISA. We all can play Academy reported None of this is to say poor kids can’t games with numbers. much greater per- MAX learn. That children of color can’t learn. Remember Gary Newton, the WalBRANTLEY maxbrantley@arktimes.com centages in the That there aren’t lessons to be drawn tons’ $237,000-a-year charter school ready and exceedfrom how different schools perform. lobbyist and LRSD critic? He and Waling ready categories. Some schools ARE better than others. ton money started the Quest charter “ ‘How do we get more of those?’ Jeff The danger is to generalize. middle school in Chenal Valley as an Wood, chairman of the Little Rock ComThe Democrat-Gazette article came escape for parents to avoid a nearby munity Advisory Board, asked about the with a tool to advance the charter school virtually all-black middle school. high performing schools. ‘That’s what narrative so beloved by its publisher, LRSD white students and LRSD the community wants to see — those but the facts proved inconvenient. A black students outscored Quest whites amazing numbers.’ ” chart accompanying the story compared and blacks significantly in both literacy I say only a bit facetiously that there’s scores of the public school districts and math scores. an easy fix for low-scoring schools — and charter schools in Pulaski County. Newton might have a good explanamore middle-class white kids. Stephens Surprise! Whiter charter schools with tion for the failure of Quest to outscore and Baseline are 3 and 7 percent white, lower percentages of poor kids did bet- the despised LRSD, though it’s his gosagainst Jefferson, 71; Forest Park, 73; ter overall. pel that choice is ALWAYS better. He Roberts, 56; and Forest Heights STEM, But, here’s a funny thing. LRSD can’t fall back on demographics. Only 33, plus 6 percent Asian. white kids outscored all the other 21 percent of Quest students meet the Booker Magnet is an outlier with schools’ white kids in English, and poverty designation, against 67 percent only 8 percent white and worth a deeper they were narrowly edged out in that in LRSD. As for race, Quest is 56 percent look, as is any school where test scores category in math by only two charter white, against 18 percent for LRSD.
Leading with lies
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he past week’s tweet storms illustrate with stunning clarity the secret to both the disgrace and miraculous survival of Donald Trump after 18 months of spectacular failures. He controls the news of the United States. Trump can concoct monstrous lies and launch them to his 48 million Twitter followers one morning and that will be the news everywhere that day. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Factcheck.org or any other group can supply the documentary evidence of all the falsehoods, but they and every other news organization will still lead with his narrative because that’s what a news organization does. Whenever a president of the United States speaks, the world listens, and whoever wants to believe him will. Trump speaks every day, so there is never room for another thread to gain ascendance. While all the intelligence agencies of Trump’s government, members of his Cabinet, nearly every member of Congress, including Arkansas’s six Trumpfawning delegates, and every person who read the indictments of Russian agents declare with certainty that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 elections to elect Trump and a few Republican congressmen and is still
himself posing as his own fake agent, “John Miller.” engaged in that Last week was Trump at his best corruption, polls — or, if you are fixed on reality, at his show that 90 permost desperate. Terrible developments cent of those who swarmed on the president at a pace he ident if y t hemhad never experienced before. His celselves as Republiebrated two-hour summit with Putin ERNEST cans believe that ended with his fawning joint appearDUMAS Vladimir Putin ance with the autocrat, which emuand his espionage team are blameless lated his earlier fawning appearances or else, as Trump maintains, they were with the Chinese and North Korean assisting “crooked Hillary.” dictators that left the United States When Trump took office, the goal with nothing but Trump’s declarations of the team he assembled was to wean that the United States’ perils were over. him from tweeting every day because Nearly everyone in his own party and while it was safe and maybe even good American allies everywhere disputed politics for a candidate to blast out daily what he said at Putin’s side. He did insults and lies and to make absurd something he had never done before: boasts, it was beneath the solemnity of He retracted what he had said, and then the president of the United States and it retracted his retractions. Critics threw was dangerous to play recklessly with around the word “treason.” His Justice the tinder of world affairs. That was Department charged a pretty Russian good advice, but Trump knew that it émigré with espionage for infiltrating would not serve him. Republican ranks, including the Trump Manipulating the news, if only the campaign, to promote good terms with gossip columns, was how he gained Russia. His own Justice Department celebrity and power. Back in the ’80s, released a redacted copy of its applicaI went to our newspaper’s morgue reg- tion to Republican judges on the fedularly and read the exchange papers eral surveillance court for permission from New York, the Daily News and to wiretap longtime Trump associate the Post especially, which competed Roger Stone. It indisputably showed to report on Donald Trump’s marital that the application was not based priinfidelities, which often were fed to the marily on Democratic sources, as he had popular gossip columnists by Trump alleged, but upon the Trump adviser’s
lengthy and documented dalliance with the Kremlin. Simultaneously, someone leaked a recording of a Trump Tower conversation between Trump and his fixer, Michael Cohen, before the 2016 election, which proved that he had lied when he said he did not know of a payoff to keep a Playboy model from telling about her yearlong affair with Trump after the birth of his son Barron in 2006. Here was the acid test for the Trump political model, to control every day’s news. With the help of Rudy Giuliani, who now serves as the president’s mouthpiece when it is safest for the president himself to shut up, he put a favorable spin on everything: Democrats and Crooked Hillary were behind all the Putin confusion. The Russian woman’s indictment was silly. The released wiretapping application actually supported his allegations, proving finally that the Mueller investigation was a witch-hunt and should be stopped. Although his old confidante Cohen should be jailed for recording him, the tape, whatever it revealed, exonerated him and thus was a political goldmine for him. If polls and Twitter numbers are right, for 50 million Americans his accounts were the news last week. That is about all that a sitting president needs because his unhappily enslaved party, at the moment, is the government.
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arktimes.com JULY 26, 2018
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