Letter from an editor

There are no haters around here

YOWZA. Our correspondent would have made a good editorial writer. Her prose was like a slap in the face on a cold morning. Which beats many editorial columns in this country today. She actually had something on her mind. Instead of setting out to write something, she set out to say something. Which is always better when it comes to opinion pieces.

Her letter to the editor(s) here wasn’t a letter to the editor. That is, she didn’t want it printed. She just wanted to get something off her chest about Little Rock’s school district—and our criticisms of it. And, boy howdy, did she:

“I have read with increasing annoyance editorials in your paper that constantly rag on the

22 schools in the LRSD that were graded D or F and yet your paper NEVER seems to criticize the 145 schools across Arkansas that were graded D nor the 44 others that were assigned an F.”

She accused us of having a double standard. And that this page has set out “to destroy the LRSD, together with its union and replace it with charters they can profit from.”

“This right here, sir, your paper’s hatred of the LRSD, is why the only time I read your paper is when I’m at my elderly mother’s house, and is the reason I long [ago] ceased to subscribe. Why pay you to destroy our public schools?”

The last sentence of her email was: “You should all be ashamed of your bias.”

Thank you, ma’am, and we will keep your name unpublished. And we did pass your note to the publisher and others who have work on this page, as you requested. We learn most from our critics. But we will reply.

We aren’t ashamed of our biases here in the opinion section of the Democrat-Gazette. We’re proud of them. One of the problems with editorials in the United States today is that there are so darned many editorials that have no bias. That is, no opinion. Instead of doing as you did when you set out to say something, too many editorialists set out to write something. Even worse, they set out to write editorials. More’s the pity.

Which is why there seems to be a standard format to editorials today: Snarky lede, 20 inches of background from the news story, and a kicker at the end. (Abortion should be rare! Don’t commit a crime with a gun! Attention should be paid!) So we’ll continue with our biases, with your permission. Or even without.

As far as hating the school district, it would be hard to hate a spiritless, inanimate object. Do you mean that we hate the folks in it? Gosh, we hope we haven’t given that impression. If we have, we owe not only you, but everybody else in Little Rock an apology.

What we’d like to see, what parents would like to see, what taxpayers would like to see, what business owners would like to see, what politicians claim they’d like to see, is a school district that works. How many generations of kids have to be lost before hard choices are made to improve the schools? Can we wait until 2020? Maybe 2022? Should we give up on the kids in high school now? If so, maybe we should build another prison to handle what’s coming.

We do have many problems with some of the priorities the teachers’ unions seem to champion. We happen to feel that school teachers who aren’t up to the job should find another line of work. But we don’t think we hate anybody concerned. We do admit to rage, however, when we think of poor kids, mostly minority kids, in some of the city’s most challenging ZIP codes, who are chained to schools that consistently not just under-perform but non-perform. Are other kids, more affluent kids—white kids—more deserving of an education because their families can move to the suburbs, or can afford a private education?

When we see an F-rated school failing students year after year, with teacher absenteeism running at about 30 percent on Fridays, putting these kids into the world without preparing them, without giving them a fair chance at life, while a handful of adults—for political and financial reasons—are seemingly willing to sacrifice them on altar of job patronage or union dues, well, yes, we hate that.

AS FAR AS the criticism that we only criticize Little Rock’s school district when there are other failing schools, we’d note that the state, to our knowledge, has only taken over four of the state’s school districts, and it so happens that one of them serves the state’s capital city. The Earle School District, while of the utmost importance in Earle, has 600 students. Little Rock has north of 24,000. We are the Weather Channel. This is a hurricane. We have to report on it. We have to opine on it. We have our souls to think about.

Thank you, opinionated writer and not-so-gentle reader, for taking the time to read the offerings on this page, even if from a borrowed paper. We take what we can get. And hope maybe one day to change a mind or two. Including yours. But please don’t link our own annoyance and sometimes even anger with the failing system with hate. Hate is like poison gas. Once released, the wind can blow it anywhere. Even into our own lines. We’d like to avoid that disaster. Even so, we remain . . . Sincerely biased, The Eds