Schools should play by the rules

You have to work hard to make me angry. That is not to say little things don’t grate on my nerves. But getting worked up to the point I am truly angry is rare.

Same with crying. I don’t do it much even though I feel deep sadness. Sometimes I want to break into lamentations for the emotional release but can’t. This quirk of character is one of my greatest strengths and weaknesses. When family and friends are asked to describe me, they inevitably use words like calm, steady, patient, stable, logical, peaceful, even-tempered, long-suffering … blah blah blah. While those can be good qualities, there are definitely times it would serve me to get angrier quicker.

I may have an anger management problem in that there are areas I historically have managed far too much. I have been writing about those and will continue as I process how my religious upbringing failed me in some ways, and how evangelical Christianity in the United States is failing us all. However, I find rage easy to access at any moment when it comes to the pillaging of our public schools.

Everything that comes out of our far-right-wing-machine-controlled state government regarding public education points to the dying of that great light. Which is no surprise, since most of the money that buys and pays for our politicians comes from powerful outside interests whose goal is to extinguish it.

LEARNS, the cookie-cutter policy peddled by this machine in legislatures all over our union, and specifically the voucher system it creates, is a huge step toward that goal in Arkansas. The march toward that goal continues, as made clear in recent state budget meetings reported by Mike Wickline for this paper.

I have never met him but read what he writes because he is smart and honest. Same with Bill Bowden. But I digress.

In a budget hearing on March 3, state Education Department Secretary Jacob Oliva told lawmakers that the $55.2 million in state funding received by our 15 public education cooperatives is currently being “re-evaluated.” Here is the full quote from Oliva: “Our educational cooperatives have been receiving funding from the state, and I want to be perfectly clear, whether it is co-ops, school districts or anybody in the state, thinks that we are just going to do business as usual and fund positions because that is what we have always funded and we don’t have a return on that investment, they need to know we are going to have a deeper conversation.

“That is not an entitlement appropriation, so we have let these co-ops know, don’t just guarantee and expect you are going to get this funding. We are going to re-evaluate how these districts are being supported because the reality is literacy and numeracy data hasn’t been improving in the last decade, but we have just been giving out dollars out the window, so we officially let them know we may not be giving you these dollars the way you have always received them. We are going to re-evaluate and make sure we are having a great impact on what’s best for students.”

Like the LEARNS Act, this is not an innovative or original idea. Google the Des Moines Register and Gov. Kim Reynolds, Area Education Agencies, Jan. 9. Speeches by these fanatical politicians read like a script. There’s a reason for that. Their policies are written by billionaire-funded organizations who want to see public schools go away. No matter how they spin it— and Oliva does a lot of spinning on behalf of his spin-master boss—that is the goal.

It is all about money. The demise of public schools is an economic goal first articulated by Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize winning economist whose work I admire and agree with in its emphasis on small government, and vehemently oppose when it comes to the privatization of schools. In my view this issue shows how, like so many other things, our state and country are out of balance.

You can be conservative without going so far to the right you defund public schools. What’s next? Police? State parks? Roads? Illegal IVF? Crazy stuff happens when fringe ideas become mainstream, when people on the far right or far left instead of in the middle make our laws. And that is exactly where we are in Arkansas.

The lack of balance is so obvious in Oliva’s Sarah Sanders-speak. Consider the irony of this statement: “We have let these co-ops know, don’t just guarantee and expect you are going to get this funding. We are going to re-evaluate how these districts are being supported because the reality is literacy and numeracy data hasn’t been improving in the last decade, but we have just been giving out dollars out the window.”

Oliva, saying all of this with a straight face, fails to mention that this is exactly what “we” will do with far more dollars through the universal voucher system created by LEARNS. Which was the whole point of LEARNS: to give millions of our tax dollars to private and home schools with little to no accountability—certainly not the same accountability or “literacy and numeracy” testing required of public schools. But, by all means, let’s take a microscope to those 15 co-ops that serve our entire public school system.

Bryan Law, whose mother was my beloved firstgrade teacher and whose pastor dad baptized me in the First Baptist Church of Ozark when I was 6 years old, is the current director of the Northwest Arkansas Education Service Co-Op, serving 17 schools in that area. He was informed that their co-op will lose three of its four instructional facilitators in literacy, one of its two math facilitators, one of its two science facilitators, and the gifted and talented coordinator.

A recent article in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette quotes Law as saying those folks “committed their life to improving instruction for students and teachers in Northwest Arkansas.” He said the state explained their positions were not the most effective use of funds, and “that is certainly not the way I feel.”

Having witnessed firsthand how essential these specialists are to the rural schools they serve, it is certainly not the way I feel either. One—I repeat, one—Republican lawmaker in the Arkansas House, former teacher and coach Jim Wooten of Beebe, had the courage to stand up to Oliva for the kids and educators LEARNS negatively affects: “I am part of what the governor calls status quo, and let me assure you that doesn’t bother me a bit because I am thinking about the 440,000 kids and not those that are being sent … to a private school.”

In response, Oliva said, “The status quo for you has ranked us 43rd in the nation, so to me that’s not good enough. We need to do something innovative. We need to do something bold. We need to do something different.”

Again, Sarah-speak. This snarky way of communicating, disrespecting our elders, educators, and anyone else who questions them with such a tone, also insults the rest of us because it is misleading. No one wants to be 43rd in education any more than we want to be 47th in health care, 50th in child hunger, or No. 1 in teen pregnancy. Any Arkansan can see the need for innovation, boldness, and difference in many areas, not just education.

But welfare for the rich in the form of vouchers that go to unaccountable private or home schools while our public schools are crushed by government regulation? Slashing our public education co-ops so we can throw hundreds of millions more money out the window to schools that don’t have to play by the same rules as public ones?

No. That’s not fair or right. And it is time for Arkansans to stand up for what is.