via Flickr
The Little Rock, Arkansas public school district is failing all 23,000 children under its care by allowing a contemporary “separate but equal” scheme to be carried out. Once the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette requested a full 2019 report card of the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, the results sounded a devastating alarm among the community and country.
The Atlantic explained the bleak reality like this: “Nearly five years ago, in January 2015, the state of Arkansas assumed control of Little Rock’s public schools. At the time, six of the schools in the district had ‘chronically underperformed’ on state exams regularly for several years; 22 superintendents had passed through the district in 32 years, creating a sense of instability.”
The idea was that perhaps if a locally elected school board could not solve the problems that cause a school to fail, perhaps the state's education commissioner could. Unfortunately, it seems that neither is helping Black students come up from behind.
In 2019, eight Little Rock public schools (all with majority Black student populations) out of a total forty received “F” letter grades. By comparison, fifteen other schools received “D” grades, eight received “C” grades, three received “B” grades, and six received “A” grades.
Separate but equal school buildings were outlawed when the Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The rest, many assumed, would be history.
But reports like this one published by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, and the failure of Black schools to keep up with majority-white schools within the same district, confirm our worst fear - scholastic and socioeconomic resources still remain inaccessible to many children and their families. And the disparity between the haves and have-nots still appears to be - though more subtly - racially motivated.
“As we mark it’s 65th anniversary, the promise of Brown appears a distant vision in our dangerously polarized society,” says Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project. “Segregation is expanding… Little has been done for a generation. There has been no meaningful federal government effort devoted to foster the voluntary integration of the schools, and it has been decades since federal agencies funded research about effective strategies for school integration. We have to do more.”
Arkansas requires schools to perform well on the mandatory ACT Aspire Test in order to receive a top grade. The hope is that test results and other metrics will demonstrate that individual public schools are capable of handling their own affairs when it relates to student achievement.
But what many teachers, parents, and school officials desperately want the state to understand is that state control robs them of any say so in how their kids are educated and that it doesn’t solve the root problem - systemic racism.
Atlantic journalist Adam Harris described the plan to hand failing schools in Black communities over to state control as a plan locals consider to be “an attempt to codify separate and unequal schools in the city.”