It Takes Some Nerve

The Governor and the town's big employer had a plan to fix the schools. But the schools made sure to stop it

by WENDY COLE

Parents like to hear their political candidates talk about whipping schools into shape and making them accountable. Easy to say. But not many parents have a clue how really hard it is to take on an entrenched, self-preserving education establishment.

Steve Brothers does. He's the manager of the American Greetings plant in Osceola, Ark., a hulking factory perched near the banks of the Mississippi where 1,500 workers make greeting cards. The 1984 Osceola High School graduate says he has trouble keeping his operation running smoothly because "I can't find enough people who can multiply seven times four." Nor can he readily recruit young executives from outside the area after they learn that the state put Osceola's school district on "academic distress" two years ago, when only 33% of 11th-graders could read at grade level, and only 8% were up to par in math.

Brothers, 33, tried to help the system in the small ways he could. He organized plant tours for students, hoping to stir their imagination, and even helped launch a "shadowing" program, in which high schoolers tag along with employees for a day. He became an officer of the Booster Club, which supports the district's popular athletic programs. "I couldn't get a single parent to attend a planning meeting, and we had just won a state championship in football," he says. But before ruling out the Osceola system for his five-year-old son Jackson, Brothers saw one last opportunity: to open a publicly financed charter school. Governor Mike Huckabee had signed legislation in early 1999 that would allow for as many as 12 charter schools, independent of local districts, to be established in the state. So Brothers, along with the Chamber of Commerce director, Mayor Dickie Kennemore and others settled on a plan for what they called the Arkansas Charter School. It would serve 72 kindergartners and first-graders by the fall, and its goals would be academic rigor, racial balance and parental involvement.

The charter-school advocates knew they would face resistance, but they did not expect the full-throttle counterattack they got. The first hitch occurred when the state education department took a full six months after the new law was adopted to issue 12 pages of onerous rules and regulations governing Arkansas charter schools. Even at that pace, lobbyists for the state's school boards, administrators and teachers protested that the process was moving too quickly. The bureaucratic delay left Brothers and his allies barely three months to identify an appropriate school site, draw up policies for admissions, personnel and attendance, hold a public hearing and submit a detailed application to the state.

The team pulled all-nighters to meet the deadline. They also made some tactical errors, most notably selecting the local country club, which has no black members, as the place to brief top school administrators and board members about the proposal over lunch. This bolstered the suspicions of their opponents that the charter school was designed to "cherry-pick" the top-performing white students rather than help those deemed most at risk of failure. Rumors began flying among faculty and staff that a charter school would kill the school district by siphoning away money from it. Under the law, the Osceola school board has the right to vote on whether it approves of a charter application. Before holding formal hearings, the board met quietly with a sympathetic staff member of the Arkansas School Boards Association, who advised the board to block the petition. The charter advocates never knew about the special meeting and didn't get to make their case until the official hearings days later. In February the Osceola board shot down the application by a 5-2 vote.

The charter advocates, though, were convinced that they could win on appeal at the state level. After all, a majority of Arkansas board of education members had been appointed by Huckabee, a vocal advocate of charter schools. The charter law itself favored poor, low-achieving districts such as Osceola's. What the reformers never anticipated, however, was the ferocity of the Osceola board's $100-an-hour attorney, Mike Gibson, who pressed the hot buttons of élitism and racism in a 20-minute speech in Little Rock. "It takes the cream of the crop off the top and pushes other students who are at risk further down at the bottom," he told the Arkansas board. Neither superintendent G. Bruce Young nor school board president Sylvester Belcher uttered a word. Brothers turned red with anger, but he and his allies remained calm when it came time to explain their plan, including the way it would achieve racial parity. Without asking a single substantive question, the six board members turned down the application.

In the end the state board rejected six out of seven similar charter petitions. "I'd have thought we'd have 25 or 30 charter schools by now," says a disappointed Huckabee. "But the state board would rather support charter schools where there is local support." And local school boards almost always see charter efforts as threats to their survival. After the state moved Osceola off its academic-distress list last spring, each side only dug in deeper. Brothers' group announced that it would try again. When the charter advocates tried to obtain recent test scores and other data from the school district, though, they received an icy letter from Young. "The activities of the charter committee are demoralizing to our educational staff," Young wrote. He said he would not help.