Arkansas School Consolidation

1. The number of school districts will be reduced from 310 to 116. All but about eight districts (extreme isolation) in the consolidated group will at the least lose their high school.

2. The superintendents of all districts will no longer be picked by the communities, but by the state department of education.

3. School boards will be obsolete. A "parent-business advisory panel" will advise the state chosen superintendents on policy and hiring.

4. Local control of schools will be undone.

An Attempt to Create a Bandwagon

This is a Republicrat effort. Here the major parties are two faces with one guiding philosophy, leaving little choice for citizens. The speed and decisiveness with which Mr. Huckabee abandoned his campaign rhetoric of support for "local control of schools" at the first pretext makes me, for one, wonder if he ever really meant it.

I am convinced that Gov. Huckabee ran his ideas past key Democrats, and agreed to push for it only if they supported it as well. Ditto with key media types from the state's most powerful media conglomerates. Most of all, it was done at the behest of corporate types who have become proponents of big government and who give money to both sides. They see a chance to stick the taxpayers with their corporation's training costs. More on that later.

For proof of my contention, one need look no further than recent newspaper reports. Even John Brummet is singing the Governor's praises. Traditional opponents like Sen. Jim Argue and Representative Harmon Seawel are actually introducing key legislation for Mike Huckabee. And they are doing it immediately after the proposal was unveiled, or perhaps concurrently. Clearly, a backroom deal has been made.

Everywhere we looked in the media, we were barraged with the message that this takeover scheme was:
a) inevitable since the Arkansas courts have ordered it, and we the people must bow down to the opinions of judges, and
b) The Republicrat leaders were heaping praise on one another, and getting it from editorials in the media. Add to that the reflexive
c) "It's for the children".

At this point in my life, when someone says "It's for the children", the red flags go up immediately. Big government seizure of power and liberty from parents "for the children" is a misnomer. Those children will one day be adults. If the statists have their way, they will grow up in a world where they will have increasingly little power to order their own affairs. The Constitution Party's position is that on the whole, Freedom and Authority for parents is what is good "for the children".

The dispute is between people who believe in local control of schools versus those who desire all authority to be concentrated in the hands of an increasingly powerful and unaccountable central machine. A machine system in which the will of each individual the machine is allegedly serving can be increasingly thrust aside.

If we as a people lack virtue, increasing state control is as certain as the sunrise. Virtuous citizenry is the best defense against encroaching government control. We the people must strive to become more virtuous, but while we are so doing, let us work to keep the machine at bay.

What about claims that consolidation will make schools more efficient?

Claims that this will make schools more efficient or save money is incorrect. There will be no reductions of schools without reductions in services provided to the community.

They are claiming that we don't need 310 superintendents, and that we can save on administrative costs. Let me show you the numbers and you decide. The district in which I teach has just under 1,200 students and so should, under the governor's plan, be consolidated into the large, better funded, district nearby. This larger district actually runs buses past our district in order to pick up students, so we are really a poster boy for consolidation.

We have about 6.5 to 7.5 million dollars to work with. The superintendent's salary is about 75K. Even if this man added no value whatsoever to our school, his salary consumes only about 1% of our budget. In reality, the superintendents that now exist will be mostly replaced by "assistant superintendents" at about the same salary in the new mega-districts. You may be losing superintendents, but they will be mostly replaced by assistant superintendents doing much the same job.

If you keep far-flung facilities, you must have administrators to watch over them. If you close facilities, costs increase all the more. If your school is twice as big, you will need twice as many administrators to watch over it, (or suffer the consequences of it not being as well watched.)

The other place they claim waste is with small classroom sizes that more often occur in small districts. The idea is that the state requires certain classes to be offered. Some such advanced classes, such as chemistry, may only have one student in the small rural school who wants the class. They say it is inefficient to have a teacher teach to one student. This claim is just as flawed, perhaps more so.

First of all, we are normally talking about isolated districts here (only the seven or eight most isolated districts would be exempt under the proposed plan). How efficient is it to bus the whole school 25 miles away just so that one student can sit in a class of twenty eight other kids? That teacher only has the single student (or more realistically, a class of less than ten students) a single period a day. The rest of the time they normally teach to regular class sizes.

There are better solutions for offering seldom-taken advanced classes. Many college courses are taught online. We can use the internet with audio-video two way links to make sure that even students in the most isolated districts get advanced instruction.

On teacher pay: Some teachers are willing to take less pay for smaller class sizes. They gravitate to smaller schools. The disparity in teacher pay is not as great as some judges would have you believe. I teach 104 students a day in a small district. Why shouldn't my pay be lower than a person who teachers six packed classes totaling 150 students in a mega-district?

So what are they up to?

They are not attempting to take away your power over your child's education for reasons of costs. That is clear. What then is the real reason? Clues can be found in the way that the phrase "business leaders" keeps popping up in the debate. Understand that they are not talking about the man who owns your local restaurant or hardware store. Those are often some of the best people on Earth.

But there are business leaders, big business leaders, who are not opposed to growing government. They have noticed that they have gotten big enough to not only keep government off of their backs, but to use government as a tool to advance their own interests at the expense of the common citizen. So long as government is grown in a way that advances their own interests, regardless of what it does to the interests of their fellow citizens, they will push it.

What is coming is the concept now known as "workforce investment". It is a great idea for other people's children, and a terrible idea for one's own. I say "now known as" because statists have a tendency to change the name of their programs once the populace catches on. They simply find a new name for the same ideas and continue to try and implement them.

The concept is that schools are to give a well rounded, broad based, liberal arts education only to the sons and daughters of the elites. For the common masses, such efforts are wasted. They will be narrowly and vocationally trained to perform whatever jobs the business leaders in the area say that they need worker-drones for at the time. In other words, the schools become vocational rather than educational. We will give up trying to teach them how to think, and instead teach them how to do a specific job. The mega-corps training costs will be shifted onto the backs of the taxpayers and whatever businesses lack the clout to get the government to subsidize them.

The whole concept of schools as vocational centers is a clear violation of the Arkansas Constitution, Article 14, section one. The constitutional mandate is to increase the "knowledge and virtue" of young people so that they might be better equipped for self-government. Vocational training is not a part of that constitutional mandate, yet in the name of conforming to our constitution, they would do violence to it and your rights.

The existence of so many small independent districts made it too hard to implement these schemes. From the perspective of the big people with the big plans for your children's lives there is currently too much freedom, too much diversity, too much choice, and too much parental input for. Breaking up power is the method the founders chose for preserving liberty. Consolidating it makes it much easier for tyranny.

If a major corporation needs workers trained to do a specific job, then let them pay for it. It is immoral and unconstitutional for them to stick the citizens with the cost of training workers to operate their machines.

Look, this system has already been tried. The former Soviet block nations do it. Western Europe does it to some extent. Japan does it. Its a proven failure. It has never worked at any time or place in the history of the world, and it won't work for your children either.

By the way, Kentucky has spent hundreds of millions of extra education dollars to implement similar ideas over the last dozen years. There has been rampant cheating by teachers and students on the state's high value tests. Improvements in those scores mean little because politicians pressure the test composers to make it a bit easier each year so that they can report that "test scores are improving". I suspect the same thing is going on in Arkansas with our benchmarks.

The ACT is a reputable national test. ACT scores in Kentucky have stayed constant or even dipped a bit. Kentucky scores lower than the national average in every area of the ACT. This is so even though the numbers of people taking it is going down. These should be the students from the "elite" group mind you. But what about the rest? Is this emphasis on employment helping them to get jobs? Unemployment for 16-19 year olds is higher in Kentucky than it is in all seven surrounding states.

The allure of ego and power is very seductive. Those in power are always tempted to think, "Ah, but we are brilliant enough to succeed where others have failed. We can manage the people's lives better than they can themselves. All we need is more power and budget."

Such thinking has always failed, and its going to fail even worse as time goes on. Our economy is a fast changing one. There is no way on earth a state program is going to keep pace in a such an economy. The jobs they would train people for would be gone by the time they got them trained. The real need might be for a job that did not exist five years ago when the program was initiated.

When I was in school, they should have trained me to run a PC with Windows XP and program multi-media devices. Of course, those things did not exist then. Fortunately, they taught me to think, and transmitted to me a core body of knowledge. They taught me to understand systems by studying the systems that don't change, like the rock cycle. With that, I could adapt as new tools and systems came along.

The flawed idea of using the schools for vocational training rather than classical education will lead to a monumental misallocation of resources. Instead of being trained as an adaptable, classical thinker with a core body of knowledge, your children will be narrowly trained to do a specific job. A job which either no longer exists or has changed beyond recognition. A job that is not what your child wants to do with their life, but is stuck with. Narrowly educated workers are not adaptable workers. Classically trained thinkers are.

The power grabbers are on the march. You may not be interested in government, but your government is very interested in you and your family. Please don't sit idly by and let them have their way.

If you want to change government, you must first change your vote. http://www.cparkansas.org

Respectfully
Mark M. Moore
chairman@cparkansas.org