Better Off Without ’Em by Chuck Thompson

Author:Chuck Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pride, Prejudice, and Cheetos-Infused Pickles at Forest Heights Middle School

I’ve come to Arkansas to give the South a fair shake on education.

Still beset by the dim stereotypes that resulted from the Little Rock Nine drama, and an unflattering 2007 HBO documentary, Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, the state is, in fact, something of a rising star on the regional academic scene. Having taken more seriously than many the criminally impossible standards of achievement set by the federal government’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, the state’s public school teachers have yoked their students into measurable improvement.

“When I left the state we ranked forty-eighth for student achievement,” says Dr. Charles Hopson, superintendent of Pulaski County Special School District, which takes in the fringes of Little Rock. After twenty years working as a school administrator in Portland, Oregon, Hopson has recently returned to his native Arkansas. It was Dr. Tom’s firm, McPherson & Jacobson, that recruited him for the Pulaski County job.

“We’re now ranked tenth in the nation in terms of student achievement,” he tells me.

A serious-minded, loquacious intellectual, Dr. Hopson is also a natty dresser with a knack for smooth talk. His “ranked tenth” proclamation isn’t exactly accurate. In its annual “Quality Counts” report on state-level efforts to improve public education, Education Week magazine ranked Arkansas sixth in the nation in 2011, up from tenth in 2010, for “efforts to improve the teaching profession, their standards, assessments and accountability systems.” Arkansas’s actual students fell well below the national average in measures of academic achievement, rolling in at number thirty-six and getting a D grade in the report—not exactly what’s known as a résumé builder in the education racket.11

Still, thirty-six hardly makes Arkansas as deprived as Mississippi. And the state’s increased emphasis on education is admirable. Gone, it would seem, are the days of 1921, when a state study concluded: “To [thousands of] children, to be born in Arkansas is a misfortune and an injustice from which they will never recover and upon which they will look back with bitterness when plunged, in adult life, into competition with children born in other states which are today providing more liberally for their children.” Or even a 1978 study that reported, “By almost any standard the Arkansas system of education must be regarded as inadequate.”

What’s more, in Arkansas I’ll mostly be giving a pass to the impoverished Delta Region, where the odd outsider can still wander around as I did for half an hour in towns such as Gould (population 1,129, median household income $14,906), be harassed by small gangs of decidedly unsociable mongrel dogs, and encounter nary a schoolhouse nor a human being willing to point you in the direction of one. “Delta” often conjures romantic images—lazy floats down bayou sloughs, ancient blues played on battered guitars from rustic wooden porches—but mostly it’s flat and plain and dull and lifeless and hotter than Satan’s taint sweat, a breeding ground for fourteen-year-old runaways who you wouldn’t have the heart to send home if they turned up in your town.

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