Arkansas Plan for More Efficient Education Meeting with Rural Resistance
by Jim Brown
February 6, 2004
(AgapePress) - The governor of Arkansas is urging the state legislature to create a more efficient public education system, rather than a more expensive one. But his plans for reform are facing more demographic than partisan opposition.It has been a slow, grinding nine weeks -- the most expensive special session in Arkansas history. The legislature is reacting to a State Supreme Court decision that calls for a school system that is "efficient, adequate, and equitable for all students regardless of geography."
Governor Mike Huckabee says the solution is not pouring more and more money into the existing school structure in order to bring the bottom up.
"Many of us have said that this is a time when we just can't keep asking the taxpayers to pay for inefficiency and to pay for a more expensive system that we don't have the courage to change," the governor says. "But it appears that, for the most part, the status quo is prevailing -- and those who opt for higher taxes as opposed to higher standards are going to ultimately succeed here."
Huckabee explains that the resistance to change is coming from small rural school districts that could not survive if an efficient system was put in place. He offers an example as a way of explanation.
"If you have a chemistry class with a fixed cost of offering it -- with the teacher, the lab, and all the things that go with that -- but you only have two students who take it because your high school is so small, then you don't have the economy of scale that makes that efficient.
"[But] if you have a high school that has been consolidated into a regional school, then you'll have enough student going to that school [and] going to those classes that we can afford to offer a solid curriculum," Huckabee says.
The governor would like to restructure his state's public school system by doing away with small, inefficient districts that cannot offer courses in an economical way. But Huckabee says superintendents in rural areas of Arkansas fear losing their jobs if high schools are consolidated to provide students with a broad curriculum and advanced placement courses.
