White parents support embattled Little Rock superintendent
Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle in Little Rock, Arkansas, the school district is still riven by racial conflict. In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks on the school board look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools. The fight is all the more disturbing to some because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration. The current conflict is over whether the city’s black leaders can exert firm control over the direction and perquisites of an urban school district in the way that white leaders did for decades. When Mr. Brooks cut 100 jobs, he saved money but earned the fierce ill will of many other blacks, who see the district as an important source of employment and middle-class stability. Many whites, on the other hand, see the district, where issues of race have long been a constant backdrop, as a bloated bureaucracy, ripe for Mr. Brooks’s pruning. Where many blacks believe Mr. Brooks disregards them and cozies up to the white business establishment, many whites say he is merely trying to stop white flight. “I’ve never seen anything like this—the divisiveness, the hate,” says Katherine Wright Knight, leader of the teacher’s union. Another outspoken critic, Katherine Mitchell, the school board president, says, “I’m saying, we have really regressed.”
The judge’s ruling in February, disputed by activists and black board members but welcomed by Mr. Brooks, freed the city’s schools from federal oversight. But it did not end longstanding resentments, and after a black majority was elected to the board for the first time last fall, the gloves are off. Other urban public school districts in the South have suffered through similar racial battles over leadership, aggravated by symptoms that prevail here, too: white flight, inner-city poverty, and what is referred to as the “achievement gap,” which fuels resentment and makes an anathema of any perceived administrative leaning toward white students. The fight here has been especially bruising because of its symbolic overtones and practical implications. Although whites have deserted the schools in many other Southern cities, they have not done so to the same degree in Little Rock, where they make up about a quarter of the 23,000 students. While many whites hail the cuts in administration—a legislative study found it “terribly bloated,” a lawmaker said—Ms. Mitchell, the board president said angrily that “African-American employees have lost $918,000,” and she enumerated positions lost or downgraded. Dr. Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, fears the dispute is really about patronage, not educational quality. “I think it would be hard to make strong criticisms of the superintendent on educational grounds,” he says. Yet Mr. Brooks has evidently neglected the political role vital to a superintendent’s success, some say. “Roy Brooks has done a credible job reaching out to the grass tops, and a lousy job reaching out to the grass roots,” says James L. Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, part of the University of Arkansas. After the board recently voted to send him a letter outlining why they wanted to be rid of him, he sued the board’s president in federal court, saying she was intimidating potential witnesses who might testify for him at a likely administrative hearing over whether he should be dismissed.
New York Times
By Adam Nossiter
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