By Steve Brawner, © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
Johnny Key is the right person to serve as education secretary for Arkansas’ 263 school districts including charters, but with one of them, he has a tiger by the tail.
Key was appointed education commissioner by Gov. Asa Hutchinson in 2015, a move that met with some disgruntlement in the education community. That disgruntlement was caused by Key not having a background in education, other than owning a day care.
Instead, Key had been a Republican representative and then senator based in Mountain Home who had chaired the Senate Education Committee. He had a party label, but he sought consensus and got along well with others.
His political background meant he could build bridges between educators accustomed to working with Democrats, and the Republicans who now control the Legislature – and will control it for a long time. He understands education politics as well as anyone. What he may not know about education technicalities – he can hire educators for that.
Hutchinson named Key secretary of education in May as part of the governor’s transformation initiative. That change, created by a 2,000-page law, reduced the number of cabinet-level agencies from 42 to 15 and brought all the state’s education-related agencies into the Department of Education.
That means Key now heads not only K-12 education but also pre-K, career and technical education, higher education, and other areas. It makes sense to combine those agencies so their goals and processes fit. But someone’s going to have to bring those different teams and cultures together while respecting their traditional independence. A secretary with a background in politics can do that as well as anyone.
The Little Rock School District, however, is basically a no-win assignment.
Two months before Key was named education secretary, the State Board of Education voted 5-4 to take over that district because six of its 48 schools were classified as being academically distressed, meaning less than half their students scored proficient on state tests. Furthermore, two-thirds of its elementary schools were scoring in the state’s bottom quarter in math. The district had been led by 22 superintendents in the last 32 years. And it was facing the loss of $37 million in state desegregation funding.
Those were the contributing factors, anyway. Four of the nine State Board members disagreed.
The state takeover in January 2015 meant that the locally elected school board was dissolved and replaced by the state education commissioner. At the time it was Tony Wood, who would soon become superintendent of the newly formed Jacksonville North Pulaski School District. Key was appointed in March, two months after the takeover.
Since that time, Key has been one of the objects of frustration for Little Rock patrons who want control of their school district back. He’s personified a state action he had nothing to do with, which created a responsibility he’d rather not have. He and the State Board would love to hand control back to a district that is fully meeting all of its students’ needs. But that can’t happen unless the Little Rock School District shows enough improvement.
Now we’re bumping up against a five-year deadline for the district to either meet the criteria for improvement, be annexed or consolidated with another district, which isn’t going to happen, or be “reconstituted,” which isn’t defined by state law. The vagueness of that last option makes it the most likely choice. State Board of Education members are holding community meetings to solicit ideas on what to do next. The Tuesday one turned ugly, as reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Who could do a better job with this situation than Key? Maybe no one. The Little Rock Central High School mascot is the Tigers. The State Board grabbed a tiger by the tail in 2015 before Key arrived, and now he and it must figure out how to let it go.
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.