School Debate Hijacks Holidays (Jeff Hankins Publisher?s Note)

A special session of the Arkansas General Assembly gives us something festive to talk about during this holiday season.

Actually, in a lot of ways it’s downright depressing. Months of debate, research, threats, studies and positioning regarding the education and future of our children have come to a head in rushed, political fashion this December.

The debates center fundamentally on five key issues related to an adequate and equitable education system as mandated by the Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision in the Lake View School District case: funding, consolidation, standards, control and accountability.

One extreme side, led by rural leaders, wants to infuse a lot more money into basically the status quo system. The other extreme side, which has virtually no leadership left, would have put big money into a new, consolidated system with higher standards and greater accountability measures.

Gov. Mike Huckabee has landed somewhere in the middle with a leaning toward more change than less but still faces heavy resistance from entrenched rural legislators and superintendents. Business leaders have reluctantly backed off massive immediate consolidation efforts in favor of a focus on standards and testing that would lead to the mergers.

I think we’ll generally be disappointed and dismayed by the ultimate outcomes — those of the session and those of the student education.

The dialogue on the funding issue grows worse by the day. One of the latest bills would remove sales tax exemptions from dozens of professional services that aren’t taxed in surrounding states. This would be a disaster for economic development and saddle Arkansas firms with a huge competitive disadvantage in bidding for out-of-state business.

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Surely I’m not the only one fuming over the North Belt Loop mess in central Arkansas.

It seems we’re going to let a neighborhood group in Sherwood potentially delay the project for another decade and force Metroplan and the Arkansas Highway Commission to spend more funds on new environmental and engineering studies for alternative routes.

These are sensitive issues to people who live in that area, but give me a break. The North Belt Loop development impacts hundreds of thousands of commuters, residents and travelers. Its delay will leave lucrative commercial development opportunities on the table — think more jobs and tax base — and leave us with serious and dangerous traffic issues on U.S. Highway 67/167 and Interstate 40.

Residents of Sherwood have known for years about the North Belt Loop development. What kind of city planning with foresight about this project was done that should have prevented the overlap of upscale neighborhoods and potential routes?

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I note the death of Robert Bartley, who was editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years and was an outspoken critic of Arkansas, Bill Clinton and Stephens Inc. throughout the 1990s.

Bartley and his staff had a field day with Whitewater issues. They were most intrigued by the Clinton connections with the Stephens family, which had previously endured unflattering editorials about its links with the Pakistani-run Bank of Credit & Commerce.

In particular, it was Bartley who focused on the state’s close-knit business and political “mores.”

Bartley told me in the 1994 interview that he had a lot of respect for Stephens Inc. because he liked big investment banks that finance entrepreneurs. But then he described Stephens as an “oligarchy” and Arkansas as a one-party state that “is a very tightly connected business culture centering around Stephens’ interests but not exclusively them.”

He and The Journal were so proud of all their Whitewater, Arkansas, Clinton and Stephens editorials that they compiled them in a book. Actually six books totaling some 2,700 pages.