I know we’ve been talking a lot ( too much) about charter schools and the situation in Little Rock lately, but the editorial in Monday’s Dem-Gaz packed such a punch that it deserves a mention, especially because I don’t think it ran in the Northwest edition.  Here are some excerpts:

Imagine that. A group of private citizens in Southwest Little Rock wants to open a college prep school for young men. How dare they! Who do these people think they are-Americans? Concerned citizens and parents who want their sons to have the best education they can get? Maybe they’re just school patrons who believe there ought to be a school dedicated to making men of boys. And well-educated,courteous, hard-working, decent men at that.

What nerve. These people don’t know how things are done ’round heah. Why can’t they be content with their failed schools? Like so many other families in America’s inner cities. Don’t they know their place?…

…The upwardly mobile in these latitudes once had to contend only with police dogs and water hoses; now they’re up against a far more formidable force: a plague of pettifogging lawyers who’ve made a highly successful career of thwarting any kind of progress or justice in public education…

…The lawyers also want the state to tell the proposed charter school it can accept only low-income students. That way, the regular public schools could hope to keep the better-off students captive. What does it say about the quality of a school district if the only way it can keep its most prized students is to fence them in? Nothing good.

Maybe the lawyers could ask the state to put barbed wire around the school and barricades at the front doors. Also, in back. In case some kid tries try to sneak off the reservation in hopes of a better education…

…What this country needs is a clear, simple amendment to the Constitution of the United States that would grant the equal protection of the laws to all, including families who ask for nothing more than a chance for their kid to attend a good charter school.

Oh. You say we already have such an amendment, the Fourteenth? And even a Civil Rights Act that forbids such discrimination on the grounds of race?

Then how come those laws aren’t being enforced? Because, as the lawyers and judges and other intellectuals all agree, those laws don’t mean what they say.

Wouldn’t it be grand if they did? Wouldn’t it be something if this country had a new birth of freedom, even in Little Rock, Arkansas?