Reports are coming out that the nays have it in the Fayetteville millage election.  After reporting early numbers via twitter that made passage look like a slamdunk (1,175 for and 630 against), Alan Wilbourn is now tweeting that the unofficial vote total is 4,085 for and 5,954 against. Over ten thousand Fayetteville residents cast ballots on the millage issue. That is quite a turnout for a special election. The table below provides a breakdown of the voting numbers.

Here is The Morning News article about the election.

The proposal to build a new high school failed to get voter approval.  So, what happens now?  Check back later today tomorrow (Sept. 17th) for some good riffing on this very topic.

The Fayetteville School District announced today that..well, it’s not exactly clear. A cryptic post on the District’s blog says the following:

The Fayetteville School District learned today that the Arkansas Department of Education plans to release $113,443,000 in stimulus credits on September 21. Applying the rules of the program and understanding that a limited number of school districts applied for credits by the 2009 deadline, the new Fayetteville High School project could receive approximately $54 million of these credits for use in financing the project.

This will significantly lower the district’s interest rate on the bonds and reduce the date the bonds will be paid off by perhaps as much as six years.

The Stimulus credits could equal an interest savings of approximately $63,000,000, depending upon market conditions at the time the bonds are being offered. According to Dr. Lisa Morstad, chief financial officer of the district, “Due to the Stimulus Act, this is a very unique opportunity in which the district will be able to finance the new high school under extremely favorable terms. We are uniquely positioned in 2009 to take advantage of these credits, since the 2010 credits cycle will likely have many more participants, making the allocations much smaller. We’re grateful to Dennis Hunt and the staff at Stephens, Inc., for informing us of this opportunity and helping us through the process.”

Use of the credits for the new high school is contingent on the passage of the proposed millage increase on September 15.

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It’s not exactly clear what this means for the district, and they should work to clarify the meaning of the announcement as soon as possible.

1) First of all, uhh, what does it mean to receive a “stimulus credit”? In layman’s terms, how does the credit work? Does the state subsidize the interest on the bond?

2) What do they mean by “could”? Do they mean the district could be awarded the stimulus credit? Or do they mean the district will receive the credit and it could total $54 million?

3) How is it that the credits are contingent on the passage of the millage?

4) How do the credits translate into savings for the community? Will the credit simply increase the total amount the district has to spend,  or will the effect be a net reduction in the amount citizens are being asked to fork over on Tuesday?

Hopefully the district will soon be offering a clearer explanation.

In a famous article in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that a good way to prevent serious crime would be for police to intervene as to seemingly low-level crimes or misdemeanors:

[D]isorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
* * *

We suggest that “untended” behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly. . . . Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes’ customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will occur.

Via the New York Times’ Idea Blog, Folwell Dunbar (Louisiana’s academic adviser for charter schools) describes his very similar rules of thumb for guessing whether a school is any good.  The title: “You don’t always need a standardized test to know a school is in trouble. Just look in the boys’ john.”  In other words, just as broken windows are a sign of a bad neighborhood, a school bathroom with graffiti, trash, and unflushed toilets is a good sign that the academic achievement level isn’t too hot.  That is, the fact that school administrators are incapable of monitoring bad behavior is a sign that students are probably being hampered from learning.

To be sure, Dunbar’s theory doesn’t rest solely on bathrooms. He lists many other conditions that, in his experience, indicate a poorly run school, such as:

• Administrators are unwilling to let credentialed visitors roam. Instead, they insist on “giving a tour” of the usual, safe suspects.
• Teachers read newspapers and take cell phone calls during professional development events.
• Teachers play solitaire on their computers during planning periods (or class). Or: the Web sites most visited by teachers include eBay, ESPN and Monster.com.
• Teachers and staff talk more about their latest degree or certification program than what they are doing with the kids.

The whole thing is worth reading.

The Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas is reporting that Governor Beebe has named Dr. Tom Kimbrell the next Commissioner of Education for the State of Arkansas.  Kimbrell has been the executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators since 2005.

“Is anyone buying this?”

“Logistics” was a popular word among area school officials over the last few days.  Confronted with the benign (yet somehow controversial) opportunity to have a sitting United States President deliver a message that stressed hard work and personal responsibility directly to the nation’s schoolchildren, many school districts opted to punt.   Rather than take a stance one way or another, they took cover and cited “logistics.”  For example, the Bentonville, Arkansas  School District released the following statement:

“The decision to provide the recorded message and make it available on the website is being made for a number of reasons:
logistics – perhaps as many as 3,000 students will be eating lunch at that time; two schools are not in session on September 8^th; most students and teachers have already planned for instruction on that day; and several of our schools are not equipped with appropriate technology to show the speech in the right setting..”

Sounds plausible, until one considers that it’s simply illogical to insist that every student must be deprived of an experience simply because the experience can’t be shared by all.

In a similar move, after informing parents that the speech would not be a part of their students’  school day, the Fayetteville, Arkansas school district released a statement on Friday, saying that:

“The decision to provide the recorded message and make it available on the website is for logistics and convenience purposes.  Many students will be at lunch, P.E., music, engaged in pre-planned instruction, labs or other activities during the original broadcast.”

Alan Wilbourn, responding to questions over Friday’s announcement stuck to the talking-points, echoing that “In the elementary school, it’s primarily logistics.”  To be fair, Wilbourn later insisted that the district’s intent was not to prohibit student viewing, but that there would be no coordinated effort.

Of course we all know that logistics wasn’t the real issue.  Faced with tough choices,  most school officials would rather avoid controversy all together than to take a stand that is sure to please some and infuriate others.  In Fayetteville, with a ginormous millage election now less than a week away, avoiding controversy was especially important.

That strategy seems to have backfired.  As it turns out,  plenty of people in Fayetteville didn’t buy the “logistics” argument.  After what the Northwest Arkansas Times referred to as “a flurry of criticism by e-mail, telephone, and the Internet,” Superintendent Vicki Thomas held a Labor Day press conference to clarify completely revise the district’s plan.  Under the new plan, viewing of the speech was being “strongly encouraged” with the hope that  every student be given the opportunity unless parents requested that their children be kept from participating.

To their credit, district leaders responded to the public pressure quickly and reports  estimate that nearly 90% of the district’s children saw the speech.  And, in the end, they chose the best path.  They let parents decide what was best for their own children.  At the press conference, however, Thomas was asked the inevitable question that was on everyone’s mind: Will this controversy affect the millage vote?

It’s probably safe to say that those who had planned on voting in favor of the millage were many of the same people that were offended by the district’s poor handling of the Obama speech controversy.   While voters may cut the district some slack for eventually getting it right, the entire fiasco was a public relations nightmare.  At the very least, school officials came across on the various news reports looking a lot less like concerned members of the community and a lot more like, well,  politicians.  And, let’s face it, people have a hard time trusting politicians.  As we  have all recently learned, even benign messages  like “stay in school”— when uttered by a politician—can spark controversy.  If support for the millage vote next Tuesday comes up short, some of the loss may be attributable to the hit the district took in terms of credibility over the last few days.

In the end, Obama’s speech wasn’t controversial at all, and reasonable people appreciated the message he gave to students.  Maybe everyone should lighten up when it comes to Presidents spending some time with America’s children.

Thanks to the Fayetteville Flyer for the excellent video.

For all of the controversy over Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, the actual speech turned out to have some valuable advice. The following sounds like something that I’ve said many times, almost verbatim:

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

Education reformers usually focus on all of the supply-side questions: how to spend money on schools, how to get good principals and teachers, how to inject competition and choice, what are the right standards and curricula, what are the right pedagogical techniques, what are the best accountability systems and merit pay, etc.

But all of that leaves out the demand-side: the students’ willingness (or not) to learn. We can deliver the perfect curriculum via perfect teachers led by perfect principals in perfect schools operating under perfect accountability standards and choice, but if the students have the attitude that “I refuse to learn, because it’s not cool, or it’s acting white,” they won’t learn very much. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

In fact, I might classify the cultural factors — whatever affects a student’s willingness to learn — as more important than anything we do with the schools themselves.  A motivated child can learn a lot on his or her own (say, by checking out books from the library) even if the school system is poorly run from top to bottom.

On the other hand, consider this alternative speech that Obama could have delivered.

Welcome to Mid-Riffs.com, a new weblog committed to providing non-partisan commentary about Arkansas public policy, as well as analysis of public policy in surrounding states and at the national level.  Beginning next week, this blog will be a place where a variety of contributors will offer everything from serious news and public policy critiques to not-so-serious commentary about life in the region. We also have a lot of interest and experience dealing with education policy. That said, no topic is off limits.

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