If cataclysmic warnings about LEARNS Act provisions seem to ring a bell, it's not your imagination. It's history, and you've heard it all before.

Just about every time reform ideas have been proposed to improve education performance deficiencies, the public school bureaucracy goes into apocalyptic opposition mode.

Borrowing the inimitable words of Yogi Berra, it's déjà vu all over again. See if these examples from the Arkansas track record sound familiar.

When mandatory teacher competency testing was passed in 1983, the Arkansas Education Association went ballistic. Predictions of disaster included crippling teacher shortages and irreparable damage to morale. Lawsuits were filed and charges of racism were leveled.

When school choice was first proposed in 1989, establishment coalitions predicted dire consequences for public schools. Allowing inter-district transfers would undo integration gains and bankrupt rural school budgets, they warned ominously.

When independent charter schools were authorized in 1999, the education bureaucracy foretold fearsome scenarios of parallel systems, instructional quality decline and "cherry-picking" of students (because charters wouldn't have to take all comers like public schools do) leading to financial ruin of public schools.

It's also a chronicle of complacency, rather than innovation.

Arkansas has rarely been an early adopter, thanks to education establishment pushback every time an opportunity arose.

Teacher tenure started falling out of favor early this century. Arkansas had to wait until 2023 for LEARNS legislation to repeal the misnamed Teacher Fair Dismissal Act.

Leading reform states started banning political labor union organizations from using state payroll software as their own collection agencies in 2011 and 2012. Gov. Sarah Sanders finally got our law changed in 2023.