The national media has a few pieces that speak to issues being debated in Arkansas (and I’m sure elsewhere).
New School Buildings
Arkansas, like many states, believes that it urgently needs to spend an enormous sum (more than $1 billion in Arkansas) to improve school facilities. I’m sure that there are schools in Arkansas that are desperately in need of repairs and replacement, but the need for new school facilities is greatly exaggerated. The obsession with shiny, new buildings is greatest in my hometown of Fayetteville, where folks covet the mansion-like schools that have recently been built in nearby Springdale and Bentonville.
But Jay Mathews had a column in the Washington Post yesterday that observed: “Great buildings don’t make great schools. It might be better if we spent our money on principals and teachers who inspire, who don’t take lethargy or resentment for an answer. Put educators like that in the rickety buildings we have, and stand back.” Mathews wrote a book reviewing the best high schools in the US and “was astonished at how bad some of the buildings were.” In the end he agreed with the teachers in those excellent schools: “It is not the building, but the teaching, that makes a difference.”
Fayetteville would do well to take some of the $92 million it was considering spending on a new high school (and why it costs so much is a topic for another day), and devote it wisely to teacher and principal salaries. I emphasize wisely because across-the-board pay raises without changing the current structure will almost certainly make no difference. Teachers are not under or over-paid. They are just paid incorrectly because the pay does nothing to attract, reward, or retain excellent teaching.
District Consolidation
The major education reform strategies championed by former governor Mike Huckabee was the consolidation of smaller school districts. Outgoing Senator Jim Argue has even floated the idea of consolidating down to 75 county-wide school districts.
Recently I’ve questioned consildation as a productive reform, suggesting that unless we want our schools to imitate county-wide districts in Los Angeles or Miami, consolidation is not the answer.
Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Los Angeles is taking steps to break-up their giant school district.
(edited to correct number of counties in AR)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I should add that Fayetteville was going to get something like $50 million of the $92 million for a new school from the sale of the existing school property to the adjacent University of Arkansas. Now that the university has withdrawn its offer, there seems little chance of building a new high school. But the district could think about devoting some of the $40 million or so that it was going to have to raise to build a new school to salaries (WISELY).
Regarding consolidation to the county level: 1) Arkansas has 75 counties, not 71, and 2) none of the counties in Arkansas is remotely similar in size to the examples you mention (LA and Miami). Those two district aren’t just large, they are humongous. If you consolidated the entire state into a single district, it probably wouldn’t enroll as many students as Los Angeles, and it would take about 80% of the state to equal Miami-Dade. It doesn’t seem like county districts in Arkansas would be much at risk of imitating either.
Thanks for the comment, PodunkS. And sorry for the typo. There are 75 counties in Arkansas. My point, which is developed a bit more in the Dem-Gaz op-ed linked in the post, is that there are educational diseconomies of scale. Bigger districts tend to have worse educational outcomes. For an example of research on this see http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3259476.html .
AR counties are not be as big as LA or Miami and may not be as bad educationally if they were districts, but there are cautionary lessons about consolidation to be found in the experience of big districts.
If Arkansas really did spend ONE BILLION DOLLARS on school construction, I wonder how much of the money would go to the schools that actually need repairs, as opposed to building the educational equivalent of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere (schools to noone?) – big new funding for school construction opens up big new opportunities for pork distribution in a field that’s normally less infested with it than most (since school construction typically requires a bond issue or some such).