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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on five general themes:
Basic school choice information
Dr. Milton Friedman chose school choice as his lasting legacy.
More choices would allow parents to place their children in a school where a relationship built on trust results in learning-disabled students receiving a quality education and needed services.
Best practices from other states
The best merit-pay policies will reward teachers based on the improvement demonstrated by their students … not just the latest test scores.
Home schooling allows for flexible schedules, curriculums and learning styles.
Objections to school choice that form the misguided arguments against more educational alternatives.
Is an arbitrary level of racial diversity in a school worth sacrificing choices for parents or quality education for children?
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
Dr. Milton Friedman, who died Nov. 15, earned the 1976 Nobel Prize and changed the way Americans think about many issues, including trade, unemployment and inflation. But his most important legacy will be his tireless fight to allow parents to choose the schools their children attend.
In his seminal work, “Capitalism and Freedom,” published in 1962, Friedman described his modest proposal that was considered radical at the time:
Governments could require a minimum level of schooling financed by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum they themselves provided on purchasing educational services from an “approved” institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions. The role of the government would be limited to insuring that the schools met certain minimum standards, such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to insure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards.
Last year, Friedman made the point more simply on the Charlie Rose Show:
If you want to subsidize anything, do you want to subsidize the producers of that thing or the consumers? … Suppose you want to subsidize food. Do you want to subsidize the grocery stores or do you want to subsidize the people who eat the food? Food stamps are a form of vouchers.
Today, 46 states have official statewide school-choice programs that allow parents to decide where their children attend school. Kentucky is not among them.
Kentucky should adopt a school-choice plan that allows parents to decide where children receive their education. At the very least, the commonwealth’s public-school establishment should engage the debate about the effectiveness of competition in our educational marketplace.
Sources:
“Milton Friedman,” Charlie Rose Show, Dec. 26, 2005.
Milton Friedman, “Capitalism and Freedom” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 85.
Each month, the Kentucky Alliance Digest features a look at school choice from a parent’s perspective. This month’s testimony is from from Louisville residents David and Betsy Gibbs.
Trust is something we all value – especially when it comes to those responsible for educating our children. It’s especially critical that parents of learning-disabled student be able to trust the school system their children attend.
Unfortunately, Kentucky’s education system has done little to deserve my trust.
Until we recently began home schooling our 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who has autism, the school district seemed more than willing to cash the large checks it received – money that was supposed to be used to provide her an education complete with the services required by her disability. Yet the system ignored her needs and our pleas for a proper evaluation to determine the best strategy for her education.
School personnel handed us a copy of our parental “rights.” However, I found it quite difficult to convince them that those rights actually mean something.
For instance, there is a regulation that allows parents to have an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) done for their child at public expense and without being required to state the reason for the action. But the school system ignored my IEE request for three months before the district’s special-education director denied approval for our chosen evaluator because he happened to live in California. The director ignored the fact that this expert had five separate degrees and 40 years of experience.
Unfortunately, our local school officials saw my child as an opportunity to get more funding. Once admitted into the system, they wanted to keep her happy, pair her up with a few “friends” and give her passing grades until she reached the 12th grade. And despite the fact that she was clearly frazzled and had tear-stained eyes when getting into the car at the end of the day, we would receive comments entered into her log book by the school’s staff that she had a “great day!”
Trust? Kentucky’s public-school system broke it with me the minute it began to see its own interests as being more important than our child’s needs.
Parents deserve choices to send their special-needs children to a school that they trust. Without such confidence, little hope exists for improving the education of Kentucky’s neediest children.
Parents interested in contributing their story can e-mail it to jwaters@bipps.org.
Not only is Florida setting the trend for the nation when it comes to school choice, it’s also becoming a leader in rewarding good teachers.
The Special Teachers Are Rewarded (STAR) program offers bonuses of 5 percent or more to teachers whose students’ gains on Florida’s state tests rank in the top-10 percent.
Teachers unions are fervently fighting the implementation of the program. However, it continues to move ahead, with the Florida Department of Education assisting local school districts in developing workable plans for objectively evaluating teachers’ performances.
Unions find it more difficult to oppose merit plans like the new STAR policy than they have past pay-for-performance ideas because it rewards improvement by students rather than their latest test scores. This gives teachers with previously low-performing students the incentive offered by financial gain to improve those children’s education.
Rewarding teachers whose students show legitimate improvement addresses unions’ objections that merit-pay plans fail to give teachers with academically challenged students already behind a legitimate chance of getting a raise.
Other pay-for-performance programs, including the Milken Family Foundation’s Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), offer opportunities for teachers to raise their salaries while remaining in the classroom instead of being lulled into higher-paying administrative positions. The TAP also provides incentives in the form of professional development and higher salaries to encourage teachers to specialize in hard-to-fill subject areas.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, whose state uses the TAP, praised it as “a vital tool for encouragement, professional growth, opportunity, and enhancement.”
Despite the formidable obstacles, Kentucky’s education system should implement its own plan to allow school districts to reward teachers who excel in the classroom. The primary beneficiary would be Kentucky’s students.
Who knows? Such a plan might even cause good teachers from states without such incentives to choose a Kentucky school as their next place of employment.
Sources:
“Fla. to Link Teacher Pay To Students’ Test Scores” by Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, March 22, 2006.
“Union Opposes Bonuses for Florida Teachers” by Jenny Rothenberg, School Reform News, April 1, 2006.
“Merit Pay for Teachers: Can Common Sense Come to Public Education?” by Robert Holland, Lexington Institute, October, 2005.
One of the most positive attributes of home schooling is the flexibility it offers parents in addressing their children’s needs.
Whereas students in traditional public-school settings may have more questions concerning a subject than teachers have time to answer, home-schooled children can stop the “teacher,” find the answers and learn at their own pace.
They can work longer in areas that interest them while accomplishing much more in a shorter amount of time than they otherwise might have in a traditional classroom setting. Home-schooled students also have the flexibility to spend more time working on concepts that are difficult to master.
Children do not all have the same learning style. When one method is not effective, home-schooled students can switch to a different system. Some parents choose a classical education while others may use a Montessori approach. Some may use unit studies while others choose a self-directed learning method.
And the curriculum choices are limitless. For example, the Robinson Curriculum utilizes a classical curriculum and combines it with a self-teaching method. And there are different curriculums available to match parents’ educational philosophies – everything from systems that teach from a religious perspective to different reading, math or science programs.
The positive effects of flexibility also provide the average home-schooled student with more time to pursue his or her own interests.
For some, this means a deeper concentration on a particular academic area. For others, it means the time needed to excel in athletics like ice skating or gymnastics. Home schooling has provided many Olympic hopefuls with a solid education while also allowing them the valuable practice time needed to excel in their sport. Still others just spend extra time being part of their family, participating in 4-H programs or community events.
Home schools are as flexible as the people who participate in them.
– Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Thanks to a persistent parent, the Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) misguided desegregation plan finally has the long-overdue attention of the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the center of the case is Crystal Meredith, whose request to transfer her son to a different school was denied because that school needed black rather than white students. The policy, meant to keep schools from becoming segregated, requires all JCPS schools to have a certain percentage of minority students.
Parents should approach this issue by asking: “Why should the government be able to dictate where my children go to school?” For Crystal Meredith, this is the key question. However, Jefferson County school leaders seem unwilling to openly discuss this issue.
If all parents in Jefferson County were allowed to choose where their children attend school, many of the arguments for and against race-based student assignments would simply evaporate.
A legitimate school-choice plan would allow JCPS parents to decide for themselves if their children should attend a neighborhood school or one that focuses on language skills or specializes in reading and math.
Proponents of race-based student assignments often claim the policies help poor minority parents. Yet these parents often pay a high price when forced to abide by desegregation plans.
Unlike wealthy families, poor parents often cannot afford to move to a different neighborhood and take advantage of better schools. As a result, they often are forced to send their children to school miles away and are unable to attend school functions, develop strong relationships with teachers and provide the kind of parental involvement necessary for children to succeed.
Racial integration is a laudable goal, but it should not be achieved at the expense of parental choice or well-being of JCPS students.
Sources:
“Justices hear arguments over JCPS’ policy” by James R. Carroll, Louisville Courier-Journal, Dec. 4, 2006.
“Court Reviews Race as Factor in School Plans” by Linda Greenhouse, New York Times, Dec. 5, 2006.
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