An open letter to concerned Kentucky parents and grandparents:

Thank you for becoming a charter member of a growing education-reform movement that prioritizes parents and children ahead of schools and administrators. This growing school-choice movement is a result of growing dissatisfaction with the quality of Kentucky’s public-education system.

The Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) was enacted in 1990 with the highest of hopes. Funded by the largest tax increase in Kentucky's history, this new reform promised to improve the future of our young people by ensuring they would never again be imprisoned in a failing public school.

Regrettably, while the promise of KERA may have improved a few schools, it has not delivered better across-the-board results into the classrooms of Kentucky’s public schools.

For example, while taxpayer-induced, per-pupil funding has more than doubled since 1990, student test scores remain stagnant and graduation rates still hover below the national average. As a result, parents have voted with their feet.

In the decade spanning 1990, when KERA began, and 2000, parents abandoned public schools for private-education settings at a higher rate experienced by any other state.

An emerging viewpoint among concerned Kentuckians reveals this. After 15 years of KERA experiments, parents should have access to education reform alternatives currently working in other cities and states.

The KERA emphasis on buildings, budgets and bureaucracies should, in considering the next series of reforms, become secondary to the individual education needs of the commonwealth’s parents and children.

To inspire and lead this new parent-driven movement, we have established the Kentucky Alliance for School Choice, and created a complementary Web site at www.kentuckyalliance.org.

Our goal is to make this Web site the destination of choice for concerned parents and their elected officials. With this growing body of knowledge, we hope they will be able to build a new consensus across the commonwealth toward a series of school choice reforms that truly fulfills the education needs of parents.

To do that, we need your input. Please help us understand what school choice means in your community.

For instance, some parents are concerned that their children are stuck in rural schools with no alternatives available. Other parents are finding that the learning environment in their neighborhood is destructive of a willing child’s ability to acquire a quality education. Still other parents are forced to pay for their children’s public education twice – once through property taxes and again by the decision to send their children to a private or parochial school.

Our main responsibility to this movement will be to search across the U.S. for reform policies and projects that are successfully meeting needs of parents. From this evolving dialogue, we’re convinced the next level of education reform in Kentucky will emerge.

To succeed, we will need to do more than merely explain how and why reforms are working. Instead, we must build a nucleus of concerned parents who will voice their opinions and express their desire for policies that support educational freedom.

To accomplish this, we have started a school-choice petition drive with a goal of collecting 100,000 signatures by Oct. 1. Please help us by both signing our petition at www.kentuckyalliance.org and by delivering five signed petitions from family, friends and colleagues so that this effort will multiply as quickly as possible.

We will deliver a copy of the signed petitions to lawmakers. Broad support for the petition will clearly convey why Kentucky parents are so dissatisfied with the state’s public-education system and the lack of choices.

Will you help us create a flood of signatures during the next few weeks to make this happen?

To keep you informed, we are attaching the first edition of our new monthly Kentucky Alliance for School Choice Digest, which addresses different types – and economic benefits of – school choice. Future digests will include testimonies from parents as well as answers to objections about school choice and other relevant information.

This alliance exists for the purpose of creating more opportunities for our children and future generations. Your involvement will determine the extent to which this movement succeeds.

Please feel free to contact us in any way you feel appropriate.