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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on four general themes:
Basic school choice information
High court rules in favor of mother who wanted choice.
Best practices from other states
Merit pay gets an unlikely ally: teachers.
Home-schooled students, well-adjusted kids
Answering objections to school choice
Does school-district size matter?
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of a Louisville woman who wanted her son to attend a neighborhood school but was denied that choice based on her son’s race.
Attorneys for Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) argued the school system needs a race-based assignment plan for students to develop a diverse academic environment conducive to minority student achievement. This argument came despite the plan’s cost to individuals who might prefer a school other than one assigned by bureaucrats. The court ruled 5-4 that Jefferson County didn’t make its case.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “government action dividing people by race is inherently suspect because such classifications promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility.”
JCPS officials are loath to admit that their policies have arbitrarily placed standards of racial integration above school preferences of individual parents. And the plan’s academic impact on minority students remains suspect. Based on minority student test scores and graduation rates, it’s difficult to conclude that the plan has worked out well for those students.
If the chief concern of JCPS officials is to ensure a quality education for minority and low-income children, an easy solution exists: Give financially strapped parents the first pick of schools.
Voucher programs and other school-choice options often discriminate in favor of minority and low-income children. For instance, Cleveland’s voucher program shows the value of choices given to a community’s low-income population.
Jefferson County faces a choice to achieve a standard of equality in education. Alexis De Tocqueville laid out that choice clearly when he said, “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: ‘equality.’ But notice the difference; while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
If Jefferson County school administrators want poor and minority students to get a better education, give them liberty, not another top-down, government-directed solution.
Sources:
“Beyond Brown” by Andrew J. Coulson, New York Post, July 2, 2007.
“Divided court rejects school diversity plans” by Bill Mears, CNN, June 28, 2007.
Student achievement as a key component to teacher pay should be a no-brainer.
But this isn’t the case in Kentucky – unlike other states where the concept of awarding bonuses and pay raises based on student achievement gains significant “currency.”
In Minnesota, a science teacher once skeptical of incentive programs based on student performance became a self-described “salesman” for it.
The New York Times reports: “Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.”
Kentucky’s pay scale hinges almost solely on the number of years teachers serve in the classroom and certifications and degrees they obtain. Education and union officials say teachers’ pay bumps are based on the kinds of achievements shown to increase student performance. Adding pay based on certifications that might improve student performance is no replacement for increasing compensation as a result of actual gains made by students.
Kentucky lags well behind on this issue. But the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence has made some overtures. Robert F. Sexton, chair of the Prichard Committee, admits Kentucky’s system of quality teacher retention is “broken.”
Sexton wrote in the committee’s newsletter that, “The way we find people, hire people, reward them, keep them in teaching and develop them is nonfunctional to achieve the goals we want.”
Unfortunately, no concrete proposals for linking student performance increases to salary bumps and bonuses have gained traction here as in other states. Kentucky should adopt a system of making sure teachers know that the value they deliver to students helps determine a teacher’s worth.
Sources:
“Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers” by Sam Dillon, New York Times, June 18, 2007.
“New Teacher Pay System Draws Interest,” Perspectives, Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Winter 2006.
Many parents who are dissatisfied with the poor quality of public education have decided to take matters into their own hands. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of home-schooled students grew by 29 percent between 1999 and 2003.
Concerned parents have good reason to home school their kids. Home-schooled children score an average of 80 points higher on SAT results than kids in public schools and 70 points higher than children attending private schools.
During the 1980s, most home schooling families were white Christians. Now, parents of all different races, religions and socioeconomic backgrounds are realizing they have a viable alternative to poorly performing public schools. Blacks now comprise the fastest-growing segment of families who home-school their children.
There are many good reasons why the popularity of home schooling – already at an all-time high – is growing.
For one, home-schooled children are in demand by prestigious colleges and universities. College administrators know that children taught at home generally are high achievers and will be among the best students on their campuses.
An increasing number of Kentuckians also are now home schooling, which is one of the few alternatives to our state’s mediocre public-education system. Kentucky lacks school-choice legislation that allows for the creation of charter schools, open-enrollment policies or voucher options enjoyed by parents in most other states.
The popularity of home schooling in Kentucky – 12,075 children were home-schooled in our state during 2004, according to the Courier-Journal – indicates that parents are losing confidence in our state’s public-school system.
Critics argue that children taught at home are somehow not “normal” and have trouble adapting socially. The evidence says otherwise. Home-schooled kids have generally higher test scores and are at least as prepared for college and life in general as kids in the public-school system.
– Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
School-district consolidation often gets sold as a means to save administrative and other costs.
During the past 50 years, the number of school districts in the United States fell dramatically. In Kentucky, state officials have threatened to consolidate a high-performing Eastern Kentucky school district – Jackson Independent – with Breathitt County, its lesser-performing counterpart.
Achieving savings appears among the reasons offered in favor of consolidation. But does consolidation always reap savings?
Probably not, said the Cato Institute’s Andrew J. Coulson. His new research conducted for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that school-district consolidations in Michigan might actually yield higher per-pupil spending.
It might be reasonable to expect that per-pupil spending would continue to fall as school districts increased in size due to economies of scale. But Coulson’s study found that costs followed a “checkmark” pattern: Spending per-pupil declined as school district size increased to a point but then began to rise once again.
Coulson writes: “Public schooling’s incentive structure appears to encourage district officials to maximize their budgets. To improve the efficiency of Michigan’s education system, this problematic incentive structure would have to be replaced with one in which school officials are instead rewarded for simultaneously controlling costs and maintaining or improving quality. This, in turn, suggests the need for incentives similar to those prevailing in the private sector, in which service providers thrive only if they meet their clients’ needs at competitive prices.
“The most promising route to higher efficiency in education thus appears to be the injection of market forces such as competition and parental choice. A policy of choice for parents and increased freedom and competition for educators is also consistent with America’s tradition of local and parental control over schooling, something that cannot be said for state-mandated district mergers or breakups.”
In other words, in order to get school districts to the right size, avoid a mandate-driven approach and allow parents to determine where their children attend school.
For Kentucky, the consequences of district consolidation could be dire. Parents will lack pre-existing choices when school-choice initiatives do come to the state. And the students currently in the system might lose the ability to easily transfer from one district to another.
Sources:
“School District Consolidation, Size and Spending: an Evaluation” by Andrew J. Coulson, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, May 22, 2007.
“Webster schools merger likely” by Victoria Marty, The (Henderson) Gleaner, July 21, 2006 (no link available).
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