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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on five general themes:
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
The goal of President Bush’s No Child Behind Act (NCLB) is to hold public schools accountable for the education they provide our children. It’s an admirable – but costly – mission.
While federal spending on NCLB programs has skyrocketed, the law is largely ineffective as schools in several states – including Kentucky – are allowed to wiggle out of many of its requirements.
For example, more than 81 percent of Kentucky’s elementary schools were not held accountable for the performance of their learning-disabled populations in 2005. Nationwide, test scores of nearly 2 million minority students were not reported last year by states taking advantage of loopholes in the NCLB law.
NCLB requires schools failing to meet goals of adequate yearly progress for two consecutive years to offer low-income students the option of transferring to a better public school. Yet the U.S. Department of Education reported recently that less than 1 percent of the 3.9 million eligible students have taken advantage of the transfer options.
Not surprising, failing schools are not going overboard to make sure parents of students eligible to transfer know their NCLB rights. Federal education officials discovered that more than half of failing school districts fail to inform parents that their children are eligible to transfer until after the school year had already started. Such antics discourage conscientious parents concerned about disrupting their children’s lives.
Failing teachers are also escaping NCLB accountability. The department reported that no single state is on track to meet NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher” requirements in core areas by the July 1 deadline.
The failure of NCLB once again shows how government – even with the best of intentions – does not offer a suitable substitute for the private sector or, in the case of education, for parental choice.
Sources:
“Answer to NCLB Failure is School Choice” by Neal McCluskey, Cato Institute, May 24, 2006.
“How Long Must Children in Failing Schools Wait?” by Dan Lips, Heritage Foundation, April 2006.
Each month, the Kentucky Alliance Digest features a look at school choice from a parent’s perspective. This month’s testimony is from Munfordville resident Jennifer Milburn.
When my husband and I married in 2001, I became the full-time stepmother to a beautiful 5-year-old girl.
She had been receiving Braille instruction from a certified vision teacher in Meade County’s school district, so when we moved to Hart County, we assumed that quality instruction would continue. It is, after all, our rights as parents of a handicapped child to receive adequate instruction for her.
We didn’t realize it would take a year for the district to which we had moved to hire a vision instructor certified to teach her. During that year, the school’s special-ed teacher instructed our daughter using Braille to the best of her ability. While that teacher had the best of intentions, she had never been trained to teach Braille.
Finally, after her teacher’s insistence, the intervention of Kentucky School for the Blind and the persistence of me and my husband, administrators agreed to hire a certified vision teacher from a nearby county to work with her.
Had we been afforded the option of sending our daughter to another school from the beginning, she would have benefited from a year of quality instruction with a certified vision instructor. Instead, she had to make do with a good-hearted, yet unqualified, special-ed teacher.
After the vision instructor was hired as an employee of the district, more visually impaired children – who had previously not been served by the district – benefited from her instruction. It was fulfilling to know that our determination helped other families who apparently did not know their children – even though they are visually challenged – are entitled to quality instruction from a certified teacher.
Only as parents have alternatives to choose schools that best meet their children’s needs will Kentucky experience meaningful education reform. Such competition will result in rigorous improvement and excellence in our public schools. And our children will be better for it.
Parents interested in contributing their story can e-mail it to jwaters@bipps.org.
Milwaukee’s school-choice program is often noted as being the de facto standard for other voucher policies.
Its success has not escaped the attention of the city’s parents and political representatives, who want to make room for more of the city’s low-income children to attend schools that are the best fit for them. As a result, a law was recently passed that raises the city’s voucher program-enrollment cap from 15,000 to 22,500 students.
Increasing the enrollment cap will also produce more competition and force more poor-performing schools – both public and private – to improve or shut down. Milwaukee parents have already decided to close some of the worst schools in the city by simply choosing to enroll their children in better schools.
School-choice critics must cringe when they realize that even students do not buy into their arguments that offering families educational liberty does not destroy public education. Indeed, as Milwaukee eighth-grader Destiny Hatcher recently told a Christian Science reporter, vouchers offer children from low-income homes the opportunity to overcome their negative environments.
“At my old school, the environment I was in was the same outside the school and inside the school,” Hatcher said. “Here, the school’s in a bad neighborhood, but the environment in the school is really loving.”
Even kids themselves realize that if failing schools do not improve, they should be replaced with good schools that benefit children, their families and entire communities.
Sources:
“How Best to Improve School Productivity? School Choice!” by George Clowes. Capitalism Magazine, Dec. 26, 2001
“Milwaukee's lessons on school vouchers” by Amanda Paulson. Christian Science Monitor, May 23, 2006.
Many Kentuckians have mistaken notions that home schooling is a recent phenomenon or that the practice was forbidden in the past. Actually, home schooling existed long before our modern system of public education was created. And there has never been a law forbidding home schooling. All 50 states allow parents the choice of educating their children at home.
A vast majority of people were taught at home until compulsory school attendance was required in 1852 in Massachusetts. Early supporters of home schooling cited religious or philosophical differences with public schools.
After initially working to reform public education to no avail, writers like John Holt created a newsletter – “Growing Without Schooling” – as a forum for advising parents on how to home school legally.
One early home-schooling source was Baltimore’s Calvert Day School, which began providing a “curriculum-in-a-box” by mail order since in 1897. The school, which is still going strong, grew from 300 students within the first five years to more than 350,000 annually today. As a result, many other mail order or correspondence schools sprouted up through the years.
With the advent of the Internet, the curriculum resources are now virtually limitless for providing a strong, effective education at home. Whereas distance and numbers once isolated home schoolers, today’s students have support groups in most communities that provide how-to advice, resources and forums for activities.
Kentucky has 12 home-school groups listed on the “A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling Web site,” including Teaching Homes In Northern Kentucky (THINK) and the Bluegrass Home Educators.
Public opinion of home schooling has risen during the past several decades and remains a valid school choice to public schools and private schools that do not satisfy parent’s desires for their children’s education.
Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Sources:
“History of Homeschooling” by Helen Hegener, Home Education Magazine, May-June 2006.
“A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling Web site”
The Murray Ledger & Times recently reported that state Rep. Melvin Henley and Sen. Ken Winters hosted an education forum at the Calloway County Public Library sponsored by the Pritchard Committee for Academic Excellence.
According to the article, only a few of the 40 people in attendance were parents. Most of the audience consisted of school-board members, bureaucrats and teachers. As a result, it’s not surprising that there was little support expressed for school choice.
When Henley and Winters asked for supporters of school choice to raise their hands, only four members in the audience responded.
More parents must begin making their voices heard at such meetings if they want to have choices and a better education system for their kids. When parents fail to show up and speak out, education issues too often get hijacked by groups primarily looking out for their own advancement rather than what’s most beneficial for Kentucky’s children.
When conscientious parents don't show, then opponents of school choice, including labor bosses of teachers unions and bureaucrats, can spin their opposition against school choice while spending more of our hard-earned tax dollars on a failing public education system.
An even-better option would be for parents to organize, energize and mobilize other parents and concerned community leaders and hold their own forums, meetings and rallies in support of educational liberty. This would help return the focus to what’s best for our kids – not on making a poor school system look better.
Sources:
“An Educator's Journey” by Laura J. Swartley. Friedman Foundation, Sept. 23, 2005.
“Local legislators pledge efforts toward education” by Tom Berry, Murray Ledger & Times, Feb. 22, 2006.
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