You can make a difference right now - just follow the steps below!
- Fill out and sign the petition for your county or school district.
- Sign up to receive e-mail updates about school choice in Kentucky:
The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on five general themes:
Basic school choice information
The nation’s Capital City is learning the value of charter schools. When will Frankfort pass the same test?
More choices would allow parents to place their children in a school where a relationship built on trust allows learning-disabled students to receive a quality education and needed services.
Best practices from other states
Courageous parents in Florida are giving elected officials and teachers an ultimatum on school choice that hits close to home.
Parents, not the state, are responsible for what, how and where children learn.
Objections to school choice that form the misguided arguments against more educational alternatives.
School-choice opponents have put their eggs in a basket full of holes
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
Charter schools in the nation’s capital have come a long way in a decade. In fact, they are now poised to take over the entire district.
The Washington Post indicates that all schools in the District of Columbia may be charters in the near future. The newspaper reports that “more than 17,000 public school students – nearly one in four – have rejected the traditional system in favor of 51 independently run, publicly funded charter schools. That share is one of the largest in the nation and is expected to rise when six more charter schools open their doors this fall.”
That’s a long way from the two schools and 161 students that D.C.’s charter system educated a decade ago after a charter-school law was passed by Congress in 1996. Since then, not only have charters provided children from low-income homes with a better education, they have forced the district to take steps to improve failing schools.
Not everyone supports the possible “charterization” of D.C. schools. Superintendent Clifford B. Janey wants a moratorium on new charters, saying the schools were never meant to “replace a school district,” but merely to “add quality.”
However, parents seem encouraged by the growing popularity of charters in the district.
Sondra Phillips-Gilbert said they have provided her with great choices for her two children.
“I don’t have money for a private school,” she told the Post. “If you get rid of charter schools, you’re telling the poor children that they’re going to have to be locked up in this incompetent school district that doesn’t care about them or their parents.”
Kentucky currently has no charter-school law. Parents in D.C. view charter schools as a means of allowing their children a path to avoid poverty. Congress agrees. When will Kentucky’s policymakers finally see the value of this form of school choice?
Sources:
“The Future of D.C. Public Schools: Traditional or Charter Education?” by Lisa Montgomery and Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, Aug. 22, 2006.
“Frequently Asked Questions,” District of Columbia Charter School Board.
“1st City Charter School With Classical Focus Is Set to Open Today” by Theola Labbe, The Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2006.
Each month, the Kentucky Education Digest features a look at school choice from a parent’s perspective. This month’s testimony is 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.
Florida’s Supreme Court recently ruled that the state’s Opportunity Scholarship voucher program is unconstitutional. The court wrongly concluded that the state’s constitution does not permit such scholarships, which allowed parents to choose private schools for their children with state funds to follow.
Thankfully, parents in Florida didn’t just stand by when the state’s high court took away their educational liberty. Instead, they started a petition to change the Florida Constitution to guarantee universal school vouchers, but with a twist.
The Web site Schoolvoucherpetition.com calls for a state constitutional amendment with the following provisions: “All students in Florida are entitled to vouchers valued at 75% of the cost of a public school education. Students may attend any accredited school of their choice. Home school parents are to be reimbursed 50% for each home-schooled child.”
But the petition’s creators saved the best part for last: “If the Amendment is not passed all elected officials and schoolteachers must send their children to public schools.”
What’s a wealthy politician to do when confronted with a decision to offer educational liberty to all parents or lose his own right to school choice?
Similarly, many teachers in Kentucky are allowed to send their own children to the public school of the teacher’s choice, a level of choice that only the wealthiest parents can boast. These teachers and Kentucky’s politicians should consider whether it would be worth losing that option in order to keep other parents from receiving the same range of options.
Sources:
“With vouchers come new choices – and markets” by Matthew I. Pinzur, The Miami Herald, Aug. 6, 2006.
“War Against Vouchers,” by Andrew J. Coulson, Cato Institute
Kentucky parents who are considering home schooling their children should know that state law favors their cause.
Parents must simply advise the local school board that they will be home schooling their children. And even this requirement is not to ask permission, but rather to let the board know that these students are not truant. Boards do not approve curriculum or teaching methods.
Also, parents must consistently evaluate their children’s progress, ensure that core subjects are taught and keep attendance records to indicate that students meet state requirements for being “in school” for a certain number of hours. The Kentucky Department of Education has established procedures for determining if a student is actually “in school.”
Since Kentucky has no standardized testing or review of home-schoolers’ progress, critics who don’t understand home schooling express concerns about the state not knowing if home-schooled children are getting an adequate education.
This appears to be a logical concern. Who is making sure these children know the “right” things? How do they perform compared to other children? What kind of jobs will they be able to get if they don’t have the same educational experience?
Home-schooling students have answered many of these questions through their performance. They exhibit solid results in the workforce and are sought after by many universities. Their achievements indicate what can happen when parents, not the state, are responsible for their children’s education.
The state does have a legitimate interest in developing an educated workforce. But that concern does not supersede the rights of parents to determine how their children learn.
While there are basic subjects that must be mastered to achieve academic and employment success, what is learned in school is an infinitesimally small amount of the sum of human knowledge, history and literature.
Parents, not governments, should help children determine the “right” things for them to learn.
– Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Sources:
“Kentucky Home School Requirements & Information,” Kentucky Department of Education.
“Academic Statistics on Homeschooling” by J. Michael Smith and Michael P. Farris, Home School Legal Defense Association, Oct. 22, 2004.
“Home Schoolers in Ivy League Universities,” Home School Legal Defense Association, May 3, 2000.
On the surface, a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) seems to cast doubt on the value of school vouchers. Not surprisingly, opponents of school choice were quick to jump in and say: “See? We told you so!”
But a consideration of value was nowhere to be found in the NCES study. NCES researchers also omitted from their analysis the holy grail of value: per-pupil spending. The study gathered no data on per-pupil spending at public and private schools. Without knowing how much schools are spending, there is simply no way to determine their cost-effectiveness.
Harvard Kennedy School of Government researchers Paul E. Peterson and Elena Llaudet took a closer look at the numbers and found that the advantage of private schools is real, but also suggest that NCES is placing its faith in “questionable methodology.”
For example, Peterson and Llaudet found that the NCES study used unreliable indicators to control for poverty, including participation in federal Title I programs and in free-and-reduced school-lunch programs. Private schools are far less likely to participate in these programs, rendering the study’s conclusions grossly inadequate.
But even if private schools offered no strong academic advantage over public schools, why should that prohibit parents from having educational choices? No matter what the numbers say, the desires of parents should top of the list of priorities when it comes to the education and well-being of their children.
Sources:
“Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling” by Henry Braun, Frank Jenkins, and Wendy Grigg, National Center for Education Statistics, July 14, 2006.
“On the Public-Private School Achievement Debate” by Paul E. Peterson and Elena Llaudet, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Aug. 2, 2006.
You can make a difference right now - just follow the steps below!