Legislators Find Way to Make KY Public Education Worse

Count on Kentucky to adopt the latest educational fad - after it's been proven a failure.

The idea of charter schools has long failed to gain traction in Kentucky — but that could be changing.

Two bills to authorize charter schools have been filed for the coming General Assembly, and the Kentucky Department of Education is currently studying the pros and cons.

Supporters say momentum is building because without such legislation, Kentucky could lose out on up to $200 million in federal stimulus money aimed at education reform and innovation.

“I think it’s the year for us,” said state Rep. Brad Montell, R-Shelbyville, who announced Monday that he had filed a bill to allow the creation of state-funded charters dubbed “public school academies,” which he said would provide an alternative to failing schools.

Pioneered in Minnesota in 1992, charter schools are independent public schools that get taxpayer funding but aren’t held to many of the rules and regulations that apply to regular schools.

In exchange for more autonomy, charter schools must meet academic goals and are held accountable by a sponsor, usually a school board, a state or a university, which can cancel the contract if academic goals aren’t met — and close the school.

Rep. Stan Lee, R-Lexington, has already filed charter-school legislation, and both lawmakers said there appears to be a growing willingness among colleagues to consider it.

Gov. Steve Beshear, asked Monday if he supported charter schools, said “all the options are on the table.”

Waste of oxygen Montell's sponsorship should be more than enough proof that this is not a bill members of the reality-basec community want anything to do with, but if you need more, in June of this year, a national study of thousands of charter schools in more than a dozen states found:

A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.

Don't be fooled by charter school bamboozlement. Charter schools are the direct descendants of the "white academies" established in the 1970s to keep children of racists out of integrated public schools.

Only worse, because charter schools demand taxpayer support, stealing scarce public education dollars away from real public schools to support what are actually private schools unaccountable to the taxpayers that fund them.

While individual charter schools may have admirable goals and well-meaning teachers and administrators, the true goal of charter school legislation is to starve public education of funding, undermine public education's mission and make it impossible for public education - the non-sectarian, secular, diverse public education that is the foundation of our democracy - to survive.