KY General Assembly Dismembering Public Schools

Eliminate basic standards for what we teach our children.

Scrap rules preventing school boards from hiring their idiot nephews to teach.

bibble!  Lots n lots n lots uh bibble!

And that's before they hand billions of Kentucky tax dollars to private corporations and freakazoids to make a profit not teaching our kids.

In 1990, Kentucky progressives finally forced the then-Democratic General Assembly to pass sweeping education reform.  It wasn't perfect, but as the 21st century approached, it dragged the Commonwealth's medieval school system screaming and kicking into the the 20th century.

At a time of incessant alarms about the need to revamp American education, one state has actually done it -- Kentucky, where a landmark court ruling six years ago produced the most comprehensive overhaul of public education the nation has ever seen.

The 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA, has produced almost everything critics of American education call for: higher standards, more money, fairer allocation of resources, new curriculums, more creative teaching, better counseling, improved technology and a philosophy that acknowledges the myriad influences outside the classroom that affect learning.

 What KERA did not do, and why it has failed to correct the severe inequities in Kentucky's public education, is the one and only thing that works:  Investing massive amounts of money in eradicating poverty.  And overturning the property tax funding mechanism that gives rich counties more than they need and leaves poor counties with nothing.

Eliminating basic education standards will not solve either poverty or inequity.

Hiring everybody's unemployable relatives won't solve either poverty or inequity.

And forcing bibble down kids' throats will make both poverty and inequity worse.

Confiscatory taxes on the rich and corporations, equalizing funding for all counties, setting real standards for content and teachers and banning religion are our only hope.

The repugs running the legislature and executive branch have incarcerated that hope and are torturing it to death right now.