Month: July 2021

With little fanfare, today Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signed HB 178, which prohibits governors from doing what Beshear himself did in December 2019 when he fired me and the ten other members of the Kentucky Board of Education for purely partisan reasons, quickly initiating the resignation of then-Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis. HB 178 is an historical development that restores some of the political independence of KBE originally intended by the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990.

HB 178, sponsored by Republican Representative Steve Sheldon and passed by the House and Senate, stipulates that while governors will retain their authority to appoint members of the Kentucky Board of Education, going forward governors may not “reorganize” KBE under KRS 12.028, the statute Beshear used to justify his removal of every sitting KBE member on his first day in office, fulfilling a campaign promise. The law also says that going forward, KBE’s membership must reflect the political, gender, and ethnic make up of the state’s registered voters.

Beshear’s current appointees to KBE may retain their seats until the ends of their terms, and may be reappointed only to the extent that they meet the demographic requirements of the new law (presently there is not a single Republican on the board, so at least half will be ineligible to serve another consecutive term).

Beshear, who owed his gubernatorial victory in 2019 to the rabid support of the state’s education establishment and the failed leadership of his predecessor Gov. Matt Bevin, had turned KBE into a meaningless political football. Bevin’s appointees to KBE were openly supportive of school choice and education accountability. In April 2018, on the day after Bevin statutorily obtained a majority of appointees to KBE, new board members controversially forced the resignation of popular education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt and replaced him with Wayne Lewis, a conservative professor of education and policy advisor to the Cabinet for Education and Workforce Development. Lewis shared KBE’s concern for accelerating student achievement and was critical when teachers initiated an illegal work stoppage when protesting potential pension and school choice reform measures.

These positions caused the education establishment to put a major target on the backs of Lewis and members of KBE (whose most important duty is to hire the commissioner of education). On the campaign trail, Beshear promised his education cronies that on his first day in office he would remove KBE members who could then arrange the removal of Wayne Lewis. And that is precisely what he did.

Members of KBE believed then, and believe now, that Beshear’s actions were illegal under both state and federal law (see the links below for more details on the legal arguments at stake). The architects of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which established the KBE as it was structured for the next 29 years, intended the education system to be largely shielded from the ever-shifting winds of partisan politics. While the Governor could appoint like-minded members to KBE, they would serve staggered terms and would hire the commissioner of education, operating independently from the governor and other political officials.

Beshear’s unprecedented removal of board members prior to the ends of their terms and for blatantly partisan reasons destroyed KBE’s independence. Unless courts or the legislature took action, from then on the commissioner and members of KBE could be assured that if they took positions unsatisfactory to the governor, their jobs would be in jeopardy. HB 178 finally assures that what Beshear did in December 2019 may not be done again.

Beshear had previously hinted that he would support such a measure as long as he could keep his sitting KBE appointees. The bill also codifies the creation of a non-voting teacher and student member of KBE, which Beshear had previously done by executive order. 

Speaking for myself, I thank Governor Beshear for finally doing the right thing and re-establishing KBE’s autonomy. And I am especially grateful to Rep. Sheldon and members of the General Assembly for passing this law and sending it to his desk. Ultimately, this is what the ousted members of KBE were fighting for in our efforts, supported by the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, to legally resist Beshear’s executive order removing us from office.

All of us knew we would not be reappointed under a Beshear administration at the ends of our terms; that was the way the law worked and we respected that. But for the sake of the state’s K-12 education system, we wanted KBE’s independence, regardless of who the governor or board members were, to be respected. Today, it finally was.

After years of hard work on the part of lawmakers, educators, and parent activitists, Kentucky has finally passed a school choice law. HB 563 was vetoed by Gov. Andy Beshear, but last night both houses of the state legislature overrode his veto and the bill will go to Secretary of State Michael Adams’ desk for his signature and will become law. Kentucky is one of the last states in the nation to adopt a law addressing school choice.¹

What the law does

HB 563 includes two major provisions. First, the law makes it easier for families to send their children to a public school that is outside of the district where they reside. Previously all such moves were carefully dictated by inter-district transfer agreements that gave larger districts an outsized advantage, allowing them to bar the door to keep a certain number of students from leaving each year. The new law creates greater balance by giving students access to any school with an open seat, and state education dollars will flow with them to their new public school.

The second provision of HB 563 will help establish education opportunity accounts (EOA’s). These privately-funded scholarships will assist families with incomes up to 175% of the federal free-and-reduced lunch eligibilty amount to access a wide variety of services, including partial or full tuition, in both public and nonpublic schools. A non-refundable tax credit encourages donations to these accounts, with priority given tothe most needy families.

Predictably, the state’s education establishment and their political allies fought ferociously to stop this modest school choice proposal from becoming law. They predicted the utter demise of public education as we know if we allowed students to have a choice in where they attend school and claimed that HB 563 would steal funds from under-resourced public schools, especially if they go to an “unaccountable” nonpublic school.

The truth about school choice

These claims are all demonstrably false. Eighteen states have some form of EOA program similar to the one in HB 563. Twenty-three states have some form of mandatory open public school enrollment. Not only has public education not been destroyed in those states, many of those states enjoy higher levels of academic achievement across a range of outcomes (see Florida, for example). 

Likewise, EOA’s encouraged by tax credits in other states have shown to be revenue neutral. The amount of the tax credit is offset by reductions in state education spending when students choose a nonpublic school. But even if one thinks a tax credit “costs” the public money (by letting people have more of their hard-earned income to spend on some other worthy cause?), the total amount of the credit in HB 563 amounts to a paltry 0.2% of the state’s entire education budget. Meanwhile, this year Governor Beshear and many members of the legislature endorsed $175 million worth of tax credits for movie production and hotel renovations. Do these other credits not “steal money” from public education?

Forgetting the hypocrisy here, the answer is actually “no.” School choice policies of any kind do not “steal” money from public schools because no school should have a monopoly on its students. We don’t look at any other type of public good in this way, even when it is publicly funded (and EOA’s under this law are not).

For example, in my home city of Bowling Green we have two hospitals. No one ever says we are “stealing” money from Greenview Hospital when a Medicare patient chooses to use her benefit at the Medical Center. We recognize that the public good of Medicare is nevertheless a highly personal benefit and the patient should have some choice of provider. The same goes for Pell grants, federally-subsidized student loans, and the GI Bill, all important benefits that allow the beneficiary to choose the education institution that best fits their needs.

Fund students, not systems

The same should be true in P-12 education. We should fund students, not systems. The bottom line is that the defenders of the education status quo simply do not want to have to compete for students. They want to maintain their monopoly because they value the dollars those students represent more than they value the principle that every family, regardless of income, should have some choices in where their kids attend school.

And what of nonpublic schools being “unaccountable?” Such schools actually face the ultimate kind of accountability – if they cannot provide a service that pleases their constituent families, they have to close their doors. No additional accountability measures on nonpublic schools should even be discussed as long as EOA’s are privately funded, and no traditional public school representative should ask otherwise until they are also ready to face closure if they can’t draw sufficient students to keep their doors open.

The fight for school choice will go on

HB 563 is a major victory for Kentucky families. But the fight for school choice will go on in several ways. As we know from the experience of other states, the education establishment will fight tooth and nail to keep families from actually exercising their options and will resist any expansion in choice with all their might.

It is highly likely that Governor Beshear or his allies will file a lawsuit to stop implementation of the new law. They will claim that Kentucky’s Constitution, which requires the legislature to fund and support a system of “common schools,” and which prohibits public dollars from going to faith-based schools, makes EOA’s illegal.

This is a ridiculous argument that will be ulimately be rejected in court. EOA’s do not utilize public money and lawsuits from multiple other states have upheld them. Likewise, EOA’s under HB 563 can be used by students in both public and nonpublic schools (for example, EOA’s can offset costs related to dual credit classes, occupational therapy, and a host of other services that could benefit public schools students). Kentucky’s system of “common schools” is alive and well and is not threatened by school choice. But the law’s implementation may be delayed by frivolous lawsuits filed by the defenders of the status quo.

Secondly, HB 563 includes a five-year sunset provision. Without future action by the state legislature, the students who will soon benefit from EOA’s and public school choice may no longer have those options in five years. The education establishment will endorse that injustice, and choice proponents will have to fight for those students’ interests.

Finally, the current version of the law only allows EOA’s to be used for students in the state’s eight largest counties. I’m delighted for those students (at one point a version of the bill cut out nonpublic students from EOA’s entirely). But this leaves behind untold thousands of students in smaller communities who could benefit from the scholarships provided under the EOA provision. Lawmakers should consider expanding the law to include other counties; perhaps seeing the success of students in the first wave of the law’s implementation will help convince them.

Courageous lawmakers: David versus Goliath

I want to end with a word of thanks to the brave members of the state legislature who endured a barrage of attacks and misinformation about HB 563 from the small but vocal minority who opposed it. The bill barely passed the House of Representatives, with many Republicans from rural districts siding with Governor Beshear and the KEA.

Polling data has made it clear that the majority of Kentuckians – including educators – support school choice. Lawmakers know that the KEA and 120 Strong and many superintendents do not speak for most of the teachers and employees who actually work in the districts. Republicans even know these groups will never endorse them, no matter how often they vote against families in favor of the interests of the education establishment.

But it is hard to have to defend yourself against the criticisms and lies being launced against the supporters of school choice. There is a price you pay for taking on the most powerful lobby in Frankfort. I know personally. When Gov. Beshear illegally removed me and other members of the Kentucky Board of Education on his first day of office in December 2019, it was clearly because of our support for school choice. 

I’m grateful for House Speaker David Osborne, bill sponsor Rep. Chad McCoy, Rep. Regina Huff who changed her vote to override the Governor’s veto and allow HB 536 to become law, and every member of the House who supported this bill against loud criticisms from the establishment. I’m especially grateful to members of the Kentucky Senate, including President Robert Stivers and bill sponsor Sen. Ralph Alvarado, for their long-standing support of school choice. The Senate has been rock-solid in its advocacy of this issue. I’m personally grateful to my own state senator Mike Wilson, one of Kentucky’s first champions of school choice, for his continued courage and support.

It is brave of these men and women to endure the attacks they will surely face for doing the right thing. And they will have to remain strong because Goliath is not going away. He’s only knocked down at the moment. The fight for school choice will go on. Let’s celebrate this victory today, but be ready to battle on for Kentucky’s families tomorrow.

¹Kentucky’s 2017 charter school law never included a permanent funding mechanism and therefore Kentucky does not have charter schools and never will until that is fixed.

One interesting point about Florida’s improvements involves the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which only reports state-level results for public schools. During the years that Florida expanded choice, it’s public school NAEP results rose in both Grade 4 and Grade 8 math and reading, rather dramatically so for Grade 4. In contrast, choice-poor Kentucky (until now) saw much less progress on NAEP, adding more evidence that choice does not destroy public schools. I have several blogs on this at www.bipps.org/blog.

Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents is probably the most important book I have read in the last year. Today The Chalkboard Review published my essay on the lessons of Live Not By Lies for educators, students, and parents of students in K-12 schools. Dreher “warns of a ‘soft totalitarianism’ slowly creeping into American culture,” I wrote. “Unbeknownst to many, K-12 schools are actually the front lines for this effort to impose a radical ideology on society by making young people cheerleaders for the totalizing worldview of critical theory, or at least to make them too afraid to speak up against it.”

My essay is not technially a review of Live Not By Lies (I link to a good review of the book’s overall thesis) but an application for what it means in the world of K-12 education. 

Anyone who is even casually observing primary and secondary education can see the growing presence of soft totalitarianism, often dressed in the noble-sounding garb of “anti-racism” and the war over what gets taught – and how – in our schools.

Let me be clear: there are long-standing racial disparities in education that should be of grave concern to everyone. Achievement gaps and lopsided student discipline data based on race are genuine problems that deserve serious, collective investigation. The lack of diversity among the teaching force probably aggravates these problems in ways we’ve not yet begun to understand. 

But as I wrote last year for the Imaginative Conservative, the presence of these inequalities does not mean they are explained wholly by racism and oppression. Certainly, bias on the part of educators or within the society at large may be a contributing factor. But only an ideological fanatic could conclude that eliminating racism (a worthy but entirely unrealistic goal) would solve all of these problems.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what is happening in many of our institutions, and educators, students, and their parents need to be prepared to push back when it comes to their school. 

Teachers and students should refuse to take part in any “diversity,” “equity,” or “anti-racist” initiatives that treat the assumptions of critical theory as truth, rather than simply as one perspective on a complex set of issues. When they are able, educators, parents, and students should challenge these initiatives openly, exposing their underlying ideology for the extremist, anti-American, anti-liberal agenda that it is. School communities should be made aware of the presence of these programs and demand their school boards provide fair and reasonable oversight.

At the same time, educators must model strategies for taking racial inequalities in education seriously. We can ask ourselves hard, demanding questions about our own internal biases and practices that may have a disparate effect on different groups of students without succumbing to the totalizing assumptions of critical theory. We stand to actually generate far more effective long-term strategies for addressing disparities in this way.

Read the whole thing here. And follow the work of No Left Turn in Education, a national organization with chapters springing up in many states, that is dedicated to resisting totalizing ideologies in K12 education and empowering educators and their students to “live not by lies.”

To the Honorable Mayor Todd Alcott, and the Bowling Green City Council,

I am writing to add further comment to the opinion that I expressed in person on Tuesday July 6^th.   The idea of adding a homeless coordinator position to the City seems like a trivial thing to oppose.  It’s just $50,000 plus benefits, and in our tit for tat world, I understand entirely Dana Beasley-Brown’s statement that her side should get this position given that your side added a position to coordinate the downtown revitalization.  For the record I oppose both, what exactly are we going to hire someone to do next? Coordinate street repairs? Lost cell phone recovery? Ah – how about codes enforcement? 

Wait you say – we already have folks that do those things?   My point exactly.  We have folks that do these things, and not just in city government – but in the private sector.   We have a codes enforcement division, we have a police department, we have departments that handle roads and infrastructure.  Why on earth would we add a position to coordinate efforts on behalf of the private organizations that already do this?    I can only come up with one reason…   one we find to often in our government.   When tackling an issue, we assume everyone else involved doesn’t know what they are doing, and they need someone to tell them what to do.    I say – that this is simply not the case.

Let’s take a look at the problem.  

First – we have to define the issue – a homeless person is – specifically someone who does not have shelter – nothing more, nothing less.

Second  – according to this definition; using the K count provided by the Kentucky Housing Corp.  there are roughly 180 homeless people in Bowling Green, this is up from 140 in 2014.   We could debate this count, but even if we double that number to 360 – it’s still less than ¼ of one percent of our population – or 1 in 400 people…    a very small portion of the population for which to dedicate a full time employee.

Third let’s look at the causes of homelessness

According to HUD there are five principal causes of homelessness:

1. lack of affordable housing
2. unemployment
3. poverty
4. mental illness and substance abuse and the lack of needed services.

Finally let’s discuss each one in detail:

1. Housing the poor is a key element in any plan for dealing with homelessness; it starts with temporary shelter, and moves to interim shelter, and then low income housing.   I have already heard that local builders are very “interested” in discussing such efforts… but don’t seem to be very motivated with regard to actually bringing their efforts to bear on the issue.   I am sure this is frustrating…   a coordinator for the homeless is not the answer.  The key here is that the city already has a lever if they desire to pull it – zoning and development can significantly impact the amount of low income housing – as can the downtown re-development effort – through land and tax grants – similar to what has been done to bring development to downtown, other blighted areas could be addressed  (we have tons of empty tobacco warehouses….  Rezoning these in advance of development efforts would help that cause).  The key here is that there are already departments and positions within the city that are responsible for these activities – adding another layer of bureaucracy won’t solve the problem.

2. Unemployment –  Jobs are not an issue in Bowling Green;  there are hundreds of open positions…. There are businesses begging folks to walk in and start work. There is a component of unemployment that has to do with behavioral outcomes (Drugs, criminal history, mental health, tragedy, physical disabilities), but there are at least three non-profits who deal with folks who are not employment ready, and they don’t need the city to coordinate their efforts.

3. Poverty –  Poverty is an interesting challenge, and it often has more to do with negative outcomes than it does actual assets.  EG – it’s not a money equation, it’s a life skills one.   Having two children and being divorced creates a challenge,  bankruptcy creates a challenge, children out of wedlock creates a challenge…  Health issues and job loss create challenges. We can, and should build a safety net for folks in our community facing these challenges – but it needs to be a hand up; not a hand out.   The path through these services in Bowling Green is fairly well documented, and as I have heard from a number of these organizations, they work hard to help people understand not just how to access the services, but how to avail themselves of the services offered by other organizations in town.  There are ways the city can better communicate with these organizations, but that is through community outreach with the police department, the fire department – the folks on the ground who already interact with these folks on a daily basis…  they need to be empowered through policy to deal with panhandling, and to route the mom who just lost her apartment  to a homeless shelter.  To make undesirable behaviors well understood, but show compassion for those in need.  They don’t need yet another bureaucrat telling them how to do their jobs.

4. Mental illness and substance abuse – These are one of the largest vectors for homelessness in Kentucky.   Our state’s struggles with this issue are well documented, and there are two organizations locally tasked with assitsing these populations, the Barren river health department, and the Warren county health department.   It is their responsibility to deal with the outcomes of mental illness and substance abuse;  a single coordinator’s position isn’t going to make a dent in the challenges we have in Bowling Green with these issues (of which a very small portion are homeless).   The homeless component of this population is best addressed through existing public servcies, our very capable police department, and those organizations serving the homeless.   Improving communications between these three groups is important, but that communications won’t come from outside of these organizations, it will come through policy changes, open discussion, and leadership.

For every one of the issues addressed above, there are already organizations and city / county / state departments that have responsibility to address these needs, in many cases redundancy upon redundancy.  A coordinator to address these issues would obviously need a great deal of authority… If it were simply a question of bringing folks together, the issue would have been solved long ago by the organizations that currently work to resolve this issue…  So where would this authority reside?   Who would this person report to?   What policy set would they govern?  Does this line of discussion start to make senes?  it’s a problem that can’t be solved in this manner, a coordinator isn’t the answer, it would just be a waste of taxpayer dollars.  Something we already have too much of in our state and federal governments, let’s not start it here too.  

Many Thanks,

Eric A. Tuttle, CISSP