In late 2022, the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down a Republican-backed law that would have given state tax credits to individuals who donate to private school scholarship funds. The court said the law violated the Kentucky Constitution by diverting tax dollars away from public education.
The ruling dealt a significant blow to school choice advocates in the commonwealth who want to provide students and families with educational options beyond traditional public schools.
Now, House Republicans have proposed legislation to amend the constitution to allow state dollars to support schools outside of the public system. Should either House Bill 2 or House Bill 208 pass the General Assembly, the question could appear on the ballot for voters to decide this November.
“I don’t think the founders of our commonwealth intended to deny education freedom back when they wrote the constitution,” says Jim Waters, president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions. “School choice isn’t for every child in Kentucky, but it should be available to every child.”
Waters says the proposed amendments don’t advocate for one particular school alternative, such as charter schools, home or microschools, or even parochial schools. Instead, he says the goal is to remove any constitutional barriers to the state helping families afford the option they might desire.
Opponents of the proposed amendments contend school choice already exists in Kentucky, and that creating a funding mechanism for non-public schools is an unnecessary and unwise use of limited tax dollars.
“If we’re going to have this discussion, we should first fully fund and focus on the public school system that was intended by the framers of our constitution,” says Kentucky Education Association President Eddie Campbell. “We don’t need to be trying to build another system on top of a system that we already have.”
A Range of Education Options Beyond Public Schools
Calls for school choice have increased in the state over the past decade as public schools have struggled to improve reading and math scores and address achievement gaps among certain groups of students. Some parents and lawmakers are also critical of how public schools present certain subjects from thorny historical topics to human sexuality.
Heather LeMire, Kentucky state director of Americans for Prosperity, says the drive for school choice intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools moved from in-person to virtual instruction.
“Parents were just disillusioned with what was happening with their children’s education and they wanted opportunities to put their child in the best educational environment for their child,” says LeMire.
Public school advocates acknowledge the challenges facing traditional schools in the commonwealth. After making significant gains in the wake of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, Brigitte Blom says Kentucky has recently dropped from eighth to 29th in fourth grade reading scores, and from 33rd to 41st in math scores.
“We’re going in the wrong direction as a state and that is undeniable,” says Blom, who is president and CEO of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. “Do we have real problems that need to be solved? Absolutely we do, and we must spend those dollars wisely if we’re going to return to a point of progress.”
Blom says the best strategy is to invest in evidence-based instructional programs that are clearly shown to improve student performance. She says public schools should also provide wrap-around services to support a student’s mental and physical wellbeing, which she says can also impact a child’s success in the classroom. She points to dramatic improvements in reading and math scores among Black students at a Henderson elementary school that brought a wealth of community resources to bear on the academic experience of children there.
As for alternative education options, Blom says there is no unbiased research that shows private school choices supported by public dollars perform better than traditional public schools. The one exception, she says, is charter schools that specifically serve marginalized students in urban areas.
Public charter schools generally follow the same academic and accountability standards as public schools but are given greater latitude to try novel educational approaches. In Kentucky, charters would have to accept students on a first-come, first serve basis, or select them by lottery if enrollment demand exceeds capacity. Other private school options such as religious-based schools, home schools, or microschools that can involve children from a handful of families usually don’t have to abide by the same standards and can select which students they accept.
“There’s a lot of innovative ideas that can come from a variety of different school institutions,” says LeMire. “We want families to be able to make that decision and choose what’s best for own their child.”
Even without a public funding mechanism for alliterative schools, Campbell argues that Kentucky parents already can decide where and how they want to educate their children. But Waters counters that those options are currently limited by a family’s ability to pay a non-public school’s tuition, or their ability to move to a community with better school options.
More Funding for Public Schools
Choice advocates point to Florida as a potential model for the commonwealth. Waters says in the years after KERA, Florida trailed Kentucky in school performance. But since school choice was implemented there, he says Florida as surged passed Kentucky.
“The more choices they’ve given parents, the better their public education system has performed,” says Waters. “This isn’t about destroying public education. This is about improving it.”
What’s more, Florida has made those gains while spending less on public education than Kentucky does, according to Waters. He says the debate here should focus on putting the needs of students ahead of the needs of any particular education system.
Before amending the state constitution to allow tax dollars to go to school choice options, Campbell says lawmakers should use the current budget surplus to invest more in public schools. He says Kentucky ranks 40th in the nation in average teacher pay, and 44th in pay for first-year teachers. Even though per-pupil funding to schools known as SEEK has increased over the years, Campbell says it has not kept up with inflation. Schools currently receive $4,200 per student. Under the House budget proposal, that amount would go up to $4,455 by the end of the biennium.
“It should be around $5,500 right now,” says Campbell. “Can you image what our public schools could do, how they could provide opportunities for our students with $1,000 extra per student… to provide smaller class sizes, to provide tutoring, to provide other opportunities that students don’t have right now.”
But spending more on public education doesn’t guarantee better outcomes, says Waters. He contends schools today actually receive about $17,000 per student when you include local, state, and federal funding sources. With some 45 other states allowing charter schools, Waters says it’s time to fully give Kentucky families that option. He says if the alternative schools don’t perform as promised, then parents will simply stop using them.
But devoting public dollars to school choice endangers the quality of instruction public school students could get, according to Blom. She contends the wise use of tax dollars for public schools will benefit children and the state and return Kentucky to a place of national prominence in education.
“We can do that again if we ground our strategies and our investment in what research shows is going to work,” says Blom. “It’s critically important, as the sixth-poorest state in the nation, we do that well if we are going to achieve economic competitiveness and the economic prosperity of Kentuckians.”
