Bluegrass Vouchers on the Ballot
Privatizers seek to change Kentucky Constitution to pilfer public funds
School privatizers in Kentucky have run into a pretty significant roadblock in their attempts to convert public money to private profits.
The Kentucky Constitution.
Peter Greene offers some additional insight:
The state currently has no voucher program and no charter schools. Yes, the Republican-controlled legislature wants both charters and vouchers. But the Democratic Governor has consistently opposed using public money to fund private schools - whether through vouchers or charter schools.
Oh, and the Kentucky Constitution prohibits it.
As Greene notes, the Kentucky Supreme Court clearly says the Constitution prohibits using public funds for anything other than public schools.
The relevant constitutional clause:
No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation
On the issue of charter schools, a judge ruled they are not “common schools” under any reasonable definition of the term and so public funds may not be used to support them.
“The central question in this constitutional analysis is whether the privately owned and operated ‘charter schools,’ which are established by this legislation, should be considered ‘common schools’ or ‘public schools’ within the meaning of Sections 183, 184 and 186 of the Kentucky Constitution? A review of the case law, and the plain language of the Kentucky Constitution itself, yields the inescapable conclusion that ‘charter schools’ are not ‘public schools’ or ‘common schools’ within the meaning of our state’s 1891 Constitution,” Shepherd wrote.
So, the only way for privatizing profiteers to get their hands on taxpayer dollars is to convince voters to amend Kentucky’s Constitution to allow for the use of public money to support schools other than “common schools.”
And this November, voters will decide.
Kentucky is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to education reform trends - one of only a handful of states with no charter schools, for example.
Both teacher pay and per pupil spending are higher in Kentucky than in Tennessee and when it comes to student achievement, Kentucky tends to outperform Tennessee on key indicators.
In that December 2023 piece, I noted relative to NAEP scores:
In both 8th-grade math and reading, the gap with Kentucky has expanded. Tennessee trailed Kentucky by 2 points in 8th-grade math in 2013 but now trails by 7. In reading, Kentucky went from being 2 points ahead to being 6 points ahead.
In 4th grade in both math and reading, the gap between the states remained the same (+3 for Kentucky in math, +8 for Kentucky in reading).
That is to say, Tennessee’s relentless push for school privatization has not produced positive results.
Or, Kentucky’s consistent commitment to public education gets better results than Tennessee’s “reform”-focused, mixed methods approach.
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