The battle lines on public funding for private education are officially drawn in Northern Kentucky, where forces rallied against a proposed school choice amendment in Newport on Thursday.
A Protect Our Schools KY rally at Newport High School brought together dozens of public school stakeholders who oppose amending the state constitution to allow lawmakers to provide taxpayer money for non-public education. The focus of the rally was on school vouchers. (Funding for public charter schools has also long been on state lawmakers’ radar.)
Voters will be able to vote for or against the proposed amendment, called Amendment 2, at the polls on Nov. 5. Protect Our Schools KY calls itself a “coalition of public education advocates and allied organizations committed to defeating Amendment 2.” The campaign is led by the Council for Better Education, Jefferson County Teachers’ Association, Kentucky Education Association, Fairness, the Kentucky Student Voice Team, and the Kentucky Parent Teacher Association.
At a Protect Our Schools KY press conference in Cold Spring on Thursday afternoon, Amendment 2 opponent and Dayton Independent Superintendent Jay Brewer said the amendment is “not about school choice. It is clearly about vouchers.”
Sometimes described as an education coupon, vouchers are a school choice option available to K-12 students in several U.S. states. Right now 29 states and the District of Columbia offer private school choice options including tax credit-based scholarships, education savings accounts, and vouchers according to news organization Education Week.
Ten states and Washington, D.C., currently have traditional voucher programs.
Yet while private school choice options, like vouchers, are often billed as a way to improve education outcomes for students in failing public schools, Brewer said that vouchers and, more broadly, “allowing public money to be used for private schools,” often don’t work.
“We are seeing several states feeling the negative impacts of allowing public money to be used for private schools: schools with no accountability failing to meet academic needs of children, vouchers being used at a rate of 70-80% by students who are already enrolled in private schools (busting the myth that these vouchers are aimed at getting students at-risk out of failing public schools), and students being denied access to private schools based on academic performance, social/emotional and behavior or physical needs,” he said.
Proponents of public funds for private education, meanwhile, have argued that private school choice benefits low-income students or those who struggle in a traditional school setting.
Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute, a conservative “free market” think tank based in Bowling Green that is supportive of the amendment. He told LINK nky that passage of the amendment would allow state lawmakers to deliberate and potentially adopt a policy that addresses both achievement gaps and what he called “the fact that a majority of our students are not reading or doing math proficiently.”
“That may be a scholarship to a lower-income family,” Waters said. “That may be where we start. But the fact is that’s working and many states have started there and expanded that. This should always be about progressing and deciding what’s best for our state. This amendment would simply allow that debate to take place.”
Boone County Education Association president and educator Kelly Read sees the amendment differently. The NKY educator, who taught students for 23 years at Boone County High School, said at Thursday’s Protect Our Schools KY press conference that Amendment 2 would allow lawmakers to move ahead with a “money-making scheme” for private schools that Read said often results in students being sent back to public school.
“They’ll still keep out the students that don’t meet their criteria whatever that happens to be,” Read said. “We teach those students time and again and are happy to do it.”
At the same time, Read said private schools will be able to raise tuition subsidized by the state.
“My fear is what will happen, if tuition is $5,000 and there’s a $4,000 voucher, next year it’s going to be $9,000 for tuition. So it’s a money-making scheme,” he told LINK nky.
A 2021 report by the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy says that private school choice voucher programs would “primarily benefit better-off families that in many cases already pay for and attend private schools.” According to the report, voucher programs eyed in Kentucky in the past would most benefit families that can already afford to pay for private school with “only the top 21% of the wealthier households in Kentucky … ineligible to participate.”
Waters countered the argument that Amendment 2 would only benefit wealthier families – an argument he said has been made repeatedly by Protect Our Schools KY.
“Well, the fact is if you take Boone County, right now, we’re spending big public dollars on wealthy students there,” said Waters. Total spending per student (state and local funds) in Boone County for the 2022-23 school year was $13,587, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.
Denying school choice to families means denying “one of the great motivators for our public education system to improve,” he said.
Last week, Waters visited West Louisville, where he said an inner city pastor told him generations of residents have struggled to improve their quality of life, including educational achievement.
“They have no options,” Waters said. For them, charter schools would be a great option. Urban areas in Lexington and NKY could also benefit from charter schools, he said.
“Around the country, 58% of the 3.7 million kids in charter schools are low income minority students, and they’re there because somebody said ‘this is going to be a better option,’ ” said Waters, pointedly challenging Protect Our Schools KY on the issue. “If giving parents more options is not the best idea and we’re already funding (at several thousands of dollars) the public school students in Kentucky then what is their answer?”
Keeping public dollars in public schools is the answer, said Read. Putting public money in private schools, he said, would instead “divert critical resources away from public schools” where Read said every child is welcome.
“When legislators talk about educational deserts, realize that those deserts are maintained by consistent underfunding and this voucher program will exacerbate that situation,” Read said.