Beech Tree News Network

Opponents of charter schools coming to Kentucky are pro-choice after all.

At least that’s how it would have appeared to a casual observer during the recent hours-long debate in the Kentucky House of Representatives over legislation funding these public schools in the commonwealth.

Charters can innovate because they’re not constrained by regulations hobbling teachers and administrators in traditional public schools.

Along with funding charters – enabled but not funded during the 2017 legislative session – the new bill requires opening at least one charter in both Louisville and Northern Kentucky.

“Progressive” politicians from those areas protested during the debate, employing – ironically – arguments about how they support school choice.

Newport Democratic Rep. Rachel Roberts noted that people in her legislative district can choose from 150 public schools in six different districts, “and children who live in my area can go to schools in downtown Cincinnati if their parents want to pay a very reasonable tuition to send them there.”

Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, claimed parents have plenty of options in her district, including magnet schools “open to any kid in the district.”

Raymond also pointed to academies serving primarily minorities and “two Catholic schools and a private school for students with learning differences; all of these offer substantial scholarship support.”  

“Parents in Jefferson County are already paralyzed by choice,” she claimed.

It turns out these “progressives” are selectively pro-choice with the defining factor being who ultimately chooses where and how children are educated.

In public school districts, parents can request, but a student-assignment bureaucrat holed away in the central office decides.

Students aren’t assigned to charters; parents, not administrators, make that choice.

So, Raymond and Roberts are pro-choice, but only if the choices fit their ideology and bureaucrats, not parents, decide where children enroll when tax dollars are involved.

Both voted last year against legislation offering parents real choices in the form of open enrollments between districts and education opportunity accounts allowing children from low-income families in Raymond’s and Roberts’ regions, among others, access to private education.

The open-enrollment portion of that law stipulates that SEEK dollars (the state portion of funding for each public school student in Kentucky) follow students to the schools they attend.

There are no complaints about how allowing SEEK dollars to follow those students “siphons off badly needed resources from public education,” such as opponents offer ad infinitum about charters.

It’s acceptable for public dollars to follow abused children or those with special needs to schools different from the ones to which they would have otherwise been assigned.

The focus is – rightly – on getting these students into schools which meet their unique educational, physical, emotional and social needs.

It’s no different than allowing some public dollars to follow poor Black children in Louisville’s West End to a charter school and improving their chances for an education that better fits their needs.

Do these lawmakers really favor empowering only parents of means with options to decide where their children attend school?

Why shouldn’t low-income families in their districts be able to send their child to a Catholic school or a high-performing academy in downtown Cincinnati?

Why should a Black girl from a poor home in West Louisville have a scant chance of attending DuPont Manual, a magnet school in Jefferson County where Raymond was privileged to get her education?

Contrary to Raymond’s claims, all kids in Louisville do not have equal access to that magnet school – a fact made clear by the Courier Journal’s recent six-part exposé slamming how her city’s magnets have racially segregated on behalf of elites who know how to game the system and get their children accepted.

Meanwhile, access is denied to other students who have no elitists advocating for them.

Public charter schools, on the other hand, must accept all students who seek seats – if seats are available.

If seats are limited, a random – random – lottery is held.

Real choice and access don’t get much fairer than that.

Jim Waters is president and CEO of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Read previous columns at www.bipps.org. He can be reached at [email protected] and @bipps on Twitter.