Charter school bill clears KY Senate’s Education Committee

A new bill to bring charter schools to Kentucky, Senate Bill 253, was passed in a nine-to-two vote by the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Committee yesterday amidst expected union pushback and an amazingly frank charge from Hal Heiner, Kentucky’s Secretary of Education, that the Kentucky Education Association is standing in the way of the best policies for children.

KET webcast the meeting and the video is now available online in the KET Archives.

There was some pretty sharp discussion during the meeting, making this video of more than average interest.

Supporting testimony on SB-253 came from bill sponsor and Senate Education Committee chair Senator Mike Wilson (R) Bowling Green, assisted by Secretary Heiner and the Kentucky Education & Workforce Development Cabinet’s Executive Director of Educational Programs, Dr. Wayne Lewis.

These comments begin at 14 minutes and 19 seconds into the video and provide a rather extensive overview of the bill.

Heiner provided added information about why charter schools are badly needed in Kentucky, focusing on the major problems with achievement gaps in the Jefferson County Public School District (JCPS).Heiner directly said at one point:

“The standard, traditional public school is not working for children that have significant gaps.”

Dr. Lewis, who was a Professor of Education at the University of Kentucky before joining the Education & Workforce Cabinet several months ago, was equally forthright. He expanded the discussion of need, touching on additional education problems in Fayette County schools, claiming:

“Our collective, continued failure to address the unwillingness and or inability of Fayette and Jefferson County to meet the needs of low income and children of color is nothing short of academic neglect.”

Heiner also made his ire with the continuing resistance of the Kentucky Education Association to charter schools in Kentucky abundantly clear, saying:

“When will we put children before adults? When will we stop drinking the KEA’s stagnant water, whose very mission statement puts adults before children?”

It was one of the most direct challenges I ever recall hearing in a legislative committee meeting, and I’ve attended plenty of those over the years. To say union members in the audience were squirming would be a gross understatement.

Despite the obvious need for Kentucky’s education system to do something different that Heiner and Lewis so effectively discussed, several Democrat members of the committee continued to argue against the legislation, mostly just parroting -- again -- the same, union-generated material. Sadly, the Democrat responses mostly served to excuse a status quo that clearly isn’t working.

At one point Sen. Gerald Neal (D) Louisville cited the Districts of Innovation program as a counter to charter schools and said some of the Schools of Innovation are doing very well under that program. Neal’s example frankly puzzled me because his own home school system, the JCPS, has only created two Schools of Innovation. One of those, the Maupin Elementary School, has encountered fantastic problems per multiple news reports in the Courier Journal published on November 28, 2015 and February 10, 2016.In fact, the Courier-Journal reports in the second article that:

“As Maupin Elementary struggles to get its new School of Innovation concept off the ground, Jefferson County Public Schools staff is warning that the school could slip into priority status this year.”

Can it be that Sen. Neal isn’t reading the only major newspaper in his own home town? Can it be he really does not understand how his hometown school system is stumbling badly with trying to do something innovative that really works for students?

Stephanie Winkler, president of the KEA, also testified against the legislation. The union leader’s comments were neither new, nor surprising, nor accurate. Winkler claims at about 52 minutes and 40 seconds into the webcast that:

“The research is clear; students do as well or better in public schools than they do in charter schools.”

Obviously, Winkler chooses to ignore the most important findings from the many reports on charter schools that have been created by the CREDO crowd at Stanford University. All the CREDO reports I have seen (such as those discussed here and here to list only a few examples) show that once students spend enough time in charters to benefit, they do outperform their traditional public school peers.

Of course, Winkler can point to reports that show otherwise, but what she didn’t admit is many of those reports are created by college professors from the National Education Policy Center, a neutral-sounding group that actually is honest enough to admit it gets a lot of funding from – the National Education Association. That funding source might just lead to some biases in those reports.Certainly, one of the obvious biases in reports that don’t find good charter impacts is those reports lump first year charter school students into their performance evaluations. But, CREDO shows that charters need longer than just one year to turn kids around, so these sorts of reports will always understate charter performance.

Maybe Winkler doesn’t know all of this, but in her position as a teacher leader, she should. Certainly, her easy to challenge claim about charter performance undermines her credibility.

In any event, you can hear all the testimony – pro and con – in the KET webcast. This legislative drama is actually rather interesting and well worth your time.