Prichard analyst now admits Kentucky has a major school achievement gap problem

Sounding more like a BIPPS scholar than a member of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, Prichard analyst Susan Perkins Westin just had a rather interesting Op-Ed published in the Lexington Herald-Leader. She points out that a bill passed in 2002 to address the achievement gaps situation in Kentucky’s public schools has been largely ignored by just about every level in the education system. From school councils, to local superintendents, right up to the Kentucky Department of Education, Weston points out that the legal requirements were never effectively implemented or enforced.

Clearly, our educators didn’t “Buy in,” a problem we discussed quite recently in another blog.

Lack of “Buy in” has been the problem all along with KERA. Despite sometimes good legislation and a tremendous amount of encouragement, the inescapable fact after a quarter of a century of reform efforts in Kentucky is that an alarming proportion of our public school educators don’t seem very interested in innovation and change.

Thus, as Ms. Weston properly points out now – and as the Bluegrass Institute has been doing for over a decade – achievement gaps continue to be a major problem in Kentucky’s schools. Add in the fact that a notable majority of the state’s students falls under one or more disadvantaged categories of racial minority, poor, learning disabled or English language learner and we are brewing a recipe for major economic disaster.

But, Weston’s approaches to fix the problem seem mostly like more of the “same old, same old.” These approaches have been around for decades and have never produced very much, if at all. I don’t understand how this time we will magically see “Buy in” from our existing traditional public school educators for the same, tired ideas.

This situation is why thoughtful people started to suggest about two decades ago that the traditional school system needed competition to spur real action. The best way to produce that competition is with school choice options that free parents from schools where innovation is mostly an empty slogan and where achievement gaps just go on and on.

Sadly, Ms. Weston and the other folks at the Prichard Committee don’t seem able to accept the obvious fact that our traditional public school system is going to keep on resisting real change so long as there aren’t any real consequences for doing so.

Perhaps the Prichard folks will eventually understand what seems so crystal clear: the traditional public school system will always move too slowly, if at all, without an external stimulus that really spurs some action. School choice can provide that incentive and is doing so in 43 other states right now. So long as Kentucky drags its heels on this increasingly effective measure, so long will our disadvantaged kids continue to founder in a school system that had demonstrated it will even ignore laws – just as Weston points out – when it suits the fancy of the educators running that system.