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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on four general themes:
Basic school choice information
Survey results show strong support for school choice in Kentucky.
Best practices from other states
Georgia backs choices for special needs-children.
Home schooling beginning to achieve mainstream status.
Answering objections to school choice
You can’t choose a well-hidden choice.
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
A recent survey by the Bluegrass Institute clearly indicates that Kentuckians favor school choice.
The survey asked 493 Kentuckians if they believed the state should sanction various plans to allow parents choices about their children’s education. The results hold promise for school-choice proponents.
The responses emphasized two points:
• Kentuckians largely remain unaware of education choices available in other states.
• When given a basic description of school-choice options, respondents believe the options would improve the state’s public education.
Many Kentuckians have seen their children languish in stagnant public schools. Parents with means can tighten the budget and send kids to private schools or move to an area with thriving public schools. For the less fortunate, that kind of choice doesn’t exist. Their children must accept a single option – the public school that the local and state government says a student must attend.
But even defenders of the status quo should take a close look at some of the survey’s results.
For example, some two-thirds of respondents said that Kentucky’s education system took a turn for the worse or stayed about the same during the past few years. This indicates that Kentuckians have become wise to how the education establishment routinely softens the bite of statistics that show anemic results.
Also, when asked which of several proposed reforms would most improve Kentucky’s education system, survey respondents chose, “Holding schools more accountable for the quality of education they provide.” That answer garnered the favor of 38 percent of respondents, beating out “Increasing teacher pay,” “Reducing class size” and “Improving school buildings and equipment.”
Kentuckians want schools held accountable by using choice. Who will bring it to them?
Sources:
“Survey shows Kentucky parents support school choice,” Bluegrass Institute, May 7, 2007.
“School Choice Survey” by Dr. Larry Caillouet and Kalisa Hauschen, Bluegrass Institute, April 30, 2007.
If you are the parent of a special-needs student in Kentucky, Jenny Ergle’s story should bring a smile to your face.
The Georgia resident is the mother of a 10-year-old boy with Tourette’s Syndrome. Now that Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a bill to provide state aid to parents who want to send special-needs students to other schools, parents such as Ergle can breathe a little easier.
The new law allows state money designated to educate a disabled child in a public-school system to fund a voucher that parents can spend at a private school instead. The policy is based on Florida’s McKay Scholarship program that now serves nearly 20,000 students.
Estimates are that the average voucher will be about $9,000. The exact amount of each voucher will depend on the severity of the recipient’s disability.
Rep. Stan Lee offered a similar program to benefit Kentucky’s special-needs children earlier this year. An analysis of Lee’s plan produced for the Bluegrass Institute showed over-identifying special-needs children could cost Kentucky $50 million a year.
The report concludes: “Every special-needs child who participates in Kentucky’s program could save the state and local school districts approximately $5,100 each. If just 1 percent of Kentucky’s special-need students – roughly 1,100 children – could have participated in the scholarship program in 2005, the state and local school districts would have realized an estimated savings of $5.7 million. During the next decade, if just 1 percent of Kentucky’s special-ed students participate in the scholarship program, the state and local school districts could benefit from a projected savings of more than $61 million.”
If Kentucky really wants to help special-needs children and save education money, a scholarship plan for special-needs kids offers a great place to start.
Sources:
“Perdue signs bill for special-needs kids” by Kevin Duffy, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 19, 2007.
“Georgia Passes Special-Needs Voucher Bill” by Karla Dial, Heartland Institute, School Reform News, June 1, 2007.
“Enable the Disabled: An analysis of the Kentucky Students with Special Needs Scholarship Program” by Vicki E. Murray, Ph.D. and Arwynn Mattix, M.A., Bluegrass Institute, Nov. 6, 2007.
When home schooling began as a socio-cultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it came about largely due to ideological differences with public schools’ teaching methods. In the 1980s, another wave of home-schooling growth occurred among religious groups in response to moral issues associated with public-school curriculums.
Today, home schooling continues to grow, but statistics show a shift in demographics from previous generations of home-schooled students.
According to the National Household Education Surveys Program, the number of home-schooled students more than doubled between the 1990-91 and 1995-96 school years. In 1996, the number of home schoolers represented between 1 to 2 percent of the school-age population. Today, the National Home Education Network estimates home schoolers now represent about 3 percent to 4 percent of the nation’s school-age population.
Since statistics showing the numbers of Kentucky home schoolers are gathered only at the local level and not by the state, they are somewhat dated, but still show a solid increase in home schooling among the commonwealth’s families. For example, the number of home-schooled students grew from 7,313 during the 1996-97 school year to 12,491 during the 2001-02 school year.
Whereas home schooling previously was viewed by some as a radical measure taken for ideological or religious reasons, it’s now becoming a more accepted practice, and is growing primarily in suburban and rural areas in the West and Midwest.
Home-schooling families tend to be white and middle class, although the number of black and Hispanic home schoolers also is rising. Home schooling also is growing among families where parents have higher levels of education and where one parent stays at home.
Increasingly, home schooling is viewed as a viable option by parents who previously would not have considered it an acceptable alternative.
– Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Sources:
“Demographics – Numbers and Growth,” A to Z Home’s Cool Homeschooling.
‘Homesschooling’s (sic) true colors: investigating the myths – and the facts – about America’s fastest growing educational movement” by Rachel Gathercole, “Mothering,” July-August 2005.
“Homeschooling Is Growing Worldwide” by Karl M. Bunday, Learn in Freedom.
A popular retort to calls for school choice is: “It’s not popular.”
So opponents of choice argue against it.
For example, when the Kentucky Department of Education’s spokesperson Lisa Gross was asked about the Bluegrass Institute’s survey showing strong support for school choice, she responded: “What we’ve found is that parents want to stick with the public school and make that school better rather than take their children out, and we see that under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) transfer option. We found parents don’t take advantage of that. They tend to want to make the school better.”
What Gross may not know is that a new study shows that very few schools appear to even respond to requests from parents about options.
“You Can’t Choose If You Don’t Know: The Failure to Properly Inform Parents about NCLB School Choice,” a study conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas Department of Education reform, found a surprisingly low response rate from schools duty bound to provide choices required by NCLB.
The study included 10 Kentucky schools, eight of which did not respond at all with information about NCLB options available to parents of students enrolled in those schools.
Overall, the study showed that fewer than 6 percent of schools nationally provided the information e-mail replies. Many schools responded without providing the requested information, but those schools did request more information about the person requesting the information.
Before Kentucky’s education establishment begins decrying the lack of popularity for choice, perhaps it should examine the extent to which schools even respond to requests for information from parents desperate to get students a better education.
Sources:
“You Can’t Choose If You Don’t Know: The Failure to Properly Inform Parents about NCLB School Choice” by Jay P. Greene, Jonathan Butcher, Laura Israel Jensen, Catherine Shock, Education Working Paper Archive, University of Arkansas, June 4, 2007.
“Survey getting scrutiny, school choice favored by parents, but method of questioning criticized” by Natalie Jordan, (Bowling Green) Daily News, May 21, 2007.
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