Gov. Beshear dumps the charter school clown car. And Bevin showed him the way.
Kentucky’s newest governor, Andy Beshear, gave an inaugural speech full of light and hope while delivering some sharp and much-needed punches to his opposition.
While waxing poetically about working for the good of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Beshear let drop that he had already reconstituted the state Board of Education in its entirety, replacing what appeared to be a charter school company with some old school educators and politicians, including former Louisville lawmaker David Karem, one of the initial creators and cheerleaders of the Kentucky Education Reform Act which made Kentucky a leader in public education back in the 1990s. He will serve as chairman.
Other members include Lu Young, formerly top administrator in Jessamine and Fayette County schools, former University of Kentucky president Lee Todd and Sharon Porter Robinson, the first black president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education who previously served as president of the Educational Testing Service’s Educational Policy Leadership Institute in Princeton, N.J.
These are serious people with a serious understanding of Kentucky’s public schools. Unlike the present crew, they aren’t right-wing charter advocates who want to strangle the system by siphoning off its resources to charter school operators and religious schools through phony tax credit schemes. Of course the new board will be held up because the charter school clown car has decided to sue.
It may not have been the best way to kick off a legislative session that will depend on bipartisan cooperation, but it needed to happen, and frankly, no one in the legislature seemed quite as excited about charter schools as former Gov. Matt Bevin, and his sidekick, the current chair, Hal Heiner. And Bevin very nicely set up the precedent for Beshear when he upended the University of Louisville Board of Trustees, the Education Professional Standards Board and others, and then beat Beshear in the courts. It’s a good cautionary tale for unfettered executive power, isn’t it?
In the executive order, Beshear noted that the current board members have conflicting relationships, lack experience in public education and failed to do a national search when they jettisoned former Commissioner Stephen Pruitt for charter school zealot Wayne Lewis. Pruitt quietly resigned when he saw the lay of the land; let’s hope Lewis will do the same. After all, he has a good faculty spot waiting for him at the University of Kentucky.
As I’ve said numerous times before, Kentucky does not need charter schools. Kentucky can fulfill the long ago promise of KERA when it is funded at KERA’s promised levels, and when Kentucky politicians do more to relieve the state’s desperate poverty than give tax cuts to banks and rich people.
And there’s the rub. Beshear says he will fund both education and pensions, starting with a $2,000 pay raise to teachers. But there is no simple or easy way forward with Republican super-majorities in the House and Senate, and it behooves the new governor to be more realistic and transparent about exactly how he will bring puppies and rainbows to state coffers.
Still whatever faults we find with Beshear today, they are nothing compared to Bevin, who spent his last days in office taking his narcissistic personality disorder out for a tour. He started with interviews where he rambled about “harvesting” urban votes, as though getting out the vote of city dwellers and college students is a bad thing, made dark prophecies about abortion clinics suddenly opening on every corner, and ended with his goodbye speech, where he said his was the best and brightest administration of our lifetimes. Then, there was Joe Gerth’s revelation that the Bevins had waited until the very last minute to vacate the Governor’s Mansion, where he never lived in the first place. The petty actions of a petty man.
Beshear promised a different tone and backed it up with strong action. On Inauguration Day, he put public education at the front of his administration as he said he would, exactly where it belongs.
