House Republicans pass a disgraceful school voucher bill disgracefully
Talk about representative democracy. Last night, the Kentucky House voted to erode funding for public schools in three urban counties, even though most representatives from those counties voted against it.
That’s right. A tax credit or voucher plan that will drain up to $25 million from the general fund to help people pay for private school in Fayette, Jefferson and Kenton counties in a 47-43 vote for the amendment. See, the original bill was to set up tax credit granting organizations to help public school students pay to go to other public school districts. It’s an all too obvious Trojan horse to set up account granting organizations (AGOs) that allow people to get tax credits for private school tuition, and the horse opened up last night when Rep. Jerry Miller, R-Eastwood, added the amendment for vouchers for private schools in three counties.
Do people in Lexington and Louisville understand that rural legislators are shoving unpopular, unworkable ideas down their cities’ throats? As the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy noted: “In essence, the bill will take $25 million from the entire state and channel it to private schools in the state’s three most affluent counties, leaving rural, lower-income communities behind.”
Miller’s amendment is a giant middle finger put up to the Kentucky Education Association, both for getting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear elected and for resistance to reopening schools in a pandemic. It also tells urban Democrats just how powerless they really are. It’s petty, it’s short-sighted, it’s using tax dollars to pay for religious schools, like the Catholic ones pushing this effort, and creating a distinctly un-adequate public education guaranteed by the Kentucky Constitution.
Best of all, as reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears wrote, they don’t even know how this will work: Rep. Chad McCoy “said the details of how the money follows the student have not been worked out so he’s asked the Kentucky Department of Education to help figure that out. The legislation also calls for a task force of lawmakers, superintendents and others to work on how the money follows the student.”
Charter schools would be better than this. Yes, there are districts that are not serving our most needy children. But that’s in part because we haven’t funded public education to the extent it needs. The best quote was from Louisville Democrat Tina Bojanowsky, a public school teacher herself.
“What are we doing to improve our public schools in which students seem to be suffering, or are we breaking our public school system and then saying we need to pay for private education because our public school system is broken?”
There are plenty of simple, straightforward ways to improve education that have not seen the light of day in the Capitol, efforts to improve reading, early childhood education, more understanding of high stakes testing.
Democrats did manage to tack on an amendment to fund all-day kindergarten, but that will probably get stripped out in the Senate because how could we afford it?
Along with all this outrage is the fact that the bill was pushed through in one day, at night, at a time when the public is not allowed in the Capitol to see what’s going on. It’s bad policy made with bad governing, and guess what? Until the next election, there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
This story was originally published March 12, 2021 at 12:05 PM.
