With voucher bill, KY Republicans get their political revenge on teachers, public schools
Back in the 1990s, Kentucky was a shining model of a state that valued education. The Kentucky Education Reform Act revolutionized school funding by creating a central pot of property taxes rather than an uneven patchwork of rich and poor. There was much more: cracking down on corruption and nepotism, raising academic standards, new money for teacher training, important supports for struggling children.
But over the past two decades, the state’s politics have turned crimson and all that potential — and state support for it — is slipping away. Why do Republicans appear to dislike and distrust public schools so much? Is it because their teachers are represented by politically powerful unions that happened to get our Democratic unicorn governor elected? Is it because those unions negotiated pretty good pension promises? Is it because they resisted reopening schools? Is it because the very notion of public education recognizes that government can do good things?
“I think what you see is a demonization of public education that’s coming from all these right wing groups,” said Nema Brewer, a co-founder of 120 Kentucky United, an education advocacy group that helped defeat Republican plans for teacher pensions and elect Beshear in 2019. “The Republican Party of Kentucky has bought into this demonization of public schools, completely forgetting the majority of them are products of public schools. It’s just amazing to me that this is what’s happened.”
Those Republicans got their political revenge on Tuesday night when they passed House Bill 563, what’s known as a “neo-voucher bill.” It hurts teachers and rural school districts, while creating more segregation and less school funding, a veritable lottery for the GOP.
The bill allows the creation of “education opportunity account programs,” where people and corporations can donate money to completely unregulated organizations for tax credits. The organizations then give then offer families scholarships to private schools. The bill offers tax credits of up to $25 million a year until 2026.
The GOP claims this bill will help poor students of color who are stuck in failing schools in Lexington and Louisville. In fact, said one University of Kentucky researcher, neo-vouchers are more likely to help the wealthy and create more segregation.
Sarah LaCour, an education professor (who is also a lawyer and former classroom teacher) said many Republicans hew to the philosophy of economist Milton Friedman, who said the monopoly of public education should be overturned.
“He acknowledged it would continue segregation, he just thought it was worth it,” LaCour said. “It feels disingenuous to say we’re doing this for poor and minority students, when we know the wealthiest of the eligible students who tend to benefit the most from these.”
Those are the people who can pay for their own transportation, wrangle the bureaucracy to get the loans and have children with academic or behavioral issues that will keep them out of private schools to begin with.
The only people it may help are middle class folks who want help going to less expensive Catholic schools, in which case our tax dollars are subsidizing religious education. The biggest effect will be a loss of $25 million a year from the general fund that will hurt rural districts that don’t have much private school choice, but do have students who need good teachers, textbooks and better funding.
Republicans have read their Friedman, but not education expert Diane Ravitch, who has written extensively about how early school choice programs started because people didn’t want to attend integrated public schools after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate, unequal schools were unconstitutional.
In addition to reading Ravitch, Republicans could also do a cursory google of SEOs to find a long list of waste, fraud and abuse that these unregulated organizations often commit.
The legislation specifically notes that the SEOs will be unregulated.
“It will be open to corruption and graft and funds will ultimately go to fly by night profiteers,” Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass said on Tuesday. “It would be my strong recommendation to slow down to consider the enormous and consequential impacts.”
GOP legislators did not slow down and did not need to. They know exactly what this will do, and they don’t care because anything that weakens public education is ok with them. They also took healthcare subsidies for teachers out of the budget bill, and who knows what other fun things we’ll find as the smoke clears.
Gov. Andy Beshear will no doubt veto this bill, and the legislature may or may not have the votes to override it.
However, revenge can go both ways. It’s clear that teachers did not “remember in November” when it came to historic GOP statehouse wins that created the supermajority last fall. Brewer said a lot of teachers focused on the governor’s race in 2019 but obviously thought it would be ok to vote for Republicans in 2020.
“A lot of educators thought once Bevin was gone, everything would be hunky dory again,” she said. “But that was not the case. This is not over — we don’t agonize, we organize.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 11:44 AM.
