Charter school vote caps dark session as Ky. GOP gets everything it ever wanted.
Early this week, there was a little bubble of excitement among Frankfort Democrats that House Bill 9, which would divert public school funding to charter schools, was dead.
That was, naturally, premature. The GOP supermajority moved the bill from the Appropriations and Revenue Committee to Education, then stacked that committee by adding the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chad McCoy of Bardstown, to its membership. A committee substitute was added just 12 hours before the vote.
There was no way they were going to let this bill slide by. This session, they’ve gotten it all — severely wounding public schools, with some special jabs at the strong union district of Jefferson County, effectively ending abortion, eviscerating public benefits for the poor and slanting tax policy toward the rich. All those years of planning, dark money, and yes, very good discipline have worked. They milked every controversy out there, mask mandates, non-existent CRT, scary Black Lives Matter protests. And that’s before we even get to a final version of the budget where who knows how many horrors are left to perpetrate upon this sad state.
Now the rest of us are stuck here in Gilead with nothing left to read but “A White People’s History of the United States.”
There are so many morbidly funny parts to all of this — a political party that relies on latent racism and a fear of telling the truth about what happened to Black people in our country’s history, passed charter schools by pretending to care about what happens to Black people, who according to their speeches, appear to live only in the West End of Louisville.
The Democratic women of the House responded with eloquence and passion on this point. It’s possible that if House Bill 9 had been limited to non-profit charter organizations, their ire might not have been so high. But this is really about two things: Grift and destroying public schools and the unions that support their employees. McCoy admitted he had not talked to any legislators from the West End of Louisville because of course they know what’s really needed in the schools there: more funding for smaller class sizes, fully-funded all day kindergarten, more and better trained teachers. It’s no mystery. But Republicans want that funding to go instead to the free market, where it can be spent on anything, based on recent articles in the endless line of controversies about charter schools.
As I tweeted yesterday during the lengthy debate, Rep. Angie Hatton, D-Whitesburg made the most cogent point: “Selling out our kids, selling our kids,” she noted before being ruled out of order by Speaker Davis Osborne for saying something true.
I wish I had a prescriptive for this most depressing of sessions. Studies show that most people like their own public schools, and maybe they will start to recognize how much these bills will hurt them. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats in voting against House Bill 9, which shows that all is not lost. There may be more elective pain for those who sold out their schools and their teachers.
Then again, the signs are not promising. As Kentucky politicians argued over charter schools on Tuesday, U.S. Senators tried to paint Ketanji Jackson Brown, who would be the first Black woman justice on the Supreme Corner, in a corner. U.S. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana gave an illuminating interview in which he said that the Supreme Court should have never decided on abortion or on Loving v. Virginia, the decision that allowed interracial marriage in the United States. He later walked those comments back, but as Maya Angelou said, “when people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Here in Kentucky, people who support public schools or women’s rights or equal justice didn’t want to believe the Republican party the first or the 20th time. But now, I think we finally will.
