KY voters destroyed Amendment 2. Will politicians now listen and support public schools? | Opinion
The people of Kentucky have spoken.
What they said Tuesday night spoke to a belief about public education as a crucial pillar of this fragile house we call democracy.
From big cities like Louisville to tiny counties like Elliott, the people of Kentucky soundly defeated Amendment 2, by nearly 25 percentage points. They turned down the chance to rewrite the Kentucky Constitution, and they did so in the face of a multi-million dollar campaign by out-of-state school choice advocates who let loose a litany of lies about what Amendment 2 would do.
They said it would raise teacher pay, they said it would improve school funding, they invoked the name of Gov. Andy Beshear, who is in fact a staunch opponent.
The people of Kentucky saw through it all because they prize their local schools. Voters understand they need more, not less school funding. In most rural communities in Kentucky, after all, local schools are the heart, and private schools hardly exist.
Not only that, thousands of voters split their ballots, voting overwhelmingly for former President Donald Trump, but against Amendment 2, even though Trump is a school choice advocate.
“Rural Republicans don’t like vouchers any more than Democrats,” said Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and the author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
“It’s precisely the Trump voters in this community who are against this kind of thing.”
The only remaining question: Now that the people have spoken, will the General Assembly, Sen. Rand Paul, the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky Students First and all the other advocates actually listen?
Will they get serious about $2 billion in underfunding that’s existed for decades? Will they stop their continual harassment of public school teachers, their library books, their history curriculums, their love and care for all children, even the marginalized ones?
Will they admit that diverting tax dollars to private and religious schools would hurt Kentucky’s public schools?
Probably not.
Legislators are not exactly know for saying they were wrong or had bad ideas on public policy. They’ll say it’s because the sitting governor had a bully pulpit to beat the amendment to death, not that it died of a self-inflicted wound.
“We don’t expect for this ongoing attacks to let up,” said Tom Shelton, director of the Council for Better Education, which brought the first lawsuit against the General Assembly in 1989 for underfunding schools, and the lawsuits against tax credits and charter schools.
“We will continue to monitor and evaluate the General Assembly, make sure they are living up to their constitutional responsibilities.”
But after the initial celebration, public school advocates need to listen, too. Not to out-of-state billionaires who want to wipe out public education all together, but to the parents and students who are frustrated by bureaucracies that ignore them or schools that just can’t make progress.
We should rededicate ourselves to Kentucky’s public schools with the same zeal that folks did in 1990, when advocates and legislators and the business community came together to create the Kentucky Education Reform Act.
We need to talk about the best ways to hold schools and school boards accountable, how to create more creative choices within our public districts, and make sure bureaucracies aren’t stifling different ways of learning. We need to improve achievement in the poorest schools in big cities and the smallest ones in rural places.
The good thing about constitutional amendments is that they represent the will of the people outside of gerrymandered political districts.
On Tuesday night, Kentuckians made their desires very, very clear.
They know that public education is at the heart of making Kentucky a more prosperous state. We can’t wash our hands of it. We need to make our public schools better for all kids.
We should all listen.
This story was originally published November 5, 2024 at 8:45 PM.
