I attended a meeting Monday night of Knox County parents who send their children to Corbin schools. They met to organize against the county district’s recent decision to end its reciprocal agreement with Corbin — meaning the parents must send their kids to Knox schools or pay an annual $1,200 tuition to Corbin.
Parents’ discontent with being forced (or at least coerced) into sending their children to Knox schools made me immediately think of calling my friend, and a regular columnist in this newspaper, Jim Waters.
Jim works for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, and as I was texting him questions during the meeting Monday, he was on KET debating the merits of bringing school choice to Kentucky.
“You know, if the state passes a charter school bill, the Corbin district could become a charter district and there’s not a darn thing Knox could do to stop parents from exercising their educational liberty,” he wrote me.
Well, turning Corbin into a charter school might not be the best solution here — but bringing a new charter school to Knox County would be a great step forward for local education.
Jim and the folks at BIPPS have been fighting for years to bring charter school legislation to Kentucky — which is one of only 10 states that doesn’t have them. A proposed amendment to allow for charter schools was recently voted down in the Senate Education Committee, but the fight’s not over. Rep. Brad Montell of Shelby County has filed a bill that would allow for charter schools.
A charter school isn’t a religious or private school, nor can it charge tuition. It’s a public school that operates under a chartering organization (say, a public university or a local city council) and would still have to meet all state educational requirements.
The difference is in the structure of the school. Charter schools aren’t bound by the agreements of teachers unions. The schools can set their own expectations of students and staff that are greater than the state’s. At the highly successful KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Academy, for example, teachers are given cell phones and are required to be accessible to students until 9 p.m. each evening and on weekends.
Charter schools can demand more than the state minimum for classroom time — at KIPP, most students are in school until 5 p.m. and every other Saturday.
And guess what — teachers are clamoring to work at the 82 KIPP schools that currently operate in 19 states. Because the kids there are learning.
No, it’s not because they’re catering to the cream of the crop. KIPP schools are open enrollment — the vast majority of students are low income, and kids are accepted “regardless of prior academic record, conduct or socioeconomic background.”
In all this talk about Corbin and Knox County schools, it’s unfortunately becoming an argument over which school is “better.”
Let’s not go down that road.
Sure, we can look at statistics and see that Corbin ranks at the top of the state when it comes to average ACT and CATS test scores... and Knox schools are usually near the bottom.
But that’s just looking at averages. One can attend Knox schools and get a perfectly wonderful education.
The problem with Kentucky’s school system, as Jim pointed out, is that it’s “one size fits all.”
In reality, some students need longer classroom hours, some kids want to focus on math and sciences, some want to concentrate on the arts, and some need a school entirely dedicated to special education. Many of the complaining Knox parents said Corbin offered certain classes and after-school activities that simply aren’t available in Knox County.
Charter schools allow for that diversity. And because they are not tied to property taxing districts, charter schools can locate anywhere. They wouldn’t get the revenues from property taxes — in fact, charter schools would run on state SEEK funding and private donations, often receiving less money per student than public schools, yet producing better educated children.
They seem to do more with less — and it’s a product of competition.
As in business, a school district with a monopoly on providing education is probably providing a poorer quality of services.
With a charter school operating in Knox, the county district could actually receive more money per pupil, as it remained collecting its unchanged share of property taxes with fewer students.
One would hope this would help the county school as well, since they’d have more proportional funding to improve programs for its remaining students.
Knox is upset that it’s losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in SEEK money as children in their district attend Corbin schools. Their solution is to cancel the agreement and strip Corbin of the funding it receives for those students.
But the SEEK money is NOT the Knox district’s money. It’s the kids’ money, for their education, and it should follow them wherever they want to go.
Which brings me to the reality of current “school choice” in Kentucky.
I, along with most of the parents at Monday’s Knox Parents for Corbin Schools meeting, was under the impression that since Knox schools had failed Annual Yearly Progress standards, parents could request their children be bused to another school at the district’s expense.
That’s only partially true. Districts must provide another alternative within the district only — a mostly meaningless requirement in Knox County, where both high and middle schools are failing. The law seems to ignore the concerns of rural parents — in low performing districts with only one middle or high school, they are stuck in a failing district with few options.
Charter schools represent a new option, and Knox County would be a prime place to start one.
I’ve heard the argument that if parents want their children to go to Corbin schools, they should move to the Corbin district. But do we really want to hinder a county’s economic opportunities because of the perception that it is home to “failing schools”? The best thing for the entire region’s economic and educational growth would be to introduce more competition among the school districts and increase the overall quality of education. We need to stop all this “city limits” and “county line” fighting and start looking at our regional opportunities.
Opening up competition to charter schools is a good place to start.
Samantha Swindler is the managing editor of the Times-Tribune. She can be reached at sswindler@thetimestribune.com
