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Prichard’s silence is deafening

By Richard Innes

“Frozen in time” by Bob Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, is a day late and several dollars short in its analysis of Kentucky’s public-education crisis.

Sexton’s recent article in the (Louisville) Courier-Journal and a companion Prichard report opine that high schools are 100 years out of date. But Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been chanting such themes for more than a year. Regarding higher standards, Gov. Ernie Fletcher agreed many months ago to participate in a national effort to raise high-school standards.

Neither are high-school exit exams anything new. The Kentucky Board of Education has been discussing them for months. In fact, development of the first exit exam is nearly complete.

The Prichard Committee isn’t leading the way on any of these initiatives, although the group once held considerable influence in molding Kentucky’s education policy. Now the committee offers little in the way of new or bold ideas.

The silence of Sexton and his committee was deafening during the last legislative session when some very promising proposals to solve the problems of Kentucky’s high schools were being debated. State senators Dick Roeding, R-Lakeside Park, and Jack Westwood, R-Crescent Springs, attempted to get legislation passed that would have created a pilot program allowing the ACT college-entrance test to be substituted for the much-maligned Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) assessment.

The ACT proposal was not a scheme invented by radical right-wingers. It was offered by superintendents and college educators in Northern Kentucky. The proposal focused on what Sexton now claims Kentucky needs – improving the skills and future opportunities for our state’s high-school students.

Requiring all 11th-grade students to take the ACT has already proved to be a successful policy in other states, including Colorado. An increasing number of Colorado’s high-schoolers are now enrolling in college and remediation rates among freshman entering the state’s colleges are now declining. Even students with learning disabilities in Colorado now take the ACT and, amazingly, have improved their scores as well.

The Prichard Committee also missed another opportunity to exert any relevant influence when lawmakers agreed to allow Kentucky’s high schools to award the General Educational Development (GED) certificate instead of a regular diploma.

The GED provides great second-chance opportunities for adults. But no one with knowledge of the GED advocates using the certificate as a high-school diploma. Despite an earnest request for its involvement, Sexton’s committee remained silent as this standards-busting bill sailed through the legislature.

In fact, the excessive focus of Sexton – and Gates for that matter – on high schools misses the boat. Kentucky’s education problems start in grade school and remain severe throughout all grade levels.

For example, a proper analysis of the National Assessment of Educational progress (NAEP) reveals that only one-fourth of Kentucky’s elementary pupils and less than one-third of the state’s middle-school students read proficiently.

Kentucky’s education problems are not limited to its middle schools and high schools. It’s a system-wide problem that continues 15 years after the Prichard Committee’s sweeping yet unproven reform ideas were pushed into our schools. Trying to fix these deficiencies with programs developed solely for high schools would be akin to building dams high in the Rocky Mountains in order to control flooding in the lower Mississippi River!

Sexton and his committee’s claim that there is “general agreement” on how to fix Kentucky’s education problems shows they just don’t get it. There is plenty of vigorous debate about how to solve the commonwealth’s education predicament.

There’s certainly no shortage of arguments about what is the best policy to address the abysmal performance of our state’s high-school students. The ACT pilot and GED law are but two examples. There are others.

For example, Sexton has shown that he is beholden to the status quo in his stated opposition to allowing school choice in Kentucky. In other states, competition has proven to create the kind of “academic excellence” for which the Prichard Committee claims to exist. Sexton should be leading this effort. However, it now appears that he will actually oppose it.

The fact that Mr. Sexton and his committee don’t seem to hear other voices with different viewpoints in no way manufactures a “general agreement.”

In the end, Sexton’s belated “me too” comments don’t add much to the discussion. It’s good that the Prichard Committee now admits the obvious. But it will be better if the group gets on board with real leaders who already have better ideas about Kentucky’s abysmal education system.

– Richard G. Innes is an education analyst for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

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