Jefferson Review

"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

Home /  Archives / Links / Quotes / Book Reviews / Advertise /Contact us / Subscribe / Calendar

‘Mission: Possible’

by Jim Waters

Take it from this movie reviewer: The latest installment of “Mission: Impossible” is worth at least the price of the ticket and a bag of popcorn.

The familiar “this-mission-should-you-choose-to-accept” is – as always – accepted by agent Ethan Hunt, who is assisted by the Impossible Mission Taskforce.

Kentucky has its own seemingly impossible mission: Free kids from failing schools, unshackle chains of educational oppression imposed by a burdensome government monopoly and make Kentucky’s education system the envy of the nation.

And just as there is no “Mission: Impossible” movie if agent Hunt does not accept, so the commonwealth will never have educational liberty if parents do not rise to the challenge.

The mission is not to destroy public education in Kentucky. Not all teachers or schools are doing a bad job. In fact, Kentucky has good teachers and fine schools. But there are also serious problems with our state’s education system that have been ignored for too long.

For example, both the achievement and the graduation gaps continue to widen between Kentucky’s black and white students.

Nationally acclaimed education researcher Jay Greene reports only 55 percent of black students graduated in Kentucky in 2003 – the latest year for which figures are available – compared to 72 percent of whites students. And there was a 20-percent graduation gap in the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) – the state’s largest district – where one out of every two black males did not graduate from high school in 2003.

While the achievement gap grows, Frankfort slumbers. As the graduation gap widens, school officials charged with providing a quality education for all children smile cutely, implement another rope-a-dope policy and promise better days ahead.

An entire generation has now grown up in our state’s public schools under the ballyhooed Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). As a result, the commonwealth is spending more than ever on education while far too many schools fail their students.

Kentucky’s policymakers, education leaders and parents must not fail another entire generation.

Cavernous disparities in our state’s racial achievement and graduation gaps have become the most important civil-rights issues of our time.

A half-century ago, cameras captured the jarring images of armed soldiers standing in doorways of public schools ensuring black boys and girls could receive the same opportunities as white children. Now, school bureaucrats and politicians cram the doorways of failing schools refusing to allow children trapped there to escape.

Hopefully, this won’t be a civil-rights struggle waged with fire hoses, civil disobedience and street violence. This battle is one waged instead by ideas, persuasion and parents determined to fight for the right to offer their children a better future.

This effort will depend on parents who won’t relent in the face of misinformation disseminated by those who oppose educational liberty.

For example, parents in Jefferson County know that they are allowed to express a preference of one school over another. School-choice critics errantly claim that this somehow constitutes a choice. In turning down the Bluegrass Institute’s recent offer to debate the merits of school choice, JCPS Superintendent Stephen Daeschner wrote that “our district has been a strong proponent and provider of managed school choice for many years.”

Expressing a preference is not the same as making a choice, especially if the school district ultimately denies your request. Until parents living in the county are allowed to make concrete choices about where their children attend school – with state funding to follow that decision – the policy will remain ineffective.

It’s apparent from the performance of many JCPS schools that choice “managed” by the same system that now has more than 31,000 students attending failing schools cannot be as effective as actual parental choice.

The only Kentuckians who have real educational liberty are people with means enough to move into a better neighborhood or pay for a private education. This is “choice by realtor.” The single mother living on Louisville’s West side and working two or three jobs does not have the option of moving to get a better school for her children.

She knows that the education her children are getting is not the best. And she wonders why the education officials, administrators, teachers unions and politicians seem determined to deny her children an exit strategy.

Should the size of her paycheck or her race prevent her children from having the opportunities that allow them to escape the grip of poverty?

The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to free her and thousands of other Kentucky parents desperate for a better future for their kids.

– Jim Waters is director of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

The Bluegrass Institute is an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems.

Weather (Louisville) / Mapquest /  White Pages / Business Search / CNN / Dictionary / E-card / MSN