When I wasn't looking...

A week or so ago at Essential Left-Overs, Family Foundation of Kentucky popularist Martin Cothran solved the charter debate. He says let parents decide. He doesn't say which parents, but I have a suspicion he has certain parents in mind.

Richard Day's continued attacks on charter schools are indicative of the wider public school establishment's disdain for them. Day and other fixtures of the education establishment want the same kind of accountability that has failed the public school system for years: that is to say, no accountability other than to themselves.

That Cothran thinks looking critically at both sides of an issue constitutes an attack, says more about him than it does about me.

For the record, I am in favor of a strong charter school law in Kentucky. I supported Commissioner Terry Holliday's call for local school board control over them.

Cothran's comments are inaccurate and, if he is a man of integrity, they should be retracted.

What I'm not in favor of are shallow, sweet-sounding, bad ideas that would rob the public schools while returning Kentucky to the days when (often poorly educated) local trustees built good schools for some and poor schools for others.

The public schools can rightly be criticized for myriad failures with America's most difficult students. Those who espouse local control over all things can be rightly criticized for myriad instances of not even trying. At the same time, the public schools can be credited for developing the bulk of the American workforce; a workforce that built a great nation.

Local control over the schools existed in Kentucky for 162 years before KERA and left the state at the bottom of most measures. For most of that time the state operated a separate system for blacks and women were treated as an afterthought. There are still a lot of difficult problems to be solved, but in the 20 years since KERA, the state's standing has risen into the middle third. It is unlikely Cothran would consider such data since it refutes the veracity of his comments.

Kentucky spent many decades tolerating middling schools with strong local control exercised by trustees who feathered their own nests and used the schools as a jobs program for their families and supporters. The increase in state control over schooling was, in fact, a direct reaction to this lousy non-system, one that left many Kentucky children behind.

The growth in state involvement was attributable to the public's loss of confidence in local schools' ability to provide high-quality education. In addition, in the mid-1960s, new interest groups drew the nation's attention to such issues as civil rights, women's roles, student rights, and bilingual education--issues that had been overlooked by local politicans.

Federal and state categorical aid programs were established to meet the needs of underserved populations while local entities such as the PTA gradually lost their influence. Local initiatives were further eroded in the 1970s by the failure of communities to support property taxes to improve the schools, and court decisions concerning student rights and due process - issues that would likely yield to "higher" priorities, if Cothran had his way.