Legislators won’t help Kentucky’s public schools by diverting money to private ones | Opinion

Rockcastle County Superintendent Carrie Ballinger was talking to some high school students this week when a student raised her hand.

“She said ‘my passion is music,’” Ballinger said. “She asked why can’t we have a music theory and music composition in our high school?”

The simple answer is money. Rockcastle is in the lowest 20% of property tax wealth, unable to tax themselves into more school funding that would provide that kind of specialized instruction.

“If she lived in Fayette or Jefferson, she would have that very opportunity that she’s seeking, but because she’s living in a rural district, she’s not,” Ballinger said.

It came as no surprise to Ballinger that Kentucky, which once was a national pathfinder for school funding equity, has now slipped to even greater inequality between rich and poor districts than what triggered the Rose lawsuit that ended with the Kentucky Education Reform Act.

This week, the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy released a paper finding “the difference in per-pupil funding between the state’s poorest and wealthiest districts now exceeds the level deemed unconstitutional by the Kentucky Supreme Court more than three decades ago.”

In 1990, there was a $3,489 per-pupil funding gap, in 2022 dollars, between the wealthiest and poorest school districts. In 2022, the per-pupil gap reached $3,902.

“Rose said the state has to provide equal opportunity for all kids, and that funding obligation cannot just be the responsibility of the local district,” Ballinger said. But because state legislators have let the base funding slip so much, poorer rural school districts simply can’t make up the difference. “That funding inadequacy impacts our instructional offerings, it impacts our ability to recruit and retain high quality teachers, it impacts our facilities and our ability to maintain and build new ones.”

Currently the district is $17 million short in its quest to replace a 50-year-old middle school with a leaking roof.

Let’s just fund another school system

But instead of addressing people like Ballinger, Kentucky’s legislative supermajority instead wants to start funding a new school system: a system of private schools.

They are openly planning to pass a ballot initiative that would rewrite the Constitution to allow tax dollars to pay for private schools. Kentucky’s founders were quite explicit on this point: “The interest and dividends of said fund, together with any sum which may be produced by taxation or otherwise for purposes of common school education, shall be appropriated to the common schools, and to no other purpose.”

That’s why the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled against a school voucher program last year. School choice advocates vowed to keep going until they got what they wanted, which will mean changing the Constitution.

But education savings accounts, vouchers, tax credits and the like always start out small and then start draining tax dollars away from public schools, said Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who began his career at the University of Kentucky.

And they end up helping not the children who want to leave public schools, but the ones who are already in private ones.

“What ends up happening is about three-quarters of the families are already in private school,” he said. “It’s not about helping failing schools, it’s about setting up a new subsidy for private enrollees.”

These efforts are supported by private schools who want new revenue streams from tax dollars, but it’s important to note that many of these efforts come from national groups, who generally want public schools to be privatized. For example, the School Freedom Fund is a PAC largely bankrolled by conservative megadonor Jeff Yass, a billionaire investment and trading executive who also supports Sen. Rand Paul. The School Freedom Fund has already put around $3 million into the Kentucky governor’s race.

But this is where national groups can get into trouble, Cowen said, because they don’t recognize the politics on the ground.

“How many private schools are there east of Lexington or in other rural areas?” he said. “If you can’t get into private school, school choice does nothing for you.”

And while rural legislators may be happy to attack books in a school library, they may be less likely to push measures that will hurt the biggest employers in their counties. Those school employees might just hold them accountable when money that should be going to their schools starts funding the little popup in the church basement instead.

“It’s impossible to pay for two school systems past about two or three budget cycles,” Cowen said. “If you need to raise teacher salaries or build infrastructure, you can’t do it if you’re paying for private schools.”

Hurting public schools

Where will this money come from? Not the GOP economic miracle of getting rid of the income tax. On Thursday, the state budget office announced that one of the triggers for lowering it another point had not been met, so the tax would not be lowered another point next year.

Luckily, Kentucky voters don’t seem to love changing our state Constitution, especially when it means it will hurt their local schools. But we will see many more millions of dollars flooding our state next year in an effort to change the democratic compact that our tax dollars should pay for public schools whether we choose them or not.

In Rockcastle County, Carrie Ballinger will be making the case that local schools should not be punished even more.

“If we already have a funding inadequacy issue that results in our students not getting an equitable education, then what happens if we start funding private schools?” she said. “It will only compound the problems our public schools are having.

“It makes no sense because public schools are the backbone of our rural communities,” she added. “You can look over what Kentucky has endured in the past few years from flooding to tornadoes — when tragedy strikes, it’s the school systems that step in. They are the community in rural Kentucky, and when we don’t fund them, we’re not just hurting students, we’re hurting the very communities that we love.”