Opinion: Rand Paul Calls for Choice To Address School Failures

Let the kids escape the holding pens

The latest state-issued report on Kentucky schools shows that only two of Louisville's 18 persistently low-achieving schools meet required measures for progress. Five Jefferson County schools have shown "zero" progress over the past three years.

This is a terrible, shameful, immediate crisis. We have thousands of young students enrolled in publicly funded schools where they are not being taught effectively or prepared for adult life.

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday calls this situation "academic genocide." I agree. …

I believe equality in education will only be achieved when we allow school choice for all: rich or poor, white, brown or black. Let the taxes paid for education follow every student to the school of his or her family's choice.

Comments

[CrunchyMama]

If they haven't improved after over a decade of No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, then perhaps those weren't the measures needed to enable and ensure school success, so it's hard to imagine that pushing MORE measures and MORE "choice" (read: corporate-funded charters which often end up costing taxpayers MORE than traditional public schools do) would improve schools, especially when they pull resources from the school that are left while they simultaneously skim the better students off the top while leaving the majority of special education and ELL's behind in the public schools so people like you can point your fingers in even greater outrage at the further-reduced test scores.

But by all means, put our children through the wringer with corporate-funded and corporate-conceived reforms imagined by people who have never been educators, many of whom send their children to private schools that don't have to undergo the testing and monitoring that public schools do, and in fact offer the low class sizes and arts enrichment programs that could well make the difference for the public schools. I'm sure THAT will show us how misguided and wrong we've been about "reform." (Yeah, that was sarcasm.)