Big Elephant in the Education Room

Kentucky educators and legislators like to debate in the 'safe' zone when it comes to public education performance. More money for education, testing standards, and graduation rate statistics are safe debates. The power structure of education is not threatened. No one falls out of their comfort zone. The following video prepared by Reason TV on Education Revolt in Watts describes challenges to education reform that education power brokers in Kentucky don't want to address:

School performance and challenges like what were described in Watts exist in Kentucky. The Jefferson County Southern Leadership School Audit Report 10/15/2006 - 10/20/2006 is extremely concerning. Pages 5 and 6 of the audit give a brief summary overview of the findings. These two pages clearly bring into question the seriousness of Kentucky's oversight approach, support approach, and accountability approach.

The audit was for one school. Yet, Jefferson County has many failing schools. These schools are failing to provide students the education fundaments to compete in life.

Like the school board member in the Education Revolt in Watts said, "I'm not sure what tomorrow looks like but I've had enough of yesterday".

It is long past time for Kentucky's leadership to put student learning as the top priority and hold educators and oversight boards accountable to get the barriers to real improvement out of the way.

It is long past time draw the line in the sand and make sure taxpayers are getting the maximum learning impact from each dollar spent in the education budget.