Commissioner wants to shake up education in Kentucky

“We won’t be able to change education in Kentucky without some type of disruptive innovation.”

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday speaking to the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents in Bowling Green

The commissioner went on to explain part of the motivation for such a shakeup is to do a better job for minority and low-income children. He wants better teaching tools to reach autistic students and others with learning disabilities and who pose major discipline problems.

Holliday is pushing local school districts to request waivers from existing regulations that create roadblocks to innovation.

One major area of concern is the large number of lost school days due to bad weather. Holliday thinks new technology tools could help a lot with this problem that has disrupted instruction in many Kentucky schools over the past two years.

Apparently unmentioned, however, was perhaps the most important roadblock to superintendents making change – Kentucky’s awkward School Based Decision Making Council (SBDM) laws.

Holliday can push superintendents all he wants, but as long as the real decisions about what happens in schools are out of superintendent control (which is the case thanks to the SBDM law), local school districts can’t “disrupt” much of anything wrong in our public schools. If we are going to have real change, the SBDM program is where it will have to start.

And, if the commissioner really wants innovation laboratories, some of the best models we have seen are found in charter schools. We need a law to allow Kentucky to set up such education laboratories, because the commissioner definitely has some things right. After 20 years of KERA, the commissioner knows too many of our public schools still are not working for minorities, the poor, and students with learning disabilities.