All Charter School Bills are Bad

I am against both HB520 and HB103 because either bill could lead to bad Charter Schools in KY. However, I have to disagree with the letter from Jeanne Allen of the Washington, DC, based Center for Education Reform in claiming that HB520 is worse than HB103. She cites Indiana as a good example, but omits to report that former Indiana state schools superintendent Tony Bennett was forced to resign a similar position in Florida after it was learned he altered the state grade of a charter school founded by a wealthy Indiana Republican donor.

Iowa has only 3 charter schools in the state, but that is because choice was left with the local school districts and not forced from state capital bureaucrats who receive campaign donations from out of state companies seeking to make profits from public school funds.

While HB520 is vastly superior to HB103, it still permits Online Charter Schools. The pro-charter school Walton Family Foundation, which has spent over $1 Billion on Charter Schools, said ” If virtual charters were grouped together and ranked as a single school district, it would be the ninth-largest in the country and among the worst-performing…Funders, educators, policymakers, and parents cannot in good conscience ignore the fact that students are falling a full year behind their peers in math and nearly half a school year in reading, annually. For operators and authorizers of these schools to do nothing would constitute nothing short of educational malpractice.”

Since both HB103 and HB520 permit online charter schools, it is in the best interest of the children of Kentucky that both bills be defeated. To do otherwise would be to permit “educational malpractice.”

Ed Hensley
Louisville, KY