The Privatization of Education is Bad for Kentucky's Schools -- VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 2.

VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 2.

Pretty much everyone I know in Kentucky has worked at or been educated at a public school. Kentucky had a constitutional protection of our public schools that will be an amendment on this year's ballot.

I suspect that you're going to see a lot of propaganda about "educational freedom" telling you that you should vote in favor of amendment 2.

But Amendment 2 is just simply the permission for legislators to make whatever law they want regarding how public funds can be spent on education. This means that if passed, the next legislative session will be full of bills meant to divert public funds to private schools, and if my discussions with prominent Republicans in the state are any guide, these schools will not be held to the same standards as our public schools.

Instead, they believe the "market" will decide.

This means private schools receiving money will not be required to do any of the following:

• Provide open records and hold open meetings. Consider that what we know about our public schools and the critical stories you see in the news are made possible because of these transparency laws. As we've seen with the Archdiocese of Louisville, the Southern Baptist Convention, and other institutions, transparency into corruption and abuse isn't a strong suit for private institutions.
• Do the same testing and provide the same demographic information that public schools must do. These same politicians love to use this data to attack public schools, but don't want it for private institutions. We will have no way of evaluating if this grand experiment does anything Republicans swear it will do. And their feigned concern about things like racial achievement gaps in our public schools will evaporate once vouchers are in place.
• Provide a slot for every child who needs one regardless of the faith or sexual identity of the child or family.
• Provide a slot for every child regardless of their ability to pay
• Provide for the needs of special needs students.(Yes, this is still an issue in public schools, but it won't be fixed by shifting funds elsewhere.)
• Provide transportation to the schools of choice. JCPS' much maligned transportation system was necessary to provide choice for everyone. If the resources aren't there now, they're not going to get better as more choices pop up.

And some other considerations:

• Money provided will not create equity for poor families, because private schools still will set their own tuition. In many states the money simply lessens the burden on wealthier families who already sends their kids to private schools while not providing enough for poorer kids to make up the difference. $9000 in voucher money toward a $15,000 education is great if you're already paying for private school. Not so great if you're poor and have to make up that $6000 difference.
• Public schools are the largest employer in most Kentucky Counties. And while teacher pay can always be better, it's often a better paying job than many others in a county, and it's usually better than pay at private schools. Shifting money away from public schools is going to hurt their bottom line.
• Republicans tend to paint a school failing as a sign of success for vouchers and the "free market". But schools are not like a local pizza place where you can easily move your business elsewhere. When a school closes, it often leaves a lot of students and their parents in a lurch, and sets up a situation where education continuity from one year to the next is put in jeopardy.
• There has been a great interest in allowing people to cross district borders. This can create some serious headaches for districts and constituents, including overcrowding potential and people paying taxes for students from other counties to attend their system.

We should be working to improve and assist our public schools, not making donations to private entities that are free from oversight or obligations that we have with our public schools.

I urge you to VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 2 this fall.

Daniel Cameron's Education Plan -- Phase 2

Daniel Cameron recently released his education plan.  However, in the interest of appealing to Trump voters, who stop reading anything after the headline, Cameron was forced to leave off some items in the interest of brevity.   Luckily, a source in the campaign was able to get me part two of Daniel Cameron's education plan, and it's truly a bold vision for the future.

Daniel Cameron has a bold plan for moving Kentucky's educational outcomes forward for the betterment of our state and our most precious natural resource, expendable workers.   To that end, Daniel Cameron proposes these bold steps.   

Daniel Cameron Will Forever End Teacher Worries About a Fully Funded Pension Plan

Teachers have wasted far too much time and energy worrying about the money being there for their pensions.  I'll fix that by eliminating the pension plan and replacing it with a copy of a Dave Ramsey lecture on 8-Track, 10 Kentucky Lottery Crossword Scratch-Offs, and $7 in free play at their local historical racing machine location.    

Daniel Cameron will Put an End to Gender Identity Ideology Once And For All 

Under Daniel Cameron, our teachers will no longer be required to subscribe to woke gender ideology.  Instead, our kids will be taught that with education they can be anything they want to be.  Our boys can grow up to be football players, attorneys, lumberjacks, police officers, soldiers, and incels.  And girls will see the sky is the limit for them as they grow up to be teachers, nurses, housewives, mothers of ten, and anything that Barbie could be before the 1970s.   

Daniel Cameron Will Never Put Your Kids In Danger of Learning Loss Again 

When Andy Beshear closed down the United States because of the COVID virus and forced us all to wear masks, he denied our children valuable classroom learning time that set them back for decades.   That will never happen under a Cameron administration.  Daniel Cameron believes a strong immune system is essential to Kentucky's well being, and as your governor, Daniel Cameron will NEVER close schools during a pandemic, require your child to get vaccines, or wear a piece of cloth that denies them precious oxygen a developing brain needs.   After all, Mitch McConnell didn't become the most powerful Senator in the country by taking a stupid polio vaccine.   

Daniel Cameron Will Keep Your Kids From Harmful Books 

Our children are inundated with descriptions and imagery of graphic sex, porn stars, marital infidelity, and more, and not just in news about Donald Trump.   Under a Cameron administration, you can rest assured that your school's library will contain only books that Daniel would read to his own child.  These include works by classic children's authors like Kirk Cameron, Dinesh Dsouza, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and God.   By reducing our libraries to a single shelf, we free up valuable space for Cameron's next initiative.   

Daniel Cameron Will Restore Discipline With His School To Prison Pipeline Internships

Andy Beshear thinks detention should be like the Breakfast Club, full of liberal celebrities breaking the rules in a library full of books people want to read.  Under a Cameron administration, we'll use the innovations of Texas and private prison companies throughout the world to create a detention that is both punitive and teaches kids a trade.  By removing books from libraries and replacing them with workstations, we'll be able to train any unruly child in valuable skills that will pay huge dividends for the companies they serve.  Under our School To Prison Pipeline Internships, bad children will learn to be telemarketers, customer service representatives, and to make products that we legally can't pay non-incarcerated people to do.  The best part is 80% of their wage will go back to the school to pay for fat pay raises for SROs. 

Daniel Cameron Will Make Sure Our Kids Learn History and Patriotism 

Andy Beshear encourages our educators to say the United States was bad because it had slavery, and that the United States is supposed to be some sort of woke melting pot of various faiths that aren't Judeo-Christian (Heavy on the Christian, light on the Judeo).     Under a Cameron administration, our children will learn how our nation was founded by Jesus and the Founding Fathers as a monument to the freedom granted by Christianity, and that slavery was just a helpful guided free internship that taught people valuable skills. They will learn to respect our flag by hugging, kissing, and fondling it like our greatest President ever, Donald Trump.  

Daniel Cameron Will Eliminate Teacher Shortages And Fund College Scholarships     

Sometimes it's all in how you frame the problem.  Do we have a teacher shortage or a student surplus?   Daniel Cameron remains committed to his pro-life stance and knows that nothing makes you value life more than realizing how quickly it can be snuffed out.  Under the Cameron Plan, Kentucky's New Educational Hunger Games will provide a robust competition that will allow competitors in a single elimination tournament to test out their skills with firearms, weapons, and survival in a monthly "last kid standing" competition for a full tuition scholarship to a local college.   Loser's families will receive a free consolation prize of a share of stock in a local aluminum plant.  

Daniel Cameron Will Encourage Teachers To Reduce Test Scores Through Incentives and Rewards

Daniel Cameron knows how important math and reeding scores are for our youth, and that's why he's set a goal of having 95% of our students proficient in reeding and 127% of our kids proficient in math by 2027.  He will accomplish this by public punishment of any teacher who does not accomplish this goal for their kids in Kentucky's new Education Stockades.   Every year on Reckoning Day, non-performing teachers will be shackled into these stockades and students will be allowed to throw all the fruits and vegetables at them we've removed from those gross healthy school lunches.    

Daniel Cameron Will Create an Ambitious Rebranding of the Governor's Scholars and Related Programs

Daniel Cameron recognizes that the names "Governor's Scholars" and "Governor's School" are impersonal and carry little prestige.  Following the inspiration of his mentor Donald Trump, the Cameron administration will now refer to all of these students as Cameron's Kids.  And in order to prevent brain drain from the state, all Cameron's Kids will sign a lifetime contract to stay and work in Kentucky under penalty of 10 years in jail.   Meanwhile, Cameron will ensure that these students are rewarded for their scholarly endeavors by covering 5% of the cost to any two year educational institution they choose in the state.  

With this bold vision for education, there's no way that Kentucky can fail.  For the future of your kids and Kentucky, vote Daniel Cameron for Governor.   

 

I Have a COVID 19 Headache

My head hurts.

To be honest, it's been hurting for awhile. Not so much pain as this continuous pressurized fog that shoves against my temples and makes my brain overload.  

Are we really this stupid?   Have we gone insane?  

When I was a teenager three decades ago, I felt like our state and country valued education, expertise, and intelligence.  We were the country that put a man on the moon.  We pioneered computers.  We did it with science, engineering, technology, and a lot of smart people working toward a common goal that inspires.   We treasured teachers, education, and saw college as a lofty goal.  Even in our poorest regions people understood the value of teachers and a decent education.  We trusted science and medicine to give us better things.  A career was something you spent loyal to a company with the trust that you'd have decent benefits and retirement.  We had a notion that each generation living better than the next was a loftier goal than a few of us being a billionaire.  

But somewhere along the way, perhaps with the rise of faith in politics, the triumph of Wall Street over main street, the growth of the internet,  or social media, we decided that expertise didn't matter.  Kindness didn't matter.  Hard work didn't matter.  Doing the right thing didn't matter.  Long term success was to be sacrificed for short term gains.   And idiocy was A-OK.  

We're witnessing it now during the COVID-19 pandemic as the simple acts of wearing a mask, physical distancing, and limiting our interactions are now seen as divisive issues.  We see politicians and the public alike dismissing the dangers of the disease and beating their chests about refusing to wear a mask like they're the guy standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.  

The stupidity seems to be raging like wildfire in Kentucky these days.  Republicans in our state General Assembly have been continuously attacking our Governor for trying to slow the spread of COVID-19 in any way they can.  Most seem to reject the idea that it will be difficult for school children to follow COVID guidelines while they themselves can't even be bothered to wear masks and physically distance themselves in their own meetings to reopen schools.  

The height of stupidity came this week when the Interim Joint Committee on Education met to discuss reopening schools.  The leader of the committee meeting, Regina Huff, sat for most of the meeting with her face covering down around her neck, even though she was sitting less than six feet away from a staffer.  Next to her was Maxwell Wise, her cochair, who led the last meeting of the committee maskless and found out he was positive for COVID not long after.  He and his fellow committee members didn't seem to recognize or care that Huff and a man sitting in the back of the audience were not wearing masks during the meeting.  

The man in the back of the room was Dennis Buschman, an alleged concerned parent testifying that schools needed to reopen.  With his medical and epidemiological expertise as a JROTC instructor, he found it ridiculous that schools hadn't reopened since kids are at a low risk of death from the virus.  He went on to compare COVID to driving, which causes far more deaths of kids, but is something we do everyday without a second thought.  Of course, the proudly maskless expert on COVID failed to mention that in most states we're required to wear a seatbelt on our body when we drive to protect ourselves, and we are subject to laws meant to protect not just us, but others.  You know, kind of like wearing a mask.   

I have yet to understand why we've turned COVID into a political hot potato.  The Governor is attacked for trying to save lives.  Our Secretary of State is attacked for trying to reach a bipartisan agreement on making it easier for people to safely vote.  Certainly Beshear has made some missteps, and some of the logic on what is reopening and what isn't is flawed.  But that doesn't mean that everything he says and does is wrong, or in the worst interest of Kentucky, or the health of its people.  Rather than work together to find the quickest and safest way to "reopen" the state for the benefit of all Kentuckians using science, reason, and the knowledge that we may have to continually revisit what we do, many in our state seem to have taken the stance that these measures are a burden to them, an attack on their masculinity, and an infringement on their freedom akin to being tossed in a facial gulag.  

No reasonable human being should be sitting in a meeting about reopening schools maskless.  No education committee chairman should be inviting conspiracy minded people to speak as experts.  Those that teach our youth shouldn't be representing their organizations in a manner contrary to that organization's own stated policies.  And our discussions on education should be grounded in the reality of our public education system, its students, its teachers, and their families, not a political ideology driven by a need to attack the opposing party.   

The members of our education committee are acting like the worst students in class, cherry picking evidence, pushing their own selfish needs over the needs of the whole, and refusing to comply with even the simplest of requests to maintain safety and order in the classroom.   

We deserve better than what we get in Frankfort.   Here's hoping that the whims of these same people don't wind up getting children or their families harmed or killed.