Lawmakers in the 2022 General Assembly session gave public education advocates a mixed bag of legislation, ranging from increases in per-pupil funding and a greater focus on early literacy to no pay raises for teachers and a shift in some powers away from site-based decision-making councils.
“If we look at investment, yes, it’s been a good session for education… Strong investment in K-12, strong investment in post-secondary,” says Brigitte Blom, president and CEO of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. “Minus a couple of areas that really caused some angst, it was a good session.”
Blom says an especially important measure was Senate Bill 9, also known as the Read to Succeed Act, which provides funding and training for teachers to help Kentucky’s youngest learners improve their literacy skills. She says this renewed emphasis on reading stems from a recent drop in proficiency scores: In 2015, Kentucky was ranked eighth in the nation in reading proficiency. But since then, the state has dropped to 26th. Blom attributes the decline to changes in state standards and school accountability as well as a disinvestment in teacher professional development.
“We haven’t given our teachers the resources they need, we haven’t given them the time to work with one another, and we’re constantly changing things for them,” she says. “At the same time, other states are moving forward and leap-frogging ahead of us.”
Under Read to Succeed, Blom says teachers will be trained to instruct children on both phonics (how combinations of letters sound) and whole language (recognizing words as a whole) skills. She describes this “balanced approach” as better for preparing teachers to help all students, regardless of any comprehension issues a child might have. Lawmakers appropriated $11 million in each year of the biennium to fund professional development in this approach.
“Within three years we should be studying the impact of this investment to be able to say whether or not it is resulting in improvements in literacy,” says Blom.
Public and Charter School Funding, Teacher Pay, and Pre-Kindergarten
Lawmakers also provided a $100 increase in both years of the biennium to per pupil funding for schools known as SEEK. Blom says those extra dollars combined with federal COVID relief aid that public schools received will give district administrators resources they need to address a range of issues.
“It’s important that we see those [federal pandemic] dollars as dollars to help districts and students catch up from learning loss,” she says, “and that those dollars coming from the state are really the stability dollars that our districts can plan with.”
The legislature also provided funds for full-day kindergarten and moved closer to providing districts with full funding for student transportation, according to Blom. But the General Assembly did not fund universal pre-kindergarten despite calls from Gov. Andy Beshear and other early childhood education advocates.
Rather than seeing pre-K strictly as an education issue, Blom says legislative leaders consider it to be more of a child care issue that impacts workforce development. She says working-class parents need high quality, reliable care for their children for a full day, whereas pre-K services generally only last half a day.
“Universal public pre-school just for four-year-olds in about four hours may benefit them from a learning standpoint, but it’s not everything that a working family needs,” Blom says. “We need to bring pre-school and child care together in a more richly funded system that results in a stronger infrastructure for early childhood.”
The General Assembly also declined to include a pay raise for teachers and school staff even as they boosted compensation for state workers. Republican legislative leaders contend they provided districts enough funding elsewhere in the budget to enable school officials to offer raises as needed within their individual districts.
Blom says that’s an understandable approach, given that other public employees work directly for state government, whereas school teachers and staff are employed by their local school districts. At the same time though, Kentucky teacher compensation continues to lag behind national averages. A recent report from the National Education Association ranks the commonwealth 44th among all states in starting teacher pay.
“School teachers are not paid at an incoming professional level relative to other areas of business,” she says, “and so that’s something we’re going to have to continue to wrestle with as a state.”
Local Versus State Control
The final version of Senate Bill 1 contained a range of education issues that impact who controls aspects of curricula and hiring within schools.
The 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) created school-based decision-making councils comprised of parents, teachers, and administrators to address things like school policies, principal hiring, and textbook selection.
“It is really important to note that 30-plus years ago (KERA) was Kentucky’s answer to ensuring parent voice locally, to ensuring teacher voice locally, and to ensuring more innovation within our schools,” says Blom.
But now SB 1 gives curriculum selection and principal-hiring responsibilities to district superintendents. The new law encourages superintendents to continue to seek community input on those decisions, but doesn’t actually require it. Blom says that centralization of power in one person may not yield the best outcomes in the classroom.
“The one thing we know without a doubt is that when communities are engaged in the decision making of their schools,” she says, “and districts turn outward to them, we get better results for our students because we’re all in it together,” she says.
SB 1 also integrates legislation that was called the Teaching American Principals Act that requires civics instruction on 24 specific documents and speeches from U.S. history. Blom describes the measure as “a solution searching for a problem.”
Despite an outcry among some national commentators about “critical race theory,” Blom says there’s not been a problem with how Kentucky educators teach history and civics. Unlike anti-CRT legislation in other states, Blom says Kentucky’s measure doesn’t prohibit the teaching of sensitive topics nor does it call for the removal of textbooks that might be considered controversial. She says this is another area where increased professional development training for educators would help ensure that they use appropriate strategies for teaching the nation’s history.
In House Bill 9, lawmakers finally provided a funding mechanism for charter schools that were legalized back in 2017. The legislation also calls for the creation of pilot charter programs in Jefferson County and in northern Kentucky within the next 18 months.
Blom says for now she sees somewhat more interest in charters in northern Kentucky than she does in Louisville. She says it will be up to the local authorizing entities (local school boards, local mayor’s offices, or the Northern Kentucky University Board of Regents) to review any charter applications, grant an initial contract to a school operator, and ensure the charters achieve better student outcomes than the local traditional schools can provide.
“They need to hold the applicant accountable,” says Blom. “At the end of that five-year contract, if there’s no appreciable difference, then the authorizers should be reevaluating that contract and can terminate it.”
Blom says she fears that the tight, 18-month timetable for launching pilot schools could compromise the quality of instruction that charter students might receive.
