Education commissioner talks charter schools, graduation requirements

In a wide-ranging interview Thursday with the Daily News, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis made the case for funding charter schools in Kentucky, an issue he said is one of many he’ll press lawmakers on during next year’s legislative session.

“There’s a fundamental difference of opinion in terms of what public school funding, or who public school funding is for,” Lewis said. “Some folks, I believe, may mistakenly believe that public school funding belongs to school districts. I believe public school funding – and the law supports me on this – is for kids.”

Lewis previously said he’ll ask lawmakers to approve a charters schools funding mechanism next year, despite the fact that the General Assembly won’t be considering a new state budget.

On Thursday, Lewis pushed back on critics who argue the state isn’t fully funding traditional public schools and that allowing student funding to flow to charter schools would worsen that situation.

“Whenever we’re having a public education conversation, it should go to children first,” he said. “The first question ought to be children, and I know for a fact there are parents that go to bed every night with tears in their eyes because they wish they had some alternative, some other public school that they could send their kids to.”

Lewis argued that every parent should have a choice about where they send their kids to school, not just those with the financial means to buy a house in the right neighborhood.

“The folks that don’t get the opportunity to make those types of decisions are poor people,” he said.

Lewis’ push for a charter schools funding mechanism, which he said is one of many legislative priorities, has raised concerns from some school district leaders.

They include Warren County Public Schools Superintendent Rob Clayton and Bowling Green Independent School District Superintendent Gary Fields. Both have said a funding mechanism for charter schools should wait until public schools are fully funded by the state.

Both school districts are faced with increasingly tapping their own resources to cover costs.

After the release of state testing results in September, that includes providing increased support for 13 local schools labeled as needing Targeted Support and Improvement. That label means those schools have at least one student subgroup performing as poorly as schools in the bottom 5 percent statewide.

Lewis said the state is having to revisit its model for supporting schools in light of a steep increase in the number of struggling schools that need help. He noted the Kentucky Department of Education’s funding for supporting that work was eliminated in the last state budget.

“We have doubled, more than doubled, the number of schools we are required by law to support, and the Commonwealth School Improvement Fund, which is the state funding mechanism for supporting that work, was not funded,” Lewis said.

As a result, the support the state can offer schools “won’t be as significant. It won’t be as hands-on as it has been in the past,” Lewis said.

“That’s unfortunate because the model that the department has used has been recognized nationally,” he added.

Lewis also cleared up what he described as misconceptions around a new 10th-grade competency test for reading and math that will be mandatory as part of new high school graduation requirements.

Through the assessment, students will be required to demonstrate a basic level of skill, with multiple ways to appeal a low score. One way, for example, is proving competency through a portfolio of work with a local superintendent’s permission.

“A lot of folks have been under the impression that this is something that if the state board of education passes that it would apply to kids in high school next year. It applies to this year’s current seventh-graders,” Lewis said. “When they get to 10th grade, they’ll be the first ones to take the test with the high stakes attached to it.”

The new graduation requirements are currently under a 30-day public comment period that ends this month.

In recent weeks, Lewis said he’s received a flood of emails from world language teachers concerned a requirement might be disappearing under the changes.

Lewis said that’s a misconception too.

“There is no current world language requirement,” he said. “There’s not one at the state level. There’s not one at the district level. I’ve not found a single district in Kentucky that has a requirement for world languages.”

Lewis wants students to continue learning languages as an elective that they chose as part of their post-graduation plans.

He hopes that the new requirements will be finalized by February. He said urgency is needed.

Although Kentucky has one of the highest graduation rates in the country, students aren’t graduating with the skills they need to succeed in college or the workforce. Under the requirement changes, all students will be required to show their transition readiness.

“I believe it is absolutely essential,” Lewis said, adding the state continues to see about 40 percent of graduates leaving high school and not moving on to any postsecondary education.

“We have to ensure that those kids have something, some basic skills, some preparation to go into the workforce, to be prepared, if they so choose, to return to postsecondary education at some later time,” he said. “The outcome for those kids, the ones that are leaving high school with just that high school diploma, those outcomes are scary.”

The other concern is that Kentucky isn’t sending enough kids on to postsecondary education compared to other states. Of those that do, only a fraction earn any kind of postsecondary credential.

“We send only 60 percent on, 23 percent of them require remediation when they get there and then only about 30 percent of them after seven years time earn any credential,” Lewis said.

By Aaron Mudd
Bowling Green Daily News