Kentucky Governor Any Beshear is one of the few politicians out there who vocally and directly supports public education, and he has stood firm in a state where the legislature is determined to defund public schools. I'm embedding the education part of his message from 9 months ago so you can watch the whole thing, but I want to transcribe for you here his bold and clear statement about charter schools (it starts at about 2:20 in the clip). He's announcing that he will veto the entire charter school bill.
I'm against charter schools.
They are wrong for our commonwealth. They take taxpayer dollars away from the already underfunded public schools in the commonwealth, and our taxpayer dollars should not be redirected to for-profit entities that run charter schools.
As attorney general, I can tell you the number of prosecutions we had against for-profit colleges, how so many of them took advantage of so many people. And the idea that we would open up that same ability for people to prey on our even younger students is simply not the direction that Kentucky should go.
And the bill would send taxpayer dollars to charter schools that have boards that are not elected and are not answerable to the people. Public dollars being spent without that oversight. And they're not even required to comply with the same controls and accountability measures as our public schools.
The answer to concerns about the performance in our public schools lies with actually funding and working with our public schools, not trying to divert money away to folks that you give more flexibility to than the group you're asking to do a better job.
There's more. You can watch the whole thing here. If you're in Harrisburg, could you run this on over to Josh Shapiro's office and have him take a look?
KY is also the US leader in teaching reading. As the slogan goes: want higher reading comprehension? Teach more science. PHONICS + CONTENT.
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