As another state prioritizes students over systems, Kansas continues to simply debate giving parents the option to send their children to the school of their choice.
In January, Tennessee became the latest state to pass a robust school choice bill.
The bill has now gone to the desk of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, who has promised to sign it.
Kansas Sen. Renee Erickson (R-Newton), the assistant senate majority leader, said Tennessee is doing what the Sunflower State is not.
“As other states prioritize students over systems, Kansas students will continue to fall behind and be at a competitive disadvantage if we don’t give parents the educational freedom they want and deserve,” Erickson said.
According to the Tennessean, the roughly $447 million Tennessee voucher program — the Education Freedom Scholarship program “will offer 20,000 scholarships of about $7,300 to Tennessee students, including both those enrolled in public school and those already attending a private institution anywhere in the state. Initially, half the slots would include income requirements.”
That $447 million is about 3.5 times the $125 million the Kansas Legislature is currently debating for its tax credit program.
Senate Bill 75 would provide a tax credit of $8,000 per child enrolled in an accredited private school or $4,000 per child enrolled in a non-accredited private school, including homeschooling.
Proponents say that students whose parents cannot afford private tuition would benefit tremendously. Nearly half of low-income students in Kansas are below grade level in reading and math, and the education system refuses to spend more than $500 million in At Risk funding to help students who are at risk of failing as required by state law.
While Kansas legislators talk, students fall farther behind
While legislators debate allowing parents to make decisions for their own children, test scores in Kansas continue to slip.
The most recent scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), acknowledged by the Kansas Department of Education as the “gold standard” of assessments, show that Kansas students once again perform below the national average in reading and math.
The recently released 2024 results show the state’s best ranking is #29 in math for 4th graders who are not low-income. All other rankings are in the 30s and 40s, with the worst being No. 44 in 8th-grade reading for students who are not economically disadvantaged, at just 31% proficient.
Only 12% of low-income 8th graders are proficient in math, and just 15% of low-income 4th graders read proficiently. The 2024 NAEP also shows that 40% of Kansas 4th-graders and 34% of 8th-graders are Below Basic in Reading. Those are both dramatically worse than in 2015 when KSDE and the State Board of Education began de-emphasizing academic improvement with the Kansans Can program and an accreditation system that measures social-emotional learning and other factors but none that tracks academic improvement.
Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson (R-Andover) said Kansas must move forward with choice.
“Tennessee just demonstrated that Kansas does not have the luxury of holding the ball while other states score touchdowns,” Masterson said. “By focusing on what’s best for students, we will have both great public schools and give parents more choices to provide a great education for their kids.”
Patrick Richardson – The Sentinel
Patrick Richardson has been a working journalist since 1992 at community papers across Kansas and for the last 10 as an editor for papers in Southeast Kansas, Northeast Oklahoma, and Southwest Missouri. As a freelancer, he has also broken major stories for national outlets like PJ Media and The Daily Caller. Richardson was born in Wichita and raised in Southwest Kansas and currently lives in extreme SE Kansas, with his wife, two Great Danes, English Bulldog and 10 grandchildren.
School choice in Kansas is different than Tennessee. Parents here can take their kids out any time for any reason and choose to do something different with no oversight. People are creative and if there’s a will, there’s a way. School Choice initiatives are admissions that the Public Schools are failing and the legislatures have chosen the easy route to ‘fix’ them. Throw money at people to keep them from complaining and possibly fixing the original problem. I realize we are in a difficult situation and people’s kids are at stake, but anytime you take a credit or money back, you open the door for regulation, which we are free from right now. We may lose the little ‘school choice’ we have and the actual problem will not be fixed. Unless the schools themselves are cut off from the spigot and their money is based on their outcomes, they will find a way to keep all their funding. They don’t give up. Schools do not want competition because it shows how bad they are. They will do anything to undermine alternatives, including lobbying for regulation–to make us prove we are complying and successful (the irony). And I don’t have any faith that our legislators will stand up to education lobbyists–are they going to start now? School choice is the easy way out.