Chapter Six
Aftermath: The Council for Better Education after the Opinion

In recognition of the Council’s successful litigation, State Representative John Harper sought to have the member districts’ expenses returned to them.  House Joint Resolution 25 sponsored by Harper and thirteen other representatives, called for the “state to reimburse local school districts for actual costs incurred in…Rose vs. Council for Better Education…” Moreland expressed his appreciation for the unsolicited attempt stating, “whether this legislation is successful or not, your intentions are greatly appreciated.”  HJR 25 was assigned to the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, where it died.
After the Supreme Court decision, the Council for Better Education evolved from a litigant into a watchdog for the equity issue.  In a period of two years the group’s presidency changed twice.  In 1991, Robert Arvin, Superintendent of the Oldham County Public Schools, was elected only to resign six-months later when he accepted a position with the Kentucky Department of Education.  James Young, the Superintendent of the Russellville Independent School District, followed him in office and served for a year and a half.  The Council’s plan was to monitor developments, but try to allow the new system to be implemented without Council intervention, at least, not for a while. Council members wanted to be supportive of the change, while waiting for the right time to reemerge and more effectively address adequacy.  According to Moreland, 
We knew that we were not going to achieve mathematical equity immediately.  And we’re willing to be tolerant of the system, provided the mechanism is good, and provided that we’re working toward that equity in the rollout period, which looks like it’s going to be some five or six years.  Once that equity is achieved…then I think we’ve got to go toward the concept of adequacy.  That doesn’t mean that we’re willing to take what is given to us.  There are enough chain-rattlers in our group that if it looks like we’re advancing backwards then…we’re ready to go.  We’ll do what we feel like we have to do.” 

Immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision, the Council busied itself monitoring the efforts of the Task Force on Education, a group formed to guide the development of Kentucky’s new system of schools.  In the Council’s view, the first attempt at a formula to prescribe how funds would be distributed under the new Kentucky Education Reform Act would not achieve the equity that was promised.  Concerns arose early on that the formula might, in fact, allow the inequitable distribution of public school funds to continue.  The Governor and members of the General Assembly were solicitous of the Council and wanted to obtain the Council’s acknowledgement that they were fully committed to reform.  
Jack Moreland drafted a widely distributed letter claiming, “consciously or unconsciously, the Task Force [had] deviated from the main themes of the Stephens decision; namely, equity and adequacy.”  The Council once again hired Dr. Kern Alexander, this time to draft a report that outlined specific concerns with the direction the Task Force seemed to be taking.  The Council promised that it was “absolutely committed to a fair and just resolution of those issues.” 
The letter drew quick responses from key staff in the Governor’s office, assuring the Council that the Task Force was “very much aware of the importance of thoroughly addressing the court’s mandate,” that they had “not strayed from the equity and adequacy issues,” and that the points made in Alexander’s document “deserve reemphasis.”  In the final analysis a new formula was developed for the distribution of public school funds called SEEK (Support Educational Excellence in Kentucky).  
The methodology in SEEK provided a ‘tiered’ system composed of three components.  First, the Adjusted Base Guarantee was “a guaranteed amount of revenue per pupil to be provided for each school district” equal to the “base funding level for each pupil in average daily attendance in the district in the previous year.”  That base funding was adjusted by the number of at-risk students, the number and types of exceptional children, vocational school students and transportation costs.  The number of at-risk students was multiplied by a factor of .15 and added to a district’s funding.  The funding for exceptional children was an add-on based upon the December 1st student count from the prior year and the types of exceptionality as defined by KRS 157.360.  Transportation allocations utilized a complex graph-adjusted cost per district, described in KRS 157.370.  A deduction factor of .3 was also applied against the base for each child attending a state-operated vocational center.  Districts were reimbursed for Home 

and Hospital costs for students with short-term health impairments.  Districts were also permitted to levy an equivalent tax rate, which would produce up to fifteen percent of the funds provided by the base rate and add-ons, and receive equalization at 150 percent of the statewide average per pupil assessment. The highest level of effort ever afforded Kentucky’s school children underwrote the formula.
Continuing Kentucky’s past pattern, even the newly created SEEK formula was not fully funded.  Although, at ninety-six percent it was much closer to full funding than historically had been the case for a statewide school-funding scheme.  The Kentucky Post reported, “During the first year of the new funding program, districts didn’t receive all the money they expected because not enough money was put into a matching fund that rewarded districts for raising taxes.” During the second two years of SEEK, allocations were cut.  The formula was under-funded by $24 million in the first year of SEEK, and $50 million in the second.  When the Council complained, Kentucky Department of Education Finance Director, Kyna Koch explained to the Kentucky Post, “If SEEK were fully funded, you wouldn’t even hear this discussion because everybody would be getting everything they felt like they were entitled to.”
The SEEK formula provided more money for poorer districts.  Wealthier districts complained that without a guarantee of continued funding at existing 

levels, or better, their programs would suffer.  A group calling itself The Coalition of High Aspiration School Districts formed just long enough to issue a report.  Some Council members feared that the group, which consisted of fifteen affluent school districts including Anchorage, Murray, Fort Thomas and Beechwood Independents along with Fayette, Jefferson, Boone and Woodford counties, might serve to counteract the equity issue by pressing the General Assembly to permit higher local taxes in certain districts.  However, the report focused squarely on the issue of adequacy stating that, “…by some criteria, Kentucky has no rich districts.”  
KERA represents an ambitious and commendable effort to respond to a court order and move Kentucky toward educational excellence.  As KERA reforms are implemented, the challenge will be to ensure (1) that funding level for excellence is adequate, (2) that the full range of special needs students and special conditions are recognized in the state’s program and (3) that educational progress can be achieved by all students.

Apparently, the Coalition’s voice was heard.  When a budget shortfall struck the state, the 1992 General Assembly passed a “hold harmless” provision, which guaranteed eighteen of Kentucky’s richest school districts that they would not receive less funding than they had during the 1991-1992 fiscal year.  The Council immediately recognized the disequalizing aspects of such a decision and went to work arguing that the General Assembly’s action was a retreat from the Rose decision.  The Council members complained that those ‘hold harmless’ school districts would in fact be exempt from any cuts while the rest of the districts had to make up any difference.  As Jack Moreland put it, “that absolutely gets at the crux of what we’re all about, which is equal justice for all.”  
The issue remained a concern into 1993, when Council for Better Education President, James Young wrote to Kentucky’s first Education Commissioner, Thomas Boysen.  He asked for “clarification as to whether the State budget passed by the 1992 General Assembly is in conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling…”  Deputy Commissioner, Randy Kimbrough, responded for the Commissioner by providing data regarding the 1992-93 tentative budget and the 1993-94 forecast, but avoiding the question of legal conflicts altogether.  She wrote that, indeed, the “hold harmless provisions in the 1993-94 forecast provide[d] over $12 million to eighteen eligible districts.” The Council pointed out that the money needed to fund the hold harmless districts reduced by more than $12 million the amount available and therefore it was, in effect, taken from the poorer districts.
For example, the Kentucky Post reported that Ft. Thomas, a well-to-do school system, was designated as a hold harmless district.  As such, Ft. Thomas received an additional $611,799 during the 1992-93 school year.  At the same time, Dayton Independent lost $21,500.  Moreland acknowledged the state shortfall but argued the answer is not taking more money from the poor districts 

when they are trying to catch up.  According to Council President James Young, “They cut us pretty wickedly.  I didn’t mind taking a flat cut but when they took $68,000 to send to Jefferson and Fayette County so that they could pay their people more than mine.  Now that bothered me.”  Young had been in contact with several of his colleagues.  It soon became apparent to him that there was not any pattern or formula used to make the cuts; rather it appeared to be whoever had money left in their budgets from the prior year.  
I’ve got 1,500 students.  They took $48 and some odd cents [per child] out of my district…[anticipating the short fall] I laid off four teachers and didn’t give a teacher’s raise this year.  Now, they looked and said, ‘Jim’s going to have a decent balance. We’ll take more money from him.’  Todd County over here has got 2000 students; they took about $7 per pupil from them.  Logan County has a higher assessment per pupil than we have and 3,200 students and they took about $8 per student…arbitrarily.
 
Young called a meeting of the Council membership for Friday, February 26, 1993, in Frankfort, to vote on a course of action but a sudden snow storm prevented all but four members from attending.  Those present decided to wait until June to meet again and vote.  
In the meantime, Moreland and Young had been invited by State Representative, Joseph Barrow to testify before a committee of the State House of Representatives.  Moreland also responded to an invitation to meet with Dudley Cotton and Robert V. Wagoner, both of whom worked in the area of school finance with the Office of Educational Accountability (OEA) to discuss the hold harmless provisions in light of the court’s ruling.  The hold harmless provision was ultimately supported by the OEA making a bureaucratic resolution unlikely.  By June, Superintendent Young retired and Moreland was once again named President of the Council for Better Education.  
Kern Alexander discouraged Council members from pursuing legal action, however.  He related to Moreland his opinion that as long as the hold harmless provision was working toward a diminishing number that the Council lacked the strong legal position needed to go back to court.  The formula continued to move toward more relative equity rather than less.  “However,” Moreland cautioned, “if, because of the shortfall of funds, that turns and goes in the opposite direction…I would suggest that we would be back in court fairly quickly.”  The watchdog barked, but did not bite.
The Council members had openly discussed disbanding.  KERA had been signed and it became clear that the Prichard Committee was going to remain active to make certain that KERA was implemented statewide.  The reason that the Council was kept alive was to address adequacy.  In Young’s view, KERA raised the level of expected student outcomes but with a level of funding that made it impossible to achieve.  He had spoken to legislators arguing that Kentucky‘s state revenue was not where it should be.  As he put it, “You can’t expect us to turn out an internationally superior product and we’re still not even at the national average for expenditure.”
Did the Council for Better Education improve conditions for children in Kentucky’s poorest districts?  The evidence from Dayton Independent Schools demonstrates that it did.  By 1993, Dayton had moved from its traditional place near the bottom of northern Kentucky school districts to a more competitive position.  In 1990, Dayton Independent Schools received $2,900,000, a 57% increase in state funds as a direct result of the SEEK funding formula in KERA.  As a result of the action, Moreland was able to bring in as much new money in one year as he would have normally received for a biennium.  According to Moreland, “To achieve that, it required an investment on the part of the Dayton Board of Education of approximately $700.”  In terms of money for teacher salaries, Dayton had historically floundered around 140th in the state.  By the 1992-93 school year, Dayton ranked 40th in the state in salaries.   
By early July 1993, Moreland had written to Debra Dawahare asking her to consider “re-establishing a relationship with the Council for Better Education.”  At the time he was not necessarily thinking about “a full-fledged lawsuit” but perhaps an injunction declaring the hold harmless provision illegal.  But Moreland knew that this was not the major issue.  He concluded, “I don’t think the hold harmless is worth a six-year process in the courts.”  Although the Council was genuinely concerned about any erosion to the equity question, its members did share a core belief with the leadership of the General Assembly - that Kentucky needed KERA to succeed.  Moreland said, 
The worst thing that can happen is if we all get into a contest fighting with each other again.  We’ve got much too strong a goals in terms of education to be fighting one with the other over $450 million out of a $2 billion budget.

Besides, the Council’s prime interest lay elsewhere.  Moreland asked in his letter to Dawahare, “Since adequacy was so much a part of the Rose vs. Council for Better Education ruling, should not someone be defining adequacy and working toward same?”  Dawahare responded that she “would be pleased to undertake the representation” but after some consideration, and without Alexander’s encouragement, it was determined that the time was not right for legal action.  
Aside from a small core of Superintendents there was very little activity being carried on by the Council, and what was done, was mainly done by Moreland in the Council’s name.  Few meetings were held, but when they were (and when minutes were kept) the minutes were sent to all Superintendents in the state in an effort to forestall any impression that the Council was taking any under-the-table action that might be thought divisive by the more affluent districts.  In Moreland’s opinion, those districts were potential allies whenever the Council moved toward addressing adequacy.  Council membership stood at ninety, but it is likely that many of those districts did not know they were 

members.  Over time, Superintendents and local boards of education members had changed, and in many cases, more than once.  Moreland explained the Council focus in 1993.
We feel right now that our thrust is as much in the area of adequacy as it is in equity and that everyone can benefit from that…There’s not been a lot of recent activity.  We did talk about going out for another assessment of another $ .25 per child on the premise that we might very well get into some litigation…a kind of a war chest…There is some movement in that area.

From the time of Arnold Guess’s invitation, approximately nine years of effort was required from the Council for Better Education to carry out the case and monitor KERA’s early implementation.  It took six months to secure Bert Combs as lead counsel, another six for the “66” districts to verbally commit to Council membership.  The Attorney General’s opinion allowing the Council for Better Education to assess membership dues from school funds came three months later, and it took three more to get the suit filed.  The Circuit Court trial began nineteen months after filing, and it took almost three years before Judge Corns entered a final judgment.  Eight months later the Supreme Court ruling came down, followed by the signing of KERA ten months later.  
In general, Council record keeping appeared to be about as rigorous as one might expect from a local civic club.  Files were kept in boxes and handwritten notes were made on letters as busy Superintendents took messages from each other.  For example, the author used four different kinds of “authorities” to verify membership – 1) handwritten notes on letters, 2) copies of check stubs from local school districts, 3) ledger entries and 4) listings on the Council membership roll.  It appears that Council membership reached seventy with the last district joining sometime during or after March 1990.
Council for Better Education, Inc. bank statements showed deposits of $153, 317.16 from May 1985 to December 1989.  Expenses appear to have been roughly $150,000, most of which went to legal and consultant services.  
Such evidence of Council activity does not go beyond 1993.  Moreland left the Dayton Independent School District to become Interim President of Northern Kentucky University and for several years the Council for Better Education slipped into complete dormancy.  The Council did not reappear until the winter of 2002 when Moreland, who had become the Superintendent for the Covington Independent School District, started rattling the saber once again.

 Nurturing the Change

When Robert Sexton commented at Bert Comb’s testimonial dinner about the difficulties that lay ahead – after the passage of legislation – he foresaw the breadth of commitment required to implement such a sweeping reform.  The early days of reform required diligent attention to many details and the legislature as well as the Department of Education needed support in order to effect change at the classroom level, and to resist those who would simply prefer to throw the reform out.  
The Prichard Committee, Kentucky’s most prominent citizens’ advocacy coalition to emerge the 1980s, had a decision to make.  The Committee had already reinvented itself from a group with a higher education mission into an elementary and secondary education watchdog.  After the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, it evolved again, into an organization dedicated to supporting the changes, not a lapdog, but clearly unwilling to be too critical.  The larger question of systemic reform outweighed any particular problems with implementation.  The Prichard Committee’s intellectual leader, Robert Sexton recalled the internal debate about whether the committee should continue after the passage of reform. 
I think it was a critical decision as to whether to continue [after KERAs adoption]…By the late 1980s I was getting pretty tired of this whole thing.  The work was beginning to get a little bit boring.  It was like one more damn legislative session, and another Governor to argue with, another press conference.  Same old, same old, again and again.  And I had kind of said, ‘Should I move on to whatever else is next?’  The fund raising was not fun.  Still isn’t, but it was less fun then because…we never knew where our money was going to come from. 

	[After the reform act was passed] there was the question of what our staff does…How long do we do this?  So the chair and I, Wade Mountz, decided we needed to talk to some of our active members and said, ‘OK, we’ve got to decide what we do.’ …Wade and I drafted a letter and essentially said, ‘Here’s what’s happened.  We set out to do this.  Please write and tell us what you think.’ 

[B]y that time Kentucky had been all over the national newspapers.  I had even talked to a national foundation that was interested in us.  I mean, things had changed dramatically…for us…just in the few weeks after the reform act passed…Kentucky had never gotten that kind of positive publicity.  So that was quite an upper…The boredom factor changed.  Anyway, we wrote to them and overwhelmingly people wrote back and said, ‘No, we’ve got to continue on.’

Closely associated with the Prichard Committee was the Partnership for Kentucky School Reform, a business group born out of United Parcel Service Chairman Oz Nelson's participation in the Business Roundtable.  Joined by other Roundtable members, David Jones and John Hall, Chief Executive Officers of Humana and Ashland Oil respectively, the vision was that the changes brought about by reform would only be sustained if everyone, including the business community, supported it.  
Georgetown University Associate Professor, Douglas Reed, validated Sexton and Nelson’s concern for sustainability issues in school finance reform efforts.  In his study, Court Ordered School Finance Equalization: Judicial Activism and Democratic Opposition, he found that dealing with public opposition was a crucial and inevitable part of implementing reform, 
State supreme courts can have substantive effects on the equity of school finance.  Their effort to do so, however, will engender equally substantive opposition – some of which will be racially based.  This public opposition is in many ways a constant to school finance reform.  As a result, the success or failure of courts’ efforts to improve the equity of school funding in primary and secondary education depends ultimately on the capacity of the legislature to withstand this heated political opposition. 

The Partnership's Executive Director, Carolyn Witt Jones, made clear that these groups were aware of Kentucky's political culture every step along the way.  In  her assessment, Jones was also very sensitive to Kentucky's tendency toward maintaining the status quo.  
I think that was the whole premise behind the action the business community took.  There was going to be a need for an independent voice that would remind Kentuckians of where we were, how bad it was, and that we had to move forward.  If we left it only to the persuasive will of educators, and the work of educators, then that would not shine the kind of light on what needed to be done, as much as [could be done by] people who were ‘outside this loop.’
  
People were used to school boards taking a position, KEA taking a position, the business community taking a position.  [The effort was] to pull these groups together, and to form a coalition, with the full knowledge that if we couldn't, that a lot of what we were trying to do in this state was in jeopardy.

So I believe…it's about identifying change, sustaining that change, and then reminding people of what the change has brought about… That's the reason we've been able to keep the business community interested in our work…  
	
The idea of public engagement and the powerful role it played in the passage and sustenance of education reform in Kentucky was explored by Molly Hunter.  In her 1999 article, All Eyes Forward: Public Engagement and Educational Reform in Kentucky, she agreed that,
Grassroots organizations such as the Prichard Committee, Forward in the Fifth, and the Kentucky PTA, as well as broad-based coalitions like the Education Coalition and the Partnership for Kentucky Schools, have been instrumental in initiating the reforms, supporting parents and educators in their innovative and demanding new roles, and involving the broader community in education reform.  These organizations and others with which they collaborate are striking in their apparent willingness to work together and coordinate efforts rather than compete for control or attention. 

The public can be fickle, or at least forgetful.  Sexton’s decision to continue the Prichard Committee’s work was in a real sense a commitment to stay in for the long haul and to teach the public that patience would be necessary in what promised to be a long implementation.  According to Sexton, 
We decided that our job was still to set the agenda.  But it was also to keep the public aware of what was happening.  It was really; overall, it would be to counsel patience.  If there’s a lesson of these reforms, if there’s a lesson in American education, it’s really that you have a reform…that’s passed by a legislature…two or three years later the next people in power throw it over and say start over again.  That’s why you don’t’ have fundamental and deep change because you never have a chance to work it down into the culture of the schools where the teachers are actually teaching kids, which requires years and years and years.

Sexton saw the Prichard Committee as a campaign to set the agenda for school reform.  The principal means was by focusing particularly on the Governor.  
If we see ourselves as a campaign…in Kentucky it would be to influence the Governor.  We saw ourselves as doing that by using our credibility with the press, by using growing credibility with the public, by using growing credibility with the business community and by having at least the semblance of a network of people who we could contact.

It was not that we had to be highly visible.  We didn’t have to be getting all the credit.  I think from the very start we knew that if you’re gong to get something done in politics the politicians who make the decisions and do what you want have to get the credit.  I mean, that’s the game, right?  They need it.  We don’t.  Our goal was to have the politician that we agreed with succeed. 

Future Governors Brereton Jones and Paul Patton were members of the Prichard Committee in the late 1980s.  Governor Martha Layne Collins also joined the committee after leaving office.
Coalition building to produce policy change requires great effort.  In this case, that effort came from the Prichard Committee’s work with the Education Coalition, established groups that already had their own communication networks.  One lesson from the reform experience may well be that without such broad-based support from the public, in Kentucky’s traditionalistic political culture, or perhaps any American political culture, systemic reform that requires legislative action may not be possible.
Like the Prichard Committee, the press, after the Rose case redirected its editorial position from the advocacy of reform to the maintenance of that reform.  The path chosen by Lexington Herald-Leader Editor John Carroll was to look for a way to support public school reform.  He wanted something that was direct and got at the heart of what was arguably Kentucky’s most pressing problem - a lively local patronage system that served the interests of persons in positions of authority, but contributed little to the support its public schools.  The political interests in some cases appeared significant enough that other interests, such as the education of Kentucky’s children, was somewhere down the list of priorities.  This would seem to have occurred with far too many supposed stewards of the public trust.  According to Carroll,
We knew that there was a lot of corruption in the tax system.  And we knew that there was a lot of nepotism.  You know, most people who’d studied schools knew that stuff was going on.  When the state Supreme Court, in 1989, declared the school system unconstitutional we decided that, you know, this was a climactic period.  And we’re a newspaper that had taken some pride in its education coverage.  That’s our foremost goal – to do that right…

Moreover, Carroll did not think that school reform was out of the woods as far as funding was concerned.  The General Assembly had shown repeatedly that passing a bill and funding it were two different things.  Carroll thought about the issues surrounding reform looking for a way to influence the General Assembly and the citizens at large that the reform movement deserved their support.  At the same time, Carroll was very concerned that many eastern Kentuckians might be so accepting of political corruption that they could not be moved to action.  In Carroll’s opinion, “…the people out in the state were very reluctant to support any more money for education as long as they knew that their local school people were doing the things they were doing – not collecting the taxes fairly, appointing their friends to school jobs, basically manipulating the schools to keep themselves in power…There’s a political tradition there that makes it acceptable to use the schools for your own personal profit.”  Carroll “had come to doubt whether the average citizen in Kentucky gave a damn about what happened to his kids in school.”    He finally settled on an approach that would help repair serious flaws in the tax system and also got at the heart of the people’s distrust of the system.  He recalled,
We floundered around for a while, but we decided…that we would concentrate on the local political control of the schools and the toll that takes, not only in dollars, but in faith.  People don’t have faith in the school system’s ability to absorb more dollars effectively as long as political hacks at the local level are in charge. We felt that was an essential issue…to getting the Legislature and the Governor to support more money for the schools and to getting the public to support more money. …It was an ugly subject, but it was like a boil.  It had to be lanced before people would be willing to go forward with anything very ambitious for the schools.

Then Carroll had to decide how he was going to approach the treatment of the topic.  He might have relegated it to the editorial pages, or had a few reporters do a series.  But he believed that the average person on the street would have a hard time relating to a typical education series.  Instead, he chose a full-court press.  According to Carroll,
The more we learned, the more we realized that it truly was an outrage the way the local school systems were being milked by local politicians.  Whether through the taxes or…padding the payrolls with their relatives or driving off teachers who were on the wrong side of the fence politically, the level of intimidation in some of those small towns was shocking.  And we thought it was truly a story about an outrage and we handled it that way.  We didn’t pull any punches.  We didn’t write it like something you would read in a scholarly book.  I mean, you don’t have to read…more than four or five paragraphs before you hit the next outrage in that story.  We packed it tightly with outrages.  We thought that was appropriate.  We didn’t think that was yellow journalism. We thought it was definitely called for.

The result was a twelve-part series of stories that ran from November 12 through December 15, 1989 utilizing nine reporters and support staff.  Collectively they describe tax giveaways, payroll padding, the persecution of teachers, nepotism, and many other affronts to good government and good education.  The articles were principally written by Kit Wagar, Lee Mueller, Bob Geiger, Bill Estep, Jack Brammer, John Winn Miller, Jamie Lucke, Mary Ann Roser and Valarie Honeycutt.  
The public response was huge.  As Herald-Leader Editor, John Carroll recalled, 
I feel like we got an extremely strong reaction to this story – stronger than anything I’ve seen…We’ve had over 1,800 letters, which is a multiple of the letters we’ve had on anything else…virtually all of them, favorable to the paper, thanking us for doing it.  And so many of them coming from what I call real people out there in little towns - the kind of people we don’t hear from very often.  It was a wonderfully rewarding thing to do.  You know…an editor suffers a lot of slings and arrows for the things he publishes.  But I’ll tell you I was coming in – typical day for a while - with 50, 60, 70, 80 letters on my desk, all of them telling me what a great guy I was.  It certainly boosted my spirits.  I think that series really stirred people.  We distributed massive numbers of reprints – about 100,000 reprints…Seven other Kentucky newspapers distributed them, and bought them from us and inserted them in their papers… All I know is that this story really grabbed people in a way that even I am amazed at.

Carroll believed the paper’s efforts helped push the legislature toward the passage of reform.  He recalled that there “was a tremendous political force generated.”  The paper published the names and addresses of all of the state legislators, and in Carroll’s view the citizens of Kentucky were not just writing to the paper.
I’m sure the mail was pouring in…and it was reflected in the debate in the General Assembly.  The phrase ‘cheating our children’ was used over and over again in the various hearings.  Just routinely they’d say, ‘Well, we can’t cheat our children any longer.’  And, much of the reform bill, or a good part of it, addresse[d] those problems that were discussed in our series.  I think that was a political price that had to be paid.  In order to pump more money into it you had to clean it up. 

Even after passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, Carroll remained cautious.  Like many of Kentucky’s educational leaders, he thought much could still go wrong and that greatest amount of effort was yet to come.
This is such a sea change in educational policy in Kentucky that its implementation will be as difficult as achieving the legislation… I think it will be as difficult to implement it in a way that it really does what its intended to do for the state, as it was to get it in the first place.  And you know it was a Herculean effort to get it in the first place.  And I think the paper’s foremost duty is to follow up and focus on these things and make sure that …they’re done properly… basically just to keep a very bright spotlight on what’s going on…

 Is It Time to Address Adequacy?

From 1989 to 1993 Kentucky’s standing relative to fifteen “southern” states (including the states typically identified as southern plus Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Maryland) improved.  Kentucky rose in rank from 12th to 7th in total annual per pupil expenditures (to $5300 per child).  But other states were improving their schools as well, and the national average annual expenditure was nearly $1000 more per child at $6280.
By 1994, the Office of Educational Accountability (OEA), which was formed to advise the Legislature on the implementation of reform, began warning the General Assembly that despite the “tremendous strides” made during the initial years of KERA “we have not arrived.”  The OEA said, “…much work and energy must still be expended if we are to attain the level of equity and adequacy required to fulfill the Kentucky Supreme Court’s ruling in Rose v. Council for Better Education.”  
The year 1995 marked a significant milestone when for the first time, “all the factors and components of the SEEK program were fully funded.”  This important event prompted the OEA to encourage continued vigilance to funding, and to advocate an increase of four to six percent biennially, and to suggest that performance expectations should be raised accordingly.  
Kentucky is rapidly approaching the point where the primary purpose for additional dollars to school districts should be raising educational outcomes.  OEA suggests that in the future both school finance and school improvement must be managed together, and the only place this can effectively occur is at the school level.

Despite this bright spot in Kentucky’s history of support for its schools, much ground remained to be made up.  In 1996, the OEA advised the General Assembly that the “SEEK program does not provide enough support for capital outlay and debt service needs” nor the revenue needed “to properly compensate teachers.”  In the OEA’s annual report, it echoed the concern of high property wealth school districts that the SEEK program was “constraining their ability to address the educational needs of students.”  The report rhetorically asked, “Is it time to address adequacy?”
OEA’s 1998 report continued to call for increased allotment for capital outlay and the development of a professional compensation plan.  In 1999, the OEA advised the General Assembly to continue annual increases to the SEEK formula and to fully fund all of its components.  The collective attention paid to the support given public schools had raised Kentucky’s national standing.  No longer did Kentucky educators joke, “Thank god for Mississippi.”  In KERA’s first decade, Kentucky’s rank in Revenues Per Pupil rose from 49th to 36th.  But while improved, the per pupil expenditure in Kentucky was only $6472 compared to a national average of $7179.  OEA’s 2000 report showed evidence that “local 

funding is increasing faster than state funding.”  Consequently, OEA recommended increases in SEEK funding levels and renewed its call for enhancements to capital outlay.  Prior reports cited the need to roll funding for special programs into the SEEK formula, but this had never been accomplished.  By 2000, the OEA expressed the concern that “funding for special needs independent of the SEEK formula has a negative effect upon equity.”
On February 13, 2002, nine years since its last activity, a group of more than 100 Superintendents met to discuss the reactivation of the Council for Better Education’s corporate charter.   The group met in response to Governor Paul Patton’s planned cuts to the K-12 education budgets.  There was initial concern expressed over “unfunded mandates” and for a brief time it appeared that the Council might get sidetracked.  But the Council’s discussions quickly returned to adequacy.  Citing a gradual decline in the percentage of general fund expenditures devoted to elementary and secondary education, Beechwood Independent Superintendent, Fred Bassett said, “In effect, the state is shifting the burden of supporting schools to the local districts.”  The Council’s resurrection 

had some immediate positive effect.  By July, Governor Patton removed the planned budget cuts after meeting with Council representatives who he said “convinced me” that districts needed the money to offset cuts elsewhere in the budget.  
The focus of the Council for Better Education was now clearly adequacy.  A statement issued on February 7, 2002 said, “The bottom line is do we have the will to maintain the progress this state has made since the inception of KERA to assure all children, regardless of income, receive an opportunity for a quality education?”  The reorganization got a quick response from the state’s Superintendents as 100 districts sent representation to Frankfort for a February 13 meeting and by summer 2002, 140 of the 176 Kentucky districts had pledged $.25 per student, thus raising $100,000, to join the Council’s effort. According to newly reelected Council President, Jack Moreland, “The idea of adequacy is woven throughout the 1989 Supreme Court decision, but until now, no one has defined adequacy as it relates to the funding mechanism.”  
The group hired University of Virginia Professor Deborah Verstegen to study what an adequate education would cost in Kentucky.  In 2003, she concluded that $1.2 billion would be required to bring Kentucky schools up to full adequacy.  Their cost estimates were tied to specific programs such as lower class sizes, and full day kindergarten and focused on the state’s goals for Kentucky’s students.  Two other studies generally supported her conclusions.  School finance experts Allan Odden and Larry Picus called for a minimum of $740 million in additional spending in a study they completed for the Kentucky Department of Education.  Governor Paul Patton’s office estimated the need to be around $400 million.  Lebanon Attorney Ted Lavit, didn’t wait for studies.  Representing 16 students from eight south-central Kentucky school districts, Lavit filed suit against the General Assembly for their failure to maintain an equitable and adequate system of schools.  Reaction from State Senator Lindy Casebier of Metro Louisville, echoed the voices of former legislators, Joe Clarke and Mike Maloney from the 1980’s when he said, “If there’s a court decision, maybe that would provide the political cover that some of the legislators feel that they need.”
There are other signs of life in Kentucky’s perennial educational reform effort as well.  The Prichard Committee showed great interest in the question of adequacy in its summer 2002 newsletter.  Reporting to its members on the revival of the Council for Better Education, one article asks, “Does Proficiency = Adequacy?”  The way the Prichard Committee sees it, “Kentucky has defined what all students should know, but no one has determined what that proficient schooling would cost.”
	As Kentucky’s second Education Commissioner, Wilmer Cody understood, the Rose decision had a dramatic impact on the way all states view education.  Before the court decision, quality was measured only by what goes into schools – dollars, salaries, books, buildings, and so forth.  Now education is judged mainly by the academic achievement of its students.  It’s the results that matter most.  Since the mid 1990s, the productivity expectations of Kentucky’s schools were raised a full 30% without any increase in resources.
	School finance experts like Kern Alexander warn that one of the problems may be Kentucky’s adherence to the property tax as the principal means of generating school revenue.  Part of any lasting solution will likely require the legislature to reconsider a fairer method of deriving school funds.  But some short-term ideas have already surfaced.  State Representative John Draud, the former Superintendent of the Ludlow Independent School district and member of the original Council for Better Education, proposed a cigarette tax of $.44 per pack.  “We are really at a crossroads in education again because we don’t have any money.  This would resolve that problem.” 
The Kentucky Post reported that in other states an increase in the state’s cigarette tax had already shown some acceptance.  
In April 2002, the Maryland legislature boosted the state’s cigarette tax to begin paying for a six-year plan to hike school spending by $1.3 billion a year…The increase followed the recommendations of a state commission which had studied the adequacy of school funding for two years… Mike Griffith, who tracks national school finance issues for the Education Commission of the States in Denver, said that many states are now using adequacy studies or lawsuits to ensure that school funding gives educators a fair chance to meet school standards.  Groups in Kansas, Nebraska and Montana are in the midst of studying the issue, and Texas officials appear ready to embark on an extensive adequacy study.  ‘In the old lawsuits that focused on equity, there were no results expected.  It was just the idea of, let’s get everyone on a level playing field.’ 

The state’s print media picked up the theme.  Supportive editorials are starting to appear in Kentucky newspapers advocating an excise tax on tobacco products.  In an editorial appearing July 21, 2002, the Lexington Herald-Leader argued that Kentucky is losing momentum in education and advocates a $.40 per pack tax.  Noting that, “higher tobacco taxes won’t substitute for the overhauled tax structure that Kentucky needs” it will produce ”an additional $200 million” and help “keep pace” with the other states, all but one of whom has a higher tax.  The editorial goes on to state that, “Kentuckians deserve more political courage from our law makers” and that a price increase “would have almost no effect on demand…”  The effort did not succeed, however, as the 2003 General Assembly subsequently adjourned without passing any kind of revenue enhancement.
More important than any particular proposed solution may be the fact that broad-based groups like the Prichard Committee, the Partnership for Kentucky Schools and the press remain active and vigilant to the new mission of adequacy.  By all accounts, these groups form an indispensable element in statewide reform that is no less valid today than it was a decade and a half ago.  In tandem with the Council for Better Education they created a powerful force.  New York attorney, Michael Rebell notes that Kentucky’s reform after Rose was “strongly influenced by an extensive round of state-wide dialogues…which the Prichard Committee had initiated years before the court’s decision.”  He underscored his belief in the impact of such broad-based support saying, “The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc., has instituted a state-wide public engagement process in New York in conjunction with its on-going adequacy litigation.”
By September 2002, Kentucky’s third Education Commissioner, Gene Wilhoit, added his voice to the call for adequacy.  Unlike Superintendent Alice McDonald two decades earlier, Commissioner Wilhoit focused his advocacy on the needs of Kentucky’s school children rather than other, more political concerns.  In his “Commissioner’s Comments” published in the Kentucky Department of Education publication, the Leadership Letter, Wilhoit explained, 
The good news is that Kentucky’s districts and schools are much more equitably funded.  The bad news is that we have yet to address the issue of adequacy of funding.  Now, at the mid-point between passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act and our target for having all students performing at proficient levels, we’re recognizing that the progress we’ve made could be at risk without additional dollars to fuel future progress.

Wilhoit applauded the efforts of Governor Paul Patton and quoted him in a recent speech during which the Governor asked, ‘Are we willing to do the things that have to be done for Kentucky’s children to realize their full potential?  What is more important, maintaining our offices or providing children with a high quality of life?’  He also acknowledged the Council for Better Education and the Prichard Committee for their “hard work on behalf of public education.”  Wilhoit concludes, 
[W]e need to honor Kentucky’s commitment to offer all students the kind of education they need to become self-sufficient and socially responsible citizens…We cannot undereducate our children and expect them to lead us well in the decades to come.  Funding adequacy is an issue whose time has come.  Kentucky’s economic, political and social future depends on it.

Chapter Summary
After the Supreme Court decision the Council for Better Education evolved, briefly, into a watchdog group monitoring the implementation of the Kentucky Education Reform Act.  In 1993, the group objected to “hold harmless” provisions added to the state’s funding scheme (SEEK) intended to keep funds to rich districts from eroding under the new equity requirements.  While the Prichard Committee and the press continued their vigilance, once it was decided that additional court action was not indicated, the Council for Better Education fell into dormancy.
By 1993, Kentucky was spending approximately $5300 per pupil and its standing among southern states rose from 12th to 7th while continuing to lag about $1000 per child behind the national average.  The Office of Educational Accountability reported annually to the General Assembly regarding Kentucky’s progress at meeting its constitutional obligations and in 1995, for the first time, all facets of the SEEK formula were funded.  The OEA reminded the legislature that there was still a lot of ground to be made up and advocated modest annual increases to the formula.  By 1999, Kentucky had risen from 49th to 36th in the nation but the OEA warned that increases would have to continue to keep pace, specifically citing needs in capital outlay, debt service, special education and teacher compensation.
Concerned by the erosion of education’s share of the state budget the Council for Better Education reemerged, 140 members strong, to question the legislature’s commitment to its schools.  The Council commissioned a study of the adequacy of Kentucky’s schools as groundwork for a possible future action.