Richard Elliott Day
5/16/1951

I am the middle son of an expert real estate appraiser (father) who was serious about the notion that in our country the only way to really participate was to show up and speak up.  Otherwise, you have no voice.  He served briefly in the Kentucky General Assembly in the 1950s, eventually retiring from the legislature after a lost bid for the State Senate.  My mother was a long time school Secretary and Treasurer to the Ludlow Board of Education and a significant player among the men who ran our schools.  
I was initially educated in the small northern Kentucky, Ludlow Independent School District, graduating as Boy of the Year, in 1969.  A small Ohio River town of modest single-family homes, Ludlowites numbered about 6,200 homogenous Caucasians. Our diversity was Protestant and Catholic.  I think the shoe repairman was Jewish, but he lived out of town.  We were also within the grasp of a major midwestern city and its media.  We did not grow up with a southern identity.  Ludlow school children visited the tight, dark quarters below Mrs. Thomas’s Candy Factory where part of the Underground Railroad once operated, within sight of the Mason-Dixon Line.  A short walk across the Ohio River on the Southern Railroad Bridge brought us to Crosley Field, where the Cincinnati Red Legs played - in the days of my youth.  I was comfortable in a loving home, basking in white privilege, in small town America, in the middle of the 20th century.
I graduated the University of Kentucky, in 1973.  I had been active on campus serving a term as President of the Student Center Board, was active in Sigma Nu Fraternity, and left with a degree in elementary education and the Sullivan Medallion under my arm.  I taught five years at R. C. Hinsdale Elementary School under the tutelage of veteran principal, Mildred Tupman.  Mrs. Tupman was chosen to open this new school, in Edgewood, under the Individually Guided Education model (complete with open classrooms) that had gained some popularity in the late 1960s.  The pedagogical philosophy was very similar to the KERA Primary Program that came 20 years later.  Both advocated a progressive, child-centered approach focused on the achievement of each child - but in 1973, we tested less.  
A 1976 Master’s degree from Xavier University, the fine Jesuit institution in Cincinnati, brought with it certification for administrative work.  I was named Elementary Supervisor for the Kenton County Public Schools, started the county’s first program for gifted children, and later became Principal of Ryland Elementary School.  I became very active with the Kentucky Jaycees and as state Vice President for Membership, played a supportive role in the admission of women in the early ‘80s.  I also cut my political baby teeth on the backroom politics.  In 1985, failing in my attempt to gain an appointment to the White House Fellowship Program, I accepted a principalship at Meadowthorpe Elementary in Fayette County and, in 1989, Cassidy School.  I served on the Fayette County Equity Council and received the Kentucky PTA’s Outstanding Educator Award for 2002. 
As principal of Cassidy School, I have found myself uniquely situated to observe KERA’s implementation, and unfortunately the achievement gap, first-hand.  Cassidy is part of the Fayette County Public School District - the district against which all others were equalized under KERA.  Founded in 1935, the school enjoyed a long history as a popular and somewhat progressive school in the affluent Lexington neighborhood of Chevy Chase.  Student test scores typically measured from the 60th to the 75th percentiles on the nationally normed Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills.  
Cassidy was commonly said to be a “good school” particularly attractive to the suburban white parents to whom it catered.  Under the higher standards described in the Rose opinion, however, disaggregated student data revealed that not all groups of Cassidy students were performing at high levels.  Among elementary schools in Kentucky, Cassidy had the largest gap in Black/White test scores at the turn of the new century.   This, despite Cassidy’s veteran faculty, the kind advocated for children of color.  By 2002, the percentage of low SES children grew to 31.8%, but neither the passage of Senate Bill 168 nor the full commitment of the Kentucky Department of Education to eradicate the achievement gap brought a penny of assistance to the approximately 140 low-income children who were said to be “in the gap.”  
It is significant that I have spent my entire career in Kentucky.  Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Rose v. Council and the passage of the KERA, Kentucky has been the focus of tremendous national attention.  Along the way, I experienced the shift toward a more open and participatory form of school administration.  The short story is that I have spent a 30-year career in Kentucky that includes district and school level instructional leadership before KERA, during its difficult implementation, and during its present reexamination under the higher mission of assuring a proficient education for each and every child.