Amendment 2 takes ‘handcuffs’ off legislators

Former Solicitor General Chad Meredith joined Bluegrass Institute President Jim Waters on this week’s edition of KET’s “Kentucky Tonight” to make the case removing constitutional barriers to state lawmakers debating and deciding policies that empower Kentucky parents to choose where children are educated.

Removing “the handcuffs” on legislators when it comes to education policy is the sole purpose of Amendment 2 on November’s ballot, Meredith explained:

“The amendment does one very simple and very important thing, and that is: It gives the people of Kentucky, through their elected legislators, the right to set education policy for themselves as opposed to having it determined for them, in large measure, by people in the 1800s.

“And what I mean by that is this: The education provisions in our constitution were written in 1891, and they address particular circumstances that existed at that time. And the choices they made then may or may not have been right for them at that point, but they still bind us today. And those choices, in large measure, put handcuffs on our legislature and they constrict the policy decisions that they can make pertaining to education. I don’t think those restrictions really make a lot of sense today.…

“I think it makes sense to take these restrictions off. Let the people of Kentucky, through their elected legislators, make decisions today – select the education policy they want, as opposed to having it determined for them by these restrictions that were put on education policy in the 1890s.”

Opponents of education freedom on the panel, including Joel Wolford, vice president of the Kentucky Education Association, the state teachers’ union, and Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, claimed school-choice policies will defund and destroy public education.

However, Waters pointed to the improvement in public schools’ academic results in states like Florida – which Kentucky lags behind in key outcomes – that offers parents an increasing amount of educational alternatives for children, and with greater efficiency, as the rate of growth in spending on public education has been far less than that of Kentucky’s since passage of the much-ballyhooed Kentucky Education Reform Act in 1990.

Watch the entire hour-long debate here: https://ket.org/program/kentucky-tonight/.