Kentucky needs to rework school based decision making - 3 – Parents don’t care

Our first two blogs in this series provided an overview of how poorly Kentucky’s public education system has progressed under the state’s unique, teacher-dominated school governance model of School Based Decision Making (SBDM). We also covered some background about this unique, Kentucky-only method for control over major education areas like school curriculum.

In this blog, we explore and update some research we conducted for our 2018 report, Kentucky’s School Based Decision Making Policy, A Closer Look, concerning a major goal of SBDM – increasing parent involvement in their children’s schools.

The quick message here – when it comes to parent involvement, Kentucky’s current form of SBDM has been an obvious failure.

Our 2018 report did a comparison of the number of parents voting in the school council elections and student enrollment in the school. Using 2016-17 data, the report found in the vast majority of Kentucky’s schools that parent interest in electing parent members of the school councils was astonishingly low.

In 72.8% of the schools with voting data for 2016-17 (818 of 1,124 schools), the ratio of voting parents to school enrollment was only a single-digit percentage. Basically, parents of fewer than about one out of 10 students in all of these schools took the interest and time to vote for parent representatives for their SBDM council.
In 2016-17, the parent-voter-to-membership ratio was less than one percent in 101 schools.
The ratio of voting parents to enrollment exceeded 50 percent in only 15 schools in the entire state.

That parent interest picture is now five years old. So, for this blog we decided to update parent SBDM voting information with the latest available data from the 2020-21 Kentucky School Report Cards system.

Using 2021 data from the Kentucky Department of Education for parent voting in each school and school membership, we again computed the number of votes cast in parent SBDM elections as a percentage of each school’s enrollment.

The results aren’t pretty. In 2021:

Among the 1,140 schools that had voting data reported, 840 had a vote to membership ratio of less than 10%. So, 73.7% of the schools with data had a voting ratio under 10%, which is almost a full point higher than what we found in 2016-17. In other words, the interest was even lower than in 2016-17.
In 186 schools, the parent vote to membership ratio was less than 1%. Obviously, this is much higher than the 101 schools with voting ratios under 1% in 2016-17 and is a further indication of dropping parent interest.
The ratio of parent votes to membership exceeded 50% in only nine schools. That’s down from the 15 schools with such high participation ratios in 2016-17 and is yet another indication of waning interest.

To summarize, the new 2021 data shows further declines in the already tremendously low parent interest in SBDM elections that we found back in 2016-17.

So, there is just no getting around it. As we said earlier, one major goal of SBDMs in Kentucky was to improve parent interest. Now, after nearly three decades of use, a major indicator of such interest shows this school governance model has been an absolute failure.

Why has this happened? Undoubtedly, many parents figured out that with the parent representatives on each school council always – by law – only a minority, there really is NO parent control over their schools available with the SBDM school councils. Teachers have control and can ignore parents anytime they choose. Given this situation, there is little incentive for parents to take the time to vote for a minority group of representatives who can’t do anything unless the teachers agree.

Clearly, with the continuing dismal academic performance we talked about in our earlier blogs and the obvious failure to get parents interested, the current SBDM model just isn’t working for Kentucky. It’s now up to the Kentucky Legislature to do something to improve this currently untenable situation.

https://bipps.org/blog/kentucky-needs-to-rework-school-based-decision-making-3-parents-dont-care

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