The Lexington Herald Leader, in a news story, has this nugget:
The legislature has spent $487,000 defending the lawsuit while the CBE has spent $391,000 on the case filed in 2003.
And as we waste a million and counting on this lawsuit, two bills in the General Assembly would add tens of millions more to the same rat hole. Kentucky law now requires children to stay in school until age sixteen. HB 221 and HB 279 provide an end-run around the lawsuit by requiring the state to pay school systems to warehouse thousands of teenagers who don't want to be in school.
The great thing about this scheme, from the CBE's perspective, is that if you add in the test scores of the would-be dropouts, they will have a built in excuse to lobby for more money still to combat the lower test scores.
What we need is an incentive for education bureaucrats to think as creatively about educating students as they do about ways to game the system for more tax dollars.
We really, really need to break up the school monopoly and inspire these folks by having them deal with the competition brought on by school choice.