Friday, December 22, 2006

Harper Needs To Speak Up About School Choice

Gubernatorial candidate Billy Harper has been all over the place on education. His ads promote his support of KERA, but his campaign says he favors school choice. Meanwhile, his name appears on a one year old letter from Prichard Committee for Academic excellence director Robert Sexton claiming school choice isn't worth discussing.

Harper's name doesn't appear on a current list of the Prichard organization's committee members, though. If he left the liberal group over school choice -- or some other education issue -- he might want to be talking about it. Republican primary voters will be looking for strong leadership on education policy in May. Continued silence on this issue only benefits the status quo.

Spending billions of dollars on "education" in Kentucky only to get beaten up for not spending billions more may be fun for a Republican governor who sees pretty weak opposition standing between himself and re-election, but Kentucky schoolchildren really could use the leadership.