Kentucky’s Education Reforms Fail Early Tests : Schools: Slow pace of change is blamed on defeatist attitude and resistance from local officials.

Two years ago, when Kentucky launched the broadest, most ambitious school reform plan ever attempted in the United States, no one was prouder than Roger Noe. The state representative from a mountain district in eastern Kentucky had spent years in office fighting for improved education and had been a chief architect of reform.

The plan he helped hammer out was hailed nationally for its comprehensiveness and scope. In Kentucky, it was seen as a historic document that inevitably would lead to much broader social and economic progress in a state where schools traditionally had lagged near the bottom of national rankings.

Noe got his reward in May: He was booted out of office. His defeat at the polls was the clearest sign yet that true change will be slow to come to the isolated hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky, where the need for reform remains the greatest.

Here time meanders instead of marching and old ways die hard. In a land hard-pressed for jobs, many say the value of an education has never been set very high. A defeatist, “why bother” attitude developed.

“I think people are hopeful about (school reform), but nothing in their experience indicates that anything will come of it,” said Josephine Richards, an eastern Kentucky school reform activist.

In many ways, the struggle to change the system in Kentucky is similar to the difficulties faced in other states and cities that have passed ambitious school reform programs. But Kentucky differs not only because its overhaul is the most extensive ever attempted by a state, but also because the unique social and political landscape of eastern Kentucky is particularly resistant to change.

Here is a society often described as feudalistic, in which entrenched school officials traditionally have been major political and economic forces. Opposition to change has been fierce.

“Our schools have been rife with corruption, with wrongdoing, with out-and-out thievery for years,” said Noe, whose district include Harlan County, by most accounts one of the state’s most corrupt.

“The good ol’ boy system is very powerful,” said Tom Gish, a crusading newspaper editor and reformer who also holds a seat on the newly constituted state school board. “I don’t care how well-intentioned the reform movement may be, when it comes up against the system, it stops right there. Good words and good intentions are not gonna hack it.”

His appraisal of the status of school reform? “Nothing is taking place. Absolutely nothing.”

It is still early. Statewide testing has not yet started, and many elements of the wide-ranging school make-over are to be phased in over a period of five years. However, Gish and others contend that even those changes that already have been instituted are having little effect in mountain classrooms.

Instead, Richards said, many school boards and superintendents are trying to “sabotage” reform by dragging their feet, ignoring rules, intimidating those who would try to bring change and continuing to treat the school systems’ bank accounts as their own private reserve.

Eastern Kentucky is unforgiving territory, mountainous and harsh. Its economy is based on coal and timber, industries owned by outside firms and subject to forces beyond local control.

The late Harry M. Caudill, in his book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands,” a history of the Appalachian region, wrote in 1962 of the “depressingly defeatist” attitude of the mountaineer.

“Company domination and paternalism and two decades of uninspired welfarism have induced the belief that control of his destiny is in other hands,” he wrote.

Gish, who was a friend of Caudill, said not much has changed. “We still economically are in a situation where almost all the area’s wealth and industry--the coal and oil and gas and timber industries--all are owned and managed by outside companies,” he said. “We have really no control of our economic destiny. We have essentially a Third World economy in which we are the exploited.”

The one place that has been open for local initiative has been public office, and the schools have been the only area where local people exercised control over large sums of money, he said.

Partly for this reason, Gish contends, the schools have been rife with profiteering and have become politicized, with nepotism and political patronage rampant.

One unique feature of the Kentucky reform bill was the creation of an independent watchdog agency. With two former FBI agents on its payroll, it is charged with investigating allegations of wrongdoing on the state and local levels.

A number of school officials have been removed from office since the agency began operation. Harlan County, in Noe’s district, was the first to be targeted, and three school board members were ousted in January on charges of misconduct and incompetence. The state essentially took control of the district.

Soon, the state police and a Harlan County grand jury also began to investigate and found evidence of forgery and theft. A former school board member and a former superintendent have been indicted so far in the ongoing investigation.

The investigation wasn’t welcomed with open arms, however.

“It offended the people here,” Noe said. “It goes along with the old adage that they may be crooks, but they’re our crooks.”

While the board members fought to stay on the board, 2,000 people held a rally in their support. All of this was going on while Noe was running a reelection campaign in which his opponents blamed him for the investigation.

“The schools are the major employers, so the schools impact the livelihoods of many, many people,” said Noe, a college professor who has been chairman of the state House Education Committee for seven years. “So that when school leaders send a message out to the employees--the bus drivers, the cooks, the janitors, the teachers--it has a much stronger impact than in an urban area.”

Kentucky legislators such as Noe began to agitate for change in the 1980s, about the time other Southern states, such as Arkansas and Tennessee, recognized the importance of education to the economic viability of their states and began enacting reforms.

Reform efforts in Kentucky got their greatest boost in 1988 when Circuit Court Judge Ray Corns, in a case on school finance, ruled that the entire state education system was unconstitutional.

When his decision was upheld by the state Supreme Court, it essentially meant that the school system would have to be redesigned from scratch. It was a historic opportunity, and in the opinion of many state and national education experts, Kentucky lawmakers rose to the challenge.

Thomas C. Boysen, the state education commissioner, said the court went far beyond what has been ordered in California and other states where finance formulas have been challenged. “They said, ‘Fix everything,’ ” he said. “It wiped the slate clean.”

John Augenblick, a Denver-based education consultant who helped devise the Kentucky reform plan, said it was the first time a court had ordered a state’s entire system of education to be rebuilt, virtually from the ground up.

In addition to creating the watchdog agency, the legislation pumped $1 billion into the schools, with most of the money going to pay raises for teachers. Legislation also created a statewide testing program and a system for rewarding successful schools. Grants and special assistance will be offered to schools that need improvement. The state has the authority to replace officials of districts that consistently lag behind.

The school reform law also creates a system of school-based management in which each school must have a council composed of parents, teachers and an administrator by 1996.

It is this emphasis on local control that Gish contends leads to widespread abuse. He and others say that, with insufficient state supervision, school boards are squandering funds and, in some districts, trying to keep power--and control of the purse strings--away from the new local councils.

“The state has dropped all this money into eastern Kentucky with no particular state standards,” Gish charged. “You take a billion dollars and spread it around the state and say, ‘Here, spend it anyway you want to, but reform yourself.’ It just doesn’t work.”

Boysen, who was school superintendent in San Diego County before taking charge of Kentucky’s schools, disagrees that money is being wildly misspent.

“Most of the districts that we know, including the poorer districts, have spent the money pretty well,” he said, citing a study conducted by the state. “They’ve hired more teachers, they’ve hired counselors; the expenditures for instructional supplies increased.”

Even without the problems being encountered in eastern Kentucky, reform is facing its greatest test this year because of the recession. State education officials had said an 8.65% increase in spending was necessary to maintain momentum. Funding will remain stagnant, however, with some districts actually receiving less money this year than last year.

Many still fear that local resistance will wear down those who want reform.

“The belief here has been fairly universal that if the superintendent and school board push hard for a few years, in two years or whatever the governor and Legislature will give up and it (reform) will all go away,” Gish said.

But Boysen says that is not going to happen and that state officials have already demonstrated their commitment to stick with reform through thick and thin.

The front-line battles, however, are being fought not in the classroom or even in the Legislature or in courtrooms but in school board rooms in places like Harlan and Hazard and Whitesburg and Salyersville--places where parents and teachers and principals are trying to bring change but keep getting swatted down.

“Every time the state isn’t effective (in facing down a recalcitrant school board or superintendent) a message gets sent out that if you as a parent or teacher or principal are going to go out on a limb, you’re out there on your own,” said Richards, the school reform activist.

But Noe remains optimistic. “School reform is not moving along as well as we had anticipated because it’s being resisted so strongly by school leaders and citizens who were profiting from that old system,” he said. “It makes it extremely difficult for a change this prodigious to occur.”

“My loss was a temporary setback,” he added. “The system transcends me. I’m personally disappointed . . . but we’re not throwing in the towel by any stretch of the imagination.”