By: Jonathan Plucker and Brenda Berg
The Kentucky General Assembly is currently considering a bill that would require school districts to establish policies for automatic enrollment in the Commonwealth’s public schools. Introduced by Rep. Robert Duvall and co-sponsored by Rep. Vanessa Grossl, HB 190 passed the House unanimously and can be considered by the Senate in the session’s final two legislative days on March 27 & 28.
Automatic enrollment is one of the most intriguing educational innovations in recent years. Also known as auto-, mandatory, or opt-out enrollment, the concept is simple: Students who perform at advanced levels in their classes oron state tests are automatically enrolled in advanced courses for the following academic year.
This commonsense reform is based on the observation that many high-performing students are not receiving advanced learning opportunities, even when there is clear evidence that they are ready to advance academically. This is especially true for low-income and rural students, who have much less access to rigorous advanced opportunities, ranging from gifted education to accelerated coursework to AP courses. Recent research demonstrates there are many such students, leading to a chronic under challenging of many of our brightest children. As a result, these students are less likely to be ready for today’s workforce or post-secondary education.
As a case in point, Western Kentucky University and Johns Hopkins University recently collaborated on Project Launch Plus. This initiative identified talented students in low-income, rural communities in Kentucky and North Carolina and provided them with advanced education. Although we anticipated finding many eligible students, the sheer number exceeded our expectations. There is tremendous talent in every single one of Kentucky’s schools, but many of these students do not have the necessary opportunities to develop those talents fully. The provisions in HB 190 will help provide those opportunities.
We encourage Senate Leadership to bring final passage to House Bill 190 so that Kentucky students can begin benefiting from its provisions.
Concerns about automatic enrollment tend to focus on cost and implementation. Regarding cost, we point to North Carolina’s experience, which began with passage of its auto-enrollment law for mathematics in 2018. The state education agency and districts now have years of experience with implementation and have seen impacts well beyond expectations by elevating the overall importance of advanced coursework opportunities. Cost proved not to be an issue: In the end, the same number of teachers educates the same number of students, leading to no additional financial burden on the state or school districts.
Implementation was challenging in some districts but can be overcome. For example, due to teacher inexperience with advanced coursework and small numbers of identified students, some districts used a range of non-traditional staffing options to promote access, including staff-sharing, transporting students, and online courses to ensure that all eligible students are able to access challenging coursework. In other cases, it was simply not on their radar that they weren’t offering advanced courses commensurate with other districts, and they could just reassign existing staff to, for example, teach algebra instead of the standard 8th grade course.
Despite these implementation challenges, North Carolina’s experience is a major policy success, with thousands of additional students enrolling in advanced math courses each year. An important key to the state’s success is that auto-enrollment begins in elementary school, before students get lost in the transitions to middle and high school. The effects appear to be most significant with middle school students and those from traditionally underserved backgrounds, such as the rural and low-income students noted above. Similar success in Kentucky would transform the STEM pipeline in the Commonwealth.
If passed and signed into law, House Bill 190 allows the Kentucky Board of Education to create regulations to administer the new provisions. We strongly encourage the Board to require the Kentucky Department of Education to (1) collect districts’ advanced education plans to promote public access to the information and (2) issue an annual report summarizing the impact of auto-enrollment, including district level reports of the number and percentage of eligible students served. Annual reports in North Carolina have been invaluable data sources for tracking the impact of the law.
HB 190 is bold, innovative, and highly likely to be effective. It will provide a strong foundation for efforts to help Kentucky’s students excel in the classroom and eventually in the workforce.
Jonathan Plucker is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a past-president of the National Association for Gifted Children. Brenda Berg is President & CEO of BEST NC (Business for Educational Success and Transformation in North Carolina).
