The Prichard Committee
What is the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence?
The Prichard
Committee is a non-partisan, non-profit citizen's advocacy
group dedicated to improving education in Kentucky at all levels. The Prichard
Committee works with local parents and citizens, issues publications, and
commissions studies to inform legislators, governors, other education officials
and the public about issues of importance in education.
Issues
The Prichard Committee was founded in 1983 in response to failure by
policymakers to address the issue of education quality in Kentucky. A report
by a blue-ribbon panel on higher education in Kentucky had been almost completely
ignored by legislators and policymakers. Cindy Heine, the Associate Executive
Director of the Prichard Committee, said that “it became
obvious that policymakers thought, ‘People in Kentucky really don't care
about education,' so they had no incentive to enact any major legislation.”
Getting Started
The Prichard Committee has its roots as a 30-member blue-ribbon panel established
in 1979 to critically examine the state of higher education in Kentucky.
The panel issued a report with recommendations in 1981, but by 1983 no action
had been taken on the panel's findings. The participants in the panel decided
to organize a group of citizen volunteers to advocate for education. They
doubled their membership to 60, and began to organize and mobilize.
At first, the Prichard Committee focused on two main projects. The first
was a study of elementary and secondary education in Kentucky education to
complement the first study. The second was to mobilize Kentuckians
to address the state of education through an ambitious series of town forums.
The Committee began planning for citizen forums to occur throughout the state
on November 15, 1984, hoping to mobilize the community and to spur policymakers
to act to improve education.
Campaign Goals
The two primary goals for the town forums were to:
- Demonstrate to policymakers that people in Kentucky do in fact care about
what happens in education.
- Hear from a large number of Kentuckians their thoughts about education
and what they wanted from their schools.
The Prichard Committee had developed a number of recommendations about higher
education that had been ignored, and were in the process of developing recommendations
about elementary and secondary school as well. Heine says that they hoped
the town forums would spur legislators “to start paying attention to these
recommendations and sending dollars to schools.”
Methods
“When we started, we thought we'd be lucky to have fifty sites…[but] by
November 15, 1984, 20,000 people showed up at 145 sites across the state,” Heine
said. The town forums were extremely successful. Some of the effective methods
the Prichard Committee employed were:
Using existing infrastructure. The Prichard
Committee began planning the town forums by drawing on preexisting community
organizations and local resources. When the state-wide organizers were
trying to find local representatives, they began by contacting community
Rotary clubs, Leagues of Women Voters, school boards, and Parent Teacher
Associations. State-wide organizations such as teachers' unions also helped
the organizers connect to local people who were interested in organizing
the forums. Using these community organizations was a convenient and effective
way to identify and connect to individuals who were concerned about the
state of education and were willing to be involved in the project.
Thinking broadly. The campaign to organize these
forums was both a state-wide effort and a local one. Although each of the
forums was to take place locally, the general structure of the forums throughout
the state was uniform. Before the forums, the Prichard Committee hosted
an introductory program about the state of education in Kentucky, which
Kentucky Educational Television (KET) volunteered to air and in which the
Governor participated. Each local forum also had volunteers moderating
and recording the discussion. The volunteers had been trained together
in order to ensure uniformity among the forums. KET also donated air time
after the event for a call-in show in which a representative from each
site reported his or her group's experience during the forum. These efforts
to perceive the forums as one unified project connected the participants
at each of the 145 sites to the other concerned parents, teachers, students
and community members around the state.
Acting locally. While forums across the state
were connected, each of the 145 sites was influenced by the community
around it. The local nature of this event was essential to the organization,
publicizing, and success of each of the forums. In terms of planning, Heine
said that “the
lead organizer at the state level was important, but local people with
their own networks in their own communities really helped make it happen.” Many
of the primary forum organizers were people who were involved
in other local organizations, organizations that already had
loyal constituents and supporters who became involved in the
forums as well.
The local nature of the forums was particularly appropriate for the topic,
as the participants were able to discuss issues that were
specific to their community's schools. As the process of organizing the forums
went on, people's enthusiasm made local planning much easier. Heine said
that people began contacting the Prichard Committee asking if they could
hold a local forum; “it
kind of got to be the place to be that night.”
Publicizing the forums. Much of the publicity
for the forums occurred locally, through existing organizations like the
League of Women Voters and the PTA. Schools and local colleges also helped
with local publicity. Across the state, the Prichard Committee held an
extensive radio, television, and newspaper advertising campaign, which
included a questionnaire that could be filled out and sent in by people
who would be unable to attend the forums. The advertising was funded by
a large state company, Ashland Oil, which had decided to focus their advertising
dollars on promoting education.
Listening. One of the primary goals of the
forums was to hear what Kentuckians had to say about
education in order to use that information to refine the Committee's recommendations
and to demonstrate to legislators how important the issue of education was
to their constituents. Heine recalls, “One of the most poignant moments for
me was when a woman stood up in our forum and said, ‘I graduated from high
school and I never learned to read, and I don't want that to happen to
my child.'” Organizers
hoped that listening to stories like this from around
the state would influence legislators who were in attendance
or who heard about the forums after the fact. The Prichard
Committee trained volunteers to record the discussions
that occurred during the forums, and shared the results
on KET as well as in a written report. Impact
Making education a key issue. The
town forums brought the issue of education to the forefront, and participants,
the media, and policymakers kept it there. Once it became clear how strongly
so many people felt about education, the media continued to cover stories
about the state of education and the public remained engaged through later
education reforms.
Influencing policymakers. Legislators were invited
to the forums to hear what their constituents had to say. The overwhelming
interest in the town forums demonstrated that education is an important issue
to many Kentuckians. “Now what this said to our policymakers was that their
impression that Kentuckians didn't care about education was wrong. And they
began to change their behavior. They began to talk more about education,” Heine
said. This was especially true for the Governor, who immediately began to
be engaged in education issues, appearing on the state-wide broadcast and
trying to enact education legislation.
Preparing for change. By demonstrating the
public's interest in education, the Prichard Committee believes that the
forums helped lay the groundwork for later dramatic changes in Kentucky 's
education system. In 1985, a year after the forums, school districts filed
a lawsuit claiming that Kentucky 's system of school funding violated the
state constitution, and the court agreed. In the late 1980's, opinion polls
in Kentucky showed that people were willing to pay more in taxes for better
education, and legislators began to respond. The Prichard Committee
believes that the education reforms that the legislature has since enacted
have reflected the support for education that Kentuckians displayed in the
town forums and since. | 
