Your series on the Highlands Latin School system highlights a couple of issues that school “choice” advocates do not want to admit in their push for Amendment 2 and laws to create vouchers in Kentucky. First is that under voucher systems, private schools are the ones with the “choice,” not parents and students. Unlike public schools, private schools are not required to admit or retain anyone they do not want to, and they can create rules and systems that make it easy to weed out children for any reason. For years Highlands Latin School has promoted the quality of their education by pointing to their high ACT scores and number of National Merit Scholars. The impression is that this is because of the quality of education received at Highlands Latin. Clearly it has more to do with the qualities of the students they admit and retain than it does the education received there. The second issue is that private schools are able to hide their internal operations and their results because they are not subject to the same transparency and reporting requirements as public schools. Laws regarding open meetings and open records do not apply to private schools. Public schools are required to provide standardized data about their results, student and teacher demographics, school environment, and more. Private schools are not. As a result, insights for parents, taxpayers, and the journalists into how private schools are serving students is extremely limited. And unlike public schools, the public will have very little say or feedback into how private schools are run. If parents want to send their students to Highlands Latin School or any other private school, that is certainly their choice. But as taxpayers, we should not be asked to pay for a separate system that can kick out students because they don’t want to educate them and can shield themselves from transparency into what is happening within them. —Rob Mattheu, 40291