Educational changes have been made by offering the chance for school choice in communities where the schools have failed for generations – with a lot of resistance. For the first time in a long time, the powerful voices of the teachers’ union, which defends mediocrity and outright failure, is no longer the voice of the day; it’s no longer being able to dictate that these kids who go to these schools are destined for failure.

When seven out of 10 children in the African-American community in Jefferson County cannot read at grade level, we have failed an entire subsection of our inner city. That is a bad indictment on the status quo. Something has to change. When 32 percent of children in Kentucky cannot recognize text in the third grade – not just read below grade level, cannot recognize text; they are functionally illiterate in the third grade – these are little dirty secrets that the teachers’ union doesn’t want to talk about. And they will not talk about it, because then they can pretend that these hundreds and hundreds of administrators, making six figures and not touching the classroom, are somehow justified. But they’re not. We’re wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative costs, robbing our children.  

We’re seeing a tremendous amount of change at the federal level already. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is truly an extraordinary public servant, and his dedication, his knowledge, his ability to effect change and move with a sense of urgency is like nothing that has ever been seen in the history of the EPA.

MG: Workforce skills are the most important criteria for business and industry site selectors. Your administration’s Kentucky Work Ready Skills Initiative leveraged $100 million to fund 40 workforce training programs that got more than $110 million in private-sector matching money. What impact do you hope to see and what is the timetable for seeing the benefits?
MB: This $100 million that we put out, people had to compete for that. The local high school, the local college and the local business community had to sit down together and come up with a proposal where each of them would contribute something to their application in the form of money and/or time and/or training and/or resources. It forced great dialogue, where the high school, college and business community, for the first time ever in some communities, began to talk with each other. What is the purpose of putting this money into education, in terms of workforce training, and what is it we in the workforce really need? For the first time, people were speaking face to face about this.
We had $540 million worth of applications for the $100 million that was available, so we got to choose the best 18 percent of the applications. The $100 million we put up wasn’t to build new buildings; this was to actually train people, scale programs. Dozens of them were put in place or expanded. It was matched by actually closer to about $140 million of additional money that came from the private sector and local communities. So nearly a quarter of a billion dollars is being invested in workforce training in just a two-year period.
We are developing training programs specifically for certain companies, in conjunction with local technical schools and four-year universities, sometimes in conjunction with apprenticeship programs that are starting now even with high school students. We’ve put dual-credit classes into schools so that high school juniors and seniors, and even some down below that, are able to take classes that apply to postsecondary training as well as toward their graduation from high school. Some students are now, at the time they graduate high school, also graduating simultaneously with associate’s degrees and/or certifications. And some of these certifications are stackable in things that employers are highly demanding right now.
All of this is being done to make sure we in Kentucky have the best, most proactive, most intentional workforce development training program of any state in America. Putting in a quarter of a billion in two years has already produced great results, but it’s only just beginning. We will do this again as we move forward, and these are the types of things that in time will continue to bear tremendous fruit. The proof is in the fact that more and more companies are coming here with the confidence that they will get the type of employees with the type of training that they need and want.

​MG: How are the state’s colleges and universities performing in their role of preparing state residents for success and in providing the private sector with the skilled workforce it needs now and will need in the near future?

MB: In certain areas very well and in other areas not well at all, so on average less than expected by the workforce. It’s why we are moving to outcome-based funding. We do invest close to a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money to postsecondary education, and it’s spread around our institutions of higher learning, from the technical schools to UK, to UofL, Morehead State, Murray State, Eastern, Northern, Western, all of them. We’re investing money, and we, the taxpayers, expect a payback.

Frankly, interdisciplinary studies or interpretive dance…there aren’t jobs out there. Not in Kentucky, not enough to justify having programs that are staffed by highly compensated faculty teaching a handful of students skills that are not needed in the marketplace. Study after study is increasingly showing even more traditional subjects are just not demanded in the 21st-century workforce. I personally have a liberal arts degree; there’s tremendous value associated with getting a liberal arts degree. But if you only study and learn for the sake of studying and learning, and you only pursue that which is intellectually stimulating but has no application capability, then you’re going to be in trouble, both as an individual and as an institution that tries to sustain itself training such people. We have to rethink how we do it, and that’s what we’re doing with outcome-based funding.

“Based upon the limited but unrefuted information of record, which indicates only that Commissioner Pruitt’s employment contract was discussed and later amended following the closed session at issue, this office concludes that the Board violated the Act in discussing a general personnel matter that exceeded the scope of (state law) during its closed session."

In the event that a vacancy occurs prior to the end of the term of the chair, the vice chair will become chair and complete the rest of the previous chair’s term. ​

Except as modified by Board Policy, Robert’s Rules of Order (most recent edition) shall constitute the rules of parliamentary procedure applicable to all meetings of the board and its committees.    ​​

“Rules contained in the bylaws (or constitution) cannot be suspended— no matter how large the vote in favor of doing so or how inconvenient the rule in question may be—unless the particular rule specifically provides for its own suspension”