The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions issued the following statement regarding today’s veto of Senate Bill 1 by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear:

With his veto of Senate Bill 1 today, Gov. Beshear has taken a position strongly in opposition to the best interests of children and those who love them most – their parents. Along the way, the governor has also come down on the wrong side for citizens and taxpayers for badly needed improvements in Kentucky’s undemocratic public education system.

One of the number of actions taken by SB 1 that the governor wants to thwart is having Kentucky’s public schools make significant changes to ensure the state’s children learn about American principles.

The bill is not like prohibition-laden anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) legislation in some other states. Rather, it takes a positive approach about how some material should be taught while making it very clear that nothing in the act “shall be construed to restrict a public school or public charter school from providing instruction or using instructional materials that include:” the history of an ethnic group, the discussion of controversial aspects of history or instruction on the historical oppression of a particular group of people. The bill includes a short listing of important documents all Kentucky’s students should learn about, readings not currently clearly required by the vacuous social studies standards created by the state’s public educators.

Despite Beshear’s protest that lawmakers should not create such provisions, precedent in state law exists for the legislature establishing education requirements. Legislative items from past years, for example, already provide for instruction about the Holocaust and Veterans Day. In fact, ever since the famous Roe V. Council for Better Education lawsuit decision in 1989, it’s been state law that the legislature is ultimately responsible for education, period. Not the governor. Not even educators.

And, legislators know our children generally have an inadequate knowledge of our country – both the good and the bad – that impacts their ability to function effectively as informed citizens. SB 1 seeks to change this situation.

Another key area in the bill finally fixes a huge mistake that was made in the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA), which removed authority regarding critical matters like educational curriculum from locally elected school boards.

Instead, the 1990 bill placed such critical authority in the hands of teachers using the artifice of School Based Decision-Making (SBDM) Councils requiring the majority membership of every single council in the state be made up of teachers with parents always in the minority. It was like someone passing a law restricting all members of a political party to a minority of the seats in Congress even before elections occurred. Plus, taxpayers without children had no representation at all.

Parents assessed the situation quickly and accurately; hardly any even bothered to vote for parent representatives to these councils. After all, once elected, the parents were still powerless to push any issue the teachers or administrators didn’t want.

The SBDM law also nearly eliminated any chance to hold local schools accountable for things that really mattered. When COVID shut down in-person learning, suddenly what children were really being taught became abundantly apparent to their parents at the same time things based on what is loosely called CRT started showing up in instruction across the state. Parents quickly learned they couldn’t override school councils’ loaded votes and were shocked to learn their locally elected school boards couldn’t help, either. The only choice left was to get help from the legislature.

The time for Kentucky’s school system to function outside of local control and for its students to leave school largely ignorant of what they need to know to function in a representative democracy is long past. COVID taught parents that they ignore what’s occurring in schools at their children’s peril.

And, a school governance system that can ignore both parents and their locally elected school board members is a recipe for poor outcomes, a sad story now becoming more apparent with recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in math and reading. Despite what Kentuckians have been told, Kentucky’s white students continue to rank very low against their racial peers in other states while, even more shocking, Kentucky’s Black students have actually lost ground to Black students elsewhere.

Gov. Beshear’s veto of this important legislation indicates his top priority is protecting the educational establishment’s status quo. We’re hopeful that the legislature, which is clearly more attuned at present to the citizens of the state than its governor, will see it right to override this most child-and-parent-hostile veto.

For more information or comment, please contact Bluegrass Institute President and CEO Jim Waters at (270) 320-4376.