Bevin’s budgets showed his disdain for public education. Beshear’s shows his belief.
Today, we celebrate French majors and dance performance students and teachers and our small regional universities.
We often talk about how elections have consequences, and in this case, if you care about public education in our state, in the best possible way. New Gov. Andy Beshear released a budget that for the first time in a decade, doesn’t cut programs. There are modest increases to basic funding for both K-12 schools and public universities. The gains are tiny, but hey, when you’ve been starving, even a snack can feel like a feast.
We’re a long way from a finished budget document. But the proposed hikes are also symbolic, acknowledgment that we now have an administration that understands public education’s importance to moving this state forward. Gov. Matt Bevin slammed our state liberal arts programs; Beshear gives ALL the state universities a 1 percent funding increase. Bevin compared teachers to thugs; Beshear gives them a $2,000 bonus. Bevin cut school support programs, like textbooks; Beshear gives basic school funding a 1 percent hike.
Of course, Beshear has a slightly better economic forecast than Bevin did, as he tried to recover from the Great Recession and pull the state pension system out of the worst of its crises. Bevin put new money into workforce development programs. But he seemed to think the only point of higher education was teaching students to make widgets; that Kentucky was only fit for a manufacturing economy, and nothing more. He went out of his way to disparage liberal arts programs and teachers and public education in general, and his budgets reflected that same disdain.
Beshear’s budget also freezes one of Bevin’s big changes to higher education: Performance funding. Now this is a trend in other states, where the legislature grants an amount of extra money that is only given out based on college performance. Great idea, public colleges and universities should be held accountable for how many students they graduate.
But Bevin and his cadre of Ayn Rand acolytes decided they’d do it differently by putting all of state funding into a performance model — without new funding — and making schools compete against each other. So guess what happened? UK, which has 30,000 students from all over the state, did really, really well. Morehead State University, which serves an Eastern Kentucky region devastated by the coal industry’s downturn, lost money it desperately needed.
Morehead President Jay Morgan welcomed the change and said his school welcomes accountability that judges the school on how much it improves year after year.
“Morehead has no problems with our expectations to perform and we have been performing,” Morgan said Wednesday morning. “But we’re a small to medium size school and we’re expected to perform in a volume-based model. We would rather the formula be somehow equalized or account for a smaller school. “It’s almost like a middle school basketball team playing a large high school basketball team, as a general rule you won’t win.”
Of course, people like Sen. David Givens, R-Greensburg, who was deeply involved in creating the formula, won’t like the proposed change, and it’s not clear what might take its place.
Republicans also rightly pointed out that the Beshear’s numbers are based on a lot of assumptions, such as a sports betting bill getting passed, and new taxes on cigarettes. But for thousands of educators around the state in elementary schools and on university campuses, there must be a collective sigh of relief that the governor is on their side.
Morgan attended Beshear’s speech Tuesday night.
“I was heartened to hear him say he wants to stop cuts to higher education after 14 years of constant, constant reductions,” he said. “I left the speech last night thinking maybe we can stabilize higher education out a little bit. Then we want to work with the legislature and the governor to begin to rebuild. Let’s look for ways to work together to move all our universities forward.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2020 at 9:13 AM.
