Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd’s ruling that pension-reform legislation passed on the 57th day of this year’s 60-day General Assembly session is unconstitutional because it allegedly didn’t get…
Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. The animosity shown by certain groups within the public-education sector toward Gov. Bevin and the legislature’s Republicans regarding their efforts at reforming the commonwealth’s ailing public pension systems…
(FRANKFORT, Ky.) — The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, Kentucky’s first and only free-market think tank, submitted comments to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in support of the Section 1115 Medicaid waiver submitted by Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration that strives to move able-bodied adults from welfare to work, thus removing them…
Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. It’s hard to reconcile public radio’s assertion that this year’s Fancy Farm event in western Kentucky was “the Super Bowl of Kentucky politics” with the fact that some…
Join Bluegrass Institute Staff Education Analyst Richard Innes on KET’s Kentucky Tonight at 8 pm (EDT) … tonight! Innes joins host Renee Shaw and a panel of guests, including Brigitte Blom Ramsey, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excllence, Stephanie Winkler, president of the Kentucky Education Association, and Steven Gordon, associate fellow at…
Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, state education leaders in Louisiana decided to take over and rebuild the shattered New Orleans public school infrastructure using charter…
The Minimum Wage And Its Effects On Kentucky’s Economy Executive Summary: While proposals to raise the minimum-wage failed in Washington and Frankfort in 2014, the debate is expected to continue at both the state and federal levels in 2015. A careful review of the evidence reveals no economic consensus that increasing the minimum-wage leads to…
While Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize for his economic theories, he and wife Rose Friedman spent the last decade of his life totally committed to growing the nation’s school choice movement, including using his resources to create and fund the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Each year, the Bluegrass Institute joins the Friedman Foundation…
Opening Statement: Dr. Lewis Kentucky has made significant improvements in education since the 1980s. Since passage of the landmark Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) in 1990, the state’s education system has improved from being one of the absolute worst in the country to now being near the top of the bottom third of systems in…
“Common Core is not state-led, rigorous, or internationally-benchmarked, and it poses a grave threat to family, local, and state sovereignty,” said Joy Pullman of the Heartland Institute during a public hearing for the Pennsylvania State Senate Education Committee back in May 2013. It seems that much of what Common Core advocates have been telling us…