What does Kentucky’s business community want out of the 2012 Kentucky General Assembly?

This from the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce:

This year, the Kentucky Chamber’s policy councils have placed special emphasis on policies that warrant immediate action and yield long-term benefits for the Kentucky business community. It’s time to get Kentuckians back to work with policies that will promote economic growth, because growth cannot be sustained without proper policies to support it.
On January 3, as the 2012 General Assembly begins, Kentucky Chamber policy advocates will work directly with legislators to create policies that will:

• support career and technical training.
• raise the high school drop-out age from 16 to 18.
• uphold new, tougher academic standards.
• promote quality teaching – reward great teachers, remove bad teachers.
• implement performance funding for new investment in higher education.
• promote sound budgeting – adhere to the Chamber’s spending principles.
• reform public pension systems to put them on sound financial footing.
• stop prescription drug abuse.
• reduce smoking and improve health and productivity.
• promote a competitive tax climate – reform taxes that hinder job growth.
• allow our horse industry to compete through expanded gaming.
• encourage business investment through angel investment and economic development plans.
• address unemployment interest payments in an employer-friendly manner.
• promote cleaner coal as a key source of reliable energy.
• support low-cost energy by protecting the current Public Service Commission structure.

Download the Chamber’s 2012 Legislative Agenda for a detailed look at the business community’s 2012 priorities.

Ky. chamber proposes new plan to pay tuition

This from the C-J:

Student, family, state, school to split cost

The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce is proposing a new way to help Kentucky students pay for college.

The Guaranteed Affordability Program, or GAP, is designed to split the cost of college among students, families, schools and the government. Chamber President Dave Adkisson presented the plan to a legislative subcommittee yesterday.

The plan calls for the following:

Students must contribute to their tuition an amount equal to what they could earn from a 40-hour work week during the summer and 10 to 15 hours per week during the school year at a minimum wage job. That contribution could come from private scholarships, as well as such state funding as a Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship.

Families must contribute an amount determined by federal financial aid guidelines.

Scholarships or other funding given by the college or university must be applied to tuition costs.

The state must make up the difference between the above sums and the cost of attending a public university or community and technical college.

The state Council on Postsecondary Education would determine the cost of attending a public institution, and students attending independent colleges and universities would be eligible to receive that public "cost of attendance" to apply toward their education costs.

The chamber did not release any estimates of what the plan would cost the state.

"Until you study our current resources, and the eligibility requirements, you could not put a price tag on it," Adkisson said. "We assume it would require extra dollars, but we also assume the economy will eventually improve." ...

Kentucky Chamber announces 'New Agenda' results

This from the Business Courier of Cincinnati:

The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce released the results of its "New Agenda for Kentucky" initiative on Wednesday.

The initiative, launched last April, was designed to encourage Kentuckians to suggest ways to improve the state, and funnel those ideas into an action agenda that will be presented to Gov. Steve Beshear and other policy officials.

A task force of business executives and entrepreneurs was formed to guide the process of developing the agenda and help solicit ideas from the public through a designated Web site, community meetings, outreach to civic organizations and community groups, and interviews with experts and opinion leaders.

The project generated nearly 400 ideas from contributors across the state, according to the task force's report. The group has selected 100 of the most compelling suggestions to share with the state and its elected leaders. The selections were made based on viability, financial feasibility, the time needed to implement, innovation and vision, and impact, the report said.
Here is a sampling of those ideas:

• To bolster Kentucky farms, promote alternative agriculture by encouraging organic farming, providing incentives for the production of industrial hemp (that cannot be used to produce marijuana), and offering financial incentives for ethanol production.
• Antiquated alcohol sales laws, which are confusing to tourists and sacrifice revenue, should be eliminated and alcohol sales should be permitted statewide in Kentucky.
• The state needs to encourage people to move to Kentucky to keep population levels high enough to compete economically. To do this, it should encourage local communities to develop Web sites that allow to them to hook up to utilities and arrange for other necessary services online.
• To bring more corporate headquarters to Kentucky, the state should offer a wide array of incentives, including full tax abatement for 10 years for all executives who move to Kentucky.
• Actions that are required to prepare Kentucky to compete in the global marketplace include: teaching the metric system in public schools, teaching foreign languages such as Chinese, and comparing Kentucky's economic/educational performance with other countries instead of just other states.
• Life skills classes should be required for all students and should include: character education, parenting skills/responsibilities, personal finance, business education/experience, civic engagement/community service and cooperative jobs to provide workplace experience.
• Establishing an education improvement tax credit for businesses in Kentucky that contribute to public and private schools could help increase funding for schools.
• Kentucky should fully fund higher education in exchange for an agreement from state colleges and universities that they will not raise tuition.
• Kentucky should require contractor accountability for the environment by requiring all potential state contractors to submit a scorecard showing how well they reduce/reuse/recycle; this information should become a factor in the awarding of state contracts.
• To encourage physicians to continue the important practice of providing charity, they should receive a tax deduction for charitable care equal to one-half of the normal Medicare-approved rate for the service provided.
• Kentucky should eliminate the prevailing wage requirement for all public construction projects.
• Kentucky's state and local tax structure should be thoroughly reviewed and changed to make it more "business friendly" by eliminating or reducing taxes such as payroll taxes, net profit taxes, occupational taxes, inventory taxes and vehicle property taxes.
• Kentucky should establish a back-to-school tax-free holiday to give families a break, boost retail business and discourage shoppers from crossing state lines to take advantage of other states' programs.
• Kentucky could reduce the number of abandoned buildings by creating a sliding scale property tax with incremental increases the longer a building is unoccupied (after one or two years).
• To increase transportation options in Kentucky's most populous regions, the state should develop light rail service/public transportation, especially between Lexington and Louisville and in the Bluegrass Region of Central Kentucky.
• Kentucky should prohibit the use of hand-held cell phones while driving.

H-L's Sunday editorial on Ky.'s education challenge

A nice editorial from H-L on Sunday.

They focus on higher education with attention paid to Beshear and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, both appropriately.

This editorial barely acknowledges K-12 and fails to mention Jon Draud's call for regional summits to revive grassroots support for education in the state. That's the thing that will ultimately make the biggest difference - when everyone comes together. Governor, Education Cabinet Secretary, Education Commissioner, CPE, state boards, business community, parents, community leaders and journalists; all with one voice to improve Kentucky's schools.

I hope, since Draud's selection was not quite what the Herald-Leader had in mind, that they aren't planning to deny acknowledgment of his positive efforts. They should give the guy a honeymoon - long enough for him to show what he stands for.

Business leaders rejoin battle with alarming data,

useful recommendations

Kentucky's business leaders are wading back into the education arena with a bunch of good ideas, including a way to guarantee an affordable college education to any Kentuckian who's willing to work for it.

But all the good ideas will be just words on paper unless there's also a rekindled sense of urgency and accountability about improving education at every level.

Reviving that urgency is one of the biggest challenges facing Steve Beshear when he becomes governor on Tuesday.

It's a good omen that the business community is showing a renewed interest in education after being absent from the debate for a while. ...

...Beshear and lawmakers must also halt what the chamber task force calls "a steady drift away" from strategic budgeting in higher education. This will require re-establishing higher-ed planning bodies.

The link between education and the economy is direct and strong. Kentucky launched education reform from so far behind that it must be extra smart and run extra hard just to stay even.

This from the Herald-Leader.

Kentucky's schools: a new reality

Former Owensboro Mayor and current President and CEO of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Dave Adkisson has an Op-Ed in the Courier-Journal supporting the idea that Kentucky has indeed made progress as measured by the recent Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center study.

For the past two years, I've traveled the state and talked to hundreds of business, education, political and community leaders, and I've tried to get a handle on whether we've made progress in education and, if so, how much. That has proved to be a difficult task. I have concluded that, as average Kentuckians, we simply don't know.

A conversation about educational progress (or lack thereof) can quickly become a mind-numbing discussion of test scores, which test scores, funding, spending, accountability, governance and other matters. For the 99.9 percent of us who are not professional educators, our eyes quickly glaze over, and we end up bewildered, not knowing whether we've made progress or not.

One news story about ACT scores sounds pretty good, and then we hear how few Kentucky workers have a bachelor's or associate degree. We don't know whether to feel good or feel bad.

The recent release of a study by the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center sheds a bright light on the question of progress and, more important, offers reason for hope and optimism.

The LTPRC took 11 major national rankings that are widely accepted as important measures of student achievement, combined them into a single index and charted them from the early 1990s through 2005, the latest year for which the rankings
are available.

Dramatic findings

What the combined index reveals is dramatic. Kentucky has made impressive progress in education, and we have clearly moved out of the bottom tier and toward the middle of the pack of all states. Overall, we moved from 43rd in 1992 to 34th in 2005. The move is even more impressive when we look at what happened to some other states, especially those who shared the basement with Kentucky in 1992: Alabama moved from 48th to 46th.

Mississippi moved from 50th to 48th.

North Carolina -- often cited as an example of what Kentucky should try to be -- began in 42nd place and moved up to 35th, one slot below Kentucky.

Other recent reports support the positive conclusions about Kentucky: Our fourth and eighth graders are performing above the national average in science and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card. Education Week's Quality Counts 2007 Achievement Index ranks Kentucky at 34th, and the Morgan Quitno 2006-07 Smartest State Index ranks Kentucky at 31st.

This is huge!

Kentucky's schools have made major gains in less than one generation. And we have proved that with a concentrated and sustained public effort to help all students learn at high levels, our schools can -- and do -- improve.

The gains are even more impressive when considered against the backdrop of Kentucky's high poverty level, the influx into our public schools of thousands of immigrants (many of whom are still learning English) and the low education levels of our adult population. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently gave Kentucky a "B" in its national report card for "return on investment."

In other words, for the tax dollars we're investing into education, we're getting a good dividend in student achievement.

Are there areas that still need attention?

Absolutely. I don't think many of us are going to rush out and paste "We're No. 34!" bumper stickers on our cars to celebrate our new rankings.