Would Jacqueline Coleman bring sound education policy into the governor’s office?

Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman is running for governor. She’s spent years as Governor Andy Beshear’s point person on education both as lieutenant governor and Secretary of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet. As a long-time participant in education policy for the commonwealth, it is appropriate that the Bluegrass Institute discuss and assess gubernatorial candidate Coleman’s positions in this regard. We conclude that, examined carefully, her record raises serious questions about the policies she would bring to the Governor's office.

The Good News

Lt. Gov. Coleman has championed a handful of education-related policy reforms that are worthy of praise. She has advocated for making the GED free for first-time test takers, which is now law. The cost of GED testing is a small but real hurdle to Kentuckians seeking employment absent a high school diploma.

More broadly, Coleman appears to recognize some key factors limiting workforce development: inadequate consideration from Kentucky’s public schools to help meet private sector workforce needs, and the proliferation of bureaucratic hurdles that can impede individuals seeking education to boost their employment prospects. Given Kentucky’s status as one of the most restrictive states with respect to occupational licensing, Coleman could be amenable to dismantling the regulatory barriers that hinder employment for a wide variety of skilled workers.

The Pre-K Letdown

Coleman has been the Beshear administration’s most vocal advocate for universal pre-kindergarten. The political appeal is obvious: Who could be against helping Kentucky’s youngest learners get a head start? But the research on universal pre-K programs is far more sobering than rhetoric suggests.

Many studies of the federal Head Start program, such as a randomized research effort released in 2012, have shown that “positive impacts on literacy and language development demonstrated by children who entered Head Start at age 4 had dissipated by the end of 3rd grade.”

A more recent, rigorous study of a scaled, statewide public pre-K program in Tennessee that extended findings to upper grades found that children who attended pre-K actually scored lower on state achievement tests in third and sixth grade than comparable children who did not attend. The negative effects grew larger over time. By sixth grade, pre-K participants were more likely to be placed in special education. Lead researcher Dale Farran, who had spent half a century studying early childhood education, said the findings forced her into a profound reconsideration of everything she had assumed about the subject.

The so-called “fade-out effect,” in which any initial academic gains from pre-K programs typically evaporate by third grade, is well-established across multiple evaluations. And the cost of doing this poorly at scale is enormous. National estimates for quality universal pre-K programs run roughly $12,500 per child annually. For Kentucky, that is hundreds of millions of dollars annually for a program whose flagship examples in other states have produced disappointing or even harmful outcomes.

Coleman has also championed a dramatic expansion of pre-K as an economic development strategy and workforce solution. Those projections deserve the same skepticism we would apply to any government program whose promised returns consistently fail to materialize. If Coleman wants to put universal pre-K at the center of her policy agenda, she owes Kentuckians a forthright accounting of the Tennessee and Head Start data — not a pivot around them.

An Agency That May Have Broken the Law — With the Education Board’s Blessing

If there is a single education issue that should concern every parent, legislator, and taxpayer in the commonwealth regardless of political persuasion, it is what the Kentucky Department of Education has done with student assessment — and what the Kentucky Board of Education apparently allowed to happen without so much as a public vote.

For nearly two decades, every Kentucky high school junior took the ACT college entrance test. Whatever one thinks of standardized testing, the ACT provided something invaluable: an 18-year trend line of college-readiness data that could not be massaged by the state, could be compared across a number of other states, and revealed the unvarnished truth about where Kentucky students stood.

What that trend line showed was uncomfortable. As Bluegrass Institute research has documented extensively, ACT scores in reading, math, and science have declined since 2016–17. The ACT is the sole long-term education trend line the state possesses — the one measure that has remained consistent through four different state-assessment regimes.

Rather than confronting those declines, the Kentucky Department of Education scrapped the ACT and switched to the SAT. This is not a harmless administrative choice. It destroys the only continuous source of college-readiness data Kentucky has, eliminates the one state-funded metric that cannot be curved or inflated by the state, and violates both the structure and the requirements of state law.

On this point, the Bluegrass Institute has been unambiguous about the legal problem. KRS 158.6453 is explicit: the college entrance exam must assess English, reading, math, and science. The SAT simply doesn’t do that. The SAT has no separate English section and no separate science score. KDE’s response — that the law requires assessment of science but not a separate science section — is precisely the kind of bureaucratic hairsplitting that should concern a legislature that wrote the Kentucky Education Reform Act to ensure a stable, trustworthy assessment system.

Worse, the department’s switch to the SAT appears to have no public record of state board approval. KDE’s December 2025 briefing to the board on 2025 assessment results omitted any discussion of the legally mandated ACT’s results. Those results showed serious performance declines that contradict the improving state assessment narrative the department presented to the board.

The Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor, appears to have quietly allowed this to happen. That is a governance failure that rests with Governor Beshear’s appointees. Erasing the ACT’s trend line will potentially mask Kentucky’s educational performance for years.

Coleman has been silent on the issue.

Any gubernatorial candidate who genuinely believes in accountability for Kentucky schools should be asked: Did you know KDE was moving forward on the ACT to SAT change without board approval? Do you believe the switch, including both the adoption process and the test adopted, satisfies the requirements of state law? And if an agency under your administration decides it can ignore a statute rather than follow it, what would you do?

Opposing Help for Kids at No Cost to Taxpayers

This spring, the Kentucky General Assembly passed House Bill 1, opting the Commonwealth into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit program. The measure allows Kentucky students to benefit from scholarships funded through a federal tax credit — without costing the commonwealth a single dollar. The scholarships can be used for private school tuition, tutoring, books, internet access, and other educational expenses. They are available to public school students, not just those seeking private options.

Ahead of the Senate vote, Coleman publicly called HB 1 a “back door voucher bill” and urged Kentuckians to contact lawmakers to vote against it. She argued the bill would redirect federal tax revenue to private entities and benefit middle-to-upper-class families already attending private school.

Those claims do not hold up. Senate President Pro Tem David Givens noted that if Kentucky refused to opt in, Kentuckians could still claim the federal credit, but their donations would flow across state lines to support education elsewhere. The practical effect of Coleman’s position, in other words, was not to protect Kentucky children — it was to ensure Kentucky children got none of the benefits while children in other states did.

The governor vetoed the bill. The Republican supermajority overrode the veto. HB 1 is now law. Kentucky became the 28th state to opt in and the first to do so over a governor’s veto. Coleman's active public campaign against a zero-cost scholarship program is now part of her record as the administration's education point person, and the policy consequences of her preferred policy deserve serious scrutiny.

What a Coleman Administration Would Inherit

There is a deeper problem underlying all three of these issues, and it is one that Bluegrass Institute has been documenting for years. Kentucky has substantially increased per-pupil spending in real terms over recent decades, and yet the state’s NAEP math and reading scores are lower today than they were a decade ago. The spending is going to bureaucracy, benefits, and pension obligations rather than into classrooms. The state’s own assessment history is a graveyard of programs (KIRIS, CATS, K-PREP, and now KSA, whose writing assessment has just been axed). Kentucky’s assessments are typically replaced before they produce the kind of reliable trend data that can be used to hold the state-run education system accountable.

Into this environment, Coleman proposes to spend hundreds of millions more on a pre-K program with a highly troubled national track record, has been silent about an agency that may have violated state law to kill our only long-term, honest measurement of high school performance, and publicly fought a program that would give Kentucky families more education options at no cost to taxpayers.

Jacqueline Coleman is running for governor on her education record. Kentuckians who care about educational accountability, transparency, and the wise use of public resources should examine that record closely.

Gary W. Houchens, Ph.D., is professor and director of the Educational Leadership Doctoral Program at Western Kentucky University. John Garen is the BB&T Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Gatton College of the University of Kentucky. Caleb O. Brown is CEO of the Bluegrass Institute.