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SALT LAKE CITY — Republican vice presidential candidate and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made clear Thursday that he and Donald Trump are on the same page when it comes to education.
Several times during a speech at Sen. Mike Lee's Utah Solutions Summit the Indiana governor started sentences with "Donald Trump and I believe …" Both, he said, favor state and local control of education and school choice.
"I just want you to know that Donald Trump and I believe that to our bone marrow," Pence said.
Pence spoke to about 300 business, government and education leaders at Vivint Home Smart Arena gathered to talk about ways to prepare the economy and the workforce to succeed. He mixed economic and educational successes in his home state with campaign messages and called Trump a "broad-shouldered" leader during his 30-minute speech.
He concluded by encouraging people in these "challenging times in our nation" to "bend the knee" in prayer, not for any one candidate or cause but for the country in the 68 days before the November election.
"I believe today what I've always believed, and that is if his people who are called by his name and humble themselves and pray, he will hear again from heaven and he'll heal our land," Pence said.
Pence was actually Lee's second choice for the summit. He first invited former Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is now president of Purdue University. But when Daniels couldn't make it, Lee said he asked Pence a few weeks ago to step in. Pence didn't take questions from the audience or the media at the event.
"His presence here does not involve his status as Donald Trump's running mate," Lee said.
Lee has not endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket, though he said he's a "huge" fan of the current Indiana governor, describing him as a "policy entrepreneur."
"Support for a running mate is not quite the same as any decision one might make about the presidential candidate," he said.
In addition to Pence, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and Gov. Gary Herbert spoke at the conference.
Pence said education is an area he and Trump found "complete alignment" from their first meeting. Choice inside and outside schools would invigorate education, he said.
"Donald Trump and I both believe that every parent in America should be able to choose where their children go to school regardless of their income, regardless of their area code, and public, private and parochial and faith-based schools on the list," he said.
The Indiana governor also said he was proud of his state's school voucher program, one the largest in the country with 33,000 students attending the schools of their choice. Utah voters turned down a voucher system nearly 2 to 1 in a 2007 referendum.
In opening the conference, Lee said business, government and education need to learn how to band together to innovate and be "disruptive" in some cases to create a successful future workforce.
He has introduced the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act or HERO, which would allow states to create their own alternative higher education accreditation systems. Under the bill, students in professional training programs, apprenticeships, distance learning and online courses would be able to access federal financial aid.
"The HERO act would simply validate their existence," Lee said of new learning models.
Fiorina said too many people in the U.S. feel powerless because they can't see beyond their own circumstances, and government keeps them down rather than lifting them up.
"The facts of our nation are we are not educating and preparing too many of our children and workers and young people for the 21st century, so in other words we a wasting vast amounts of human potential. That's dumb. It's not just wrong, it's dumb for us as a nation," she said.
