Education is the silver bullet for so many of our nation's problems.
Our efforts to build a "land of opportunity" can succeed only if our
public schools give every child the chance to realize his or her
potential. Furthermore, our country's status as an economic and
military power rests on our students' ability to keep pace with
students from every other country. Therefore, our national government
must make it the highest priority to help states improve public
education.
Our national government should help improve our public schools in the following ways:
- Congress should listen to professional educators' advice about how
to improve the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The NCLB goals are
admirable, but in practice the Act has major problems. Congress must
fully fund the Act for it to be effective, and our government should
reform the Act according to input from our country's best educators.
- Congress should use federal money to improve public schools, not to
finance vouchers for private schools. Most private schools are
fantastic institutions where parents may certainly choose to send
children, but our government should not use public money to finance
those choices. Public money should go to our under-funded public
schools.
- Congress should focus on helping our best and brightest students
push themselves as far as they can. For our country to remain an
economic and military superpower, our country's top students must be
among the world's best minds leading all our endeavors.
- Congress can and should increase public school funding in a fiscally responsible way.
My opponent, John Linder, does not understand the importance of
fully funding our public schools. He has repeatedly voted to divert
funding from public schools into voucher programs, which use public
funds to send children to private schools. On his website, Mr. Linder
says our country has the "responsibility to educate every child," but
he clearly does not understand how removing money from public schools
prevents our country from doing just that. In 2007, the National
Education Association gave Mr. Linder an "F" for his failure to
"promote the cause of quality public education." John Linder simply
does not understand how to help improve educational opportunities for
our country's children and young adults.
More on Education: Supporting My Position
Our national government must help state governments fully fund our
public schools. In 2002, President Bush signed into law the strongly
bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, a landmark law designed to
facilitate the academic success of every student- regardless of any
student's socioeconomic background. The law preserves states' autonomy
by allowing each state to design and follow its own path to school
improvement. The law's goals are admirable, but it has some major flaws
that our national government can help address.
The NCLB Act has never been adequately funded. This year's federal
budget for NCLB is $24.5 billion-which sounds impressive until you
consider that the Gwinnett County Public Schools alone operate on
nearly $2 billion each year. The law requires schools to set benchmarks
for improvement like never before, but schools are given no additional
funds to help make this happen. Only the very poorest schools receive
any federal money at all through "Title I" funds. This situation fails
students, hurts teachers' and administrators' morale, and makes
unreasonably difficult each school's task of achieving its required
"Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP).
Many groups of professional educators have submitted plans to
improve the NCLB Act, including the American Federation of Teachers,
the National Education Association, the Aspen Institute, and the
National Center for Fair and Open Testing. Congress needs to pay
attention to what large groups of experts say about education
legislation. For instance, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
says it "has long championed the principles underlying the No Child
Left Behind Act" but criticizes the Act for sticking to a flawed AYP
formula and failing to support educators. The AFT says that the $70.9
billion "short-changed" to the Act since 2002 would help solve many of
the Act's problems. Other organizations offer different criticisms and
solutions, but here is the bottom line: Congress must fully fund
whatever reforms it passes, or the promise of opportunity will remain
un-kept for many students.
Some argue that instead of increasing funding for our country's
public schools, we should privatize schools and let market competition
drive our education system. Others believe we should partially
privatize education through student "voucher" programs. These would be
poor decisions: public money should be used to improve our public
education system, not support privatization programs. Like any product
in the market, the best schools would cost the most money, and the
"land of opportunity" we want to build should not make the best schools
cost-prohibitive for most families. Additionally, the U.S. Department
of Education reports that 76% of our country's private schools are
religious institutions. We don't fund our churches with taxpayer
dollars and we also shouldn't fund our religiously-based private
schools with those taxpayer dollars.
Others argue that money is not the problem because our country
already spends as much money per student as any other country. It is
true that schools need to spend efficiently and that parenting and
other factors play huge roles in students' success; however, our
funding problem is not that simple. The United States is unique among
countries with high-achieving students for several reasons. Many other
countries offer free education only through middle school, but we offer
it through high school. Other countries do not offer the wealth of free
special education programs our schools offer, and these programs
require a lot of funding. American public schools try to offer students
unique kinds of opportunity, but we need to adequately fund our public
education programs for those opportunities to be real.
Yet even a fully-funded No Child Left Behind program will not solve
all our country's public education problems. NCLB focuses on achieving
minimum passing standards for all students, but it does not focus on
helping our best students push themselves further. Our country's top
students used to lead the world, but over the past two decades we have
fallen behind. For America to remain an economic and military
superpower, our country's top students must be among the world's best
minds leading all our endeavors. We must do more than help students
achieve at a minimum level: we must help all our students reach as far
as they can.
Finally, while our national government must spend more money on
public education, it must do so while keeping a fiscally disciplined
overall budget. There are plenty of ways we can realistically
accomplish this goal. (Please read article the "Fiscal Discipline" )
Doug Heckman is candidate for U.S. Congress. I am asking for your vote to send me to the United States Congress. To find out more why you should vote for me, please visit www.dougheckman.com.
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