Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Jeff Ghrist expressed that his top priority during his campaign as Commissioner was and continues to be education. Every year during his two terms he supported a fully funded Board of Education request despite tough fiscal times where other line items experienced very deep cuts. While other counties have requested waivers to the mandated maintenance of effort Jeff insisted our local school system continue to be fully funded. Jeff is also proud of the incredible working relationship he has had with the boards of education.

Jeff has worked very closely with Chesapeake College and school Superintendents to look at the feasibility of a regional technology and vocational program that would pool resources to give students throughout the mid-shore the best education in their respective fields of interest. Jeff strongly believes that curriculum's should reflect the interest of the students rather than the questions on a standardized test. Vocational and Technical training opportunities should be improved.

Jeff has spent a fair amount of time in classrooms during the past five years as a Character Counts coach and understands that maintaining small class sizes must be a priority. He will continue to support increases in school construction funding along with providing tax incentives for parents who send students to private school and for parents who home school their children.

Education and investments in human capital are the best tools for economic development!

Ronald Reagan once said, "I believe that parents, not government, have the primary responsibility for the education of their children," he said. "Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control."
Unfortunately, Reagan was unsuccessful in instituting tuition tax credits and school vouchers. He was also unsuccessful in limiting federal power in education. Since Reagan's term, Washington has levied more power over education, resulting in the socialized education experiment, "No Child Left Behind". NCLB has been a failure.

Test scores and outcomes have not improved so the federal government has decided to ramp up the universal approach to education by developing the Common Core State Standards. State standards? Common Core is nothing short of a federal take over and nationalization of education. The "one size fits all" approach to government has never worked. Students in the various states, localities and in many cases in individual schools are very different. Students come from different backgrounds. They learn and are motivated in different ways. Jeff believes that funding, curriculum's and teaching should remain local.
More concerning is the creation of the Common Education Data Standards. In order to connect the common learning standards with the actual data the federal government had to find a way to obtain student data. Until recently a student's privacy was protected under FERPA (Family Educational Rights Privacy Act). Last year the law was changed granting an exception to the law giving the Department of Education access to personally identifiable student data.

The Data Quality Campaign states:
"every governor and chief state school officer has agreed to build statewide longitudinal data systems that can follow individual students from early childhood through K-12 and post secondary ed and into the workforce as a condition for receiving State Fiscal Stabilization Funds as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). A condition of getting the funding (ARRA money) was that the system would be interoperable."

It is argued that the State Longitudinal Databases are personal details that the federal and state governments are seeking to know about children. A vast federal program of linked databases started off appearing to collect information that is "not personally identifiable". There is fear among some that this data will soon be linked to individual students. Unlike the federal government states are empowered to change this status. It is illegal under the General Education Provision Act and under the Constitution, to have a federal database citizen surveillance. The federal government paid states to create these databases. The databases must be interoperable. By default, a national database has been created.

Like most federal government programs it is obvious that the federal government can't solve the problems in the nation's public schools. No child left behind is an excellent example. The best education reforms have occurred at the state level.

Like other important issues, many politicians take bad news about our public schools and turn it into an opportunity to offer another "necessary" proposal to increase federal spending and increased federal control. The USDE continues to make attempts to improve public education in America by creating new federal programs and increasing federal spending on education. Jeff believes that our teachers and school superintendents should be charged with improving their own schools.

Similar to other important issues Jeff strongly believes that the federal government should get out of the way.

Keep the money, resources and mandates at the local and state levels!

Source