Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Education is the most important issue for Delaware and our country. The key to our future is preparing our schoolchildren for the competitive world and job market of the 21st Century. I ran for the State Senate to help improve local schools, increase autonomy for schoolteachers, and ensure Delaware schoolchildren have real job and education opportunities after they graduate.

We as Delawareans need to rethink our approach to education so that it better reflects the realities of the 21st Century. We must work hard to build stronger bonds between students, teachers, parents, and administrators to ensure our public schools are the vibrant bedrock of our community. Chief among the changes we must make is a halt to the increasing emphasis on high-stakes standardized tests. These tests are an inadequate approach both for preparing our children for their future careers in dynamic industries, and for evaluating teacher performance. We must provide the laws, funding, and support necessary for our students and teachers to develop the nuanced and nurturing relationships that are at the heart of a great education. We should not measure educational success primarily on test scores. Our fundamental measure should be the success of Delaware students who choose to pursue higher education or who choose to seek employment immediately after high school.

Policymakers should approach education not from pure ideological perspectives, but from a perspective that actively recognizes, reflects on, and adjusts for the actual data coming from the schools themselves. Policymakers should not overly incentivize competition and antagonism between schools through the over-use of competitive grants for foundational education programs. Students should not lose out because their school's grant application is only second or third best. We should instead focus on building bonds of cooperation between schools, including between district and charter schools, in order to help all schools learn lessons from one another and maximize the impact of limited funding.

We must compensate our teachers much more than we do now to treat them as the professionals they are. We should encourage the best and brightest students to see teaching for the advanced profession it is. We should ensure our schools have more resources, including for:

1) paraprofessionals to support teachers;

2) counseling and guidance for students, especially when tough economic times lead to stress within homes and families;

3) more individualized instruction;

4) more coordination between employers/industries and schools/districts, so that our students are actually learning 21st Century skills in schools;

5) more accountability for student behavior;

6) parental involvement programs; and

7) programs to help students engage with community service.

These are among the steps we must take to move Delaware along the path towards vastly improving our students' educational outcomes. It is a journey that we must take in order to ensure a robust, sustainable future for Newark/Bear and the entire State of Delaware.

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