Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

K-12

It is crucial that all children in Kentucky have access to a world-class education. That includes making sure we are providing teachers with the proper tools to educate our children and rewarding excellence in the classroom. We must improve transparency in our public school systems and focus on sending more money to our classrooms and less money to administrative bureaucracies.

Curriculum control is better placed at the local level and we should be giving teachers the freedom to teach rather than holding them back with nationalized standards dictated from Washington, DC.

Kentucky is behind the curve when it comes to school choice. School choice is a vital tool in promoting competition among schools and improving the overall quality of education for all Kentuckians.

Post-Secondary

If we are going to bring good paying jobs to Kentucky, we must have a well-educated workforce to meet the demands of those jobs. We have a post-secondary education system in Kentucky and across the nation that fails the needs of our students and our economy.

The current system encourages students to take out thousands of dollars in student loans to obtain degrees for jobs that will not pay an adequate wage to make the student loan payments. We are setting our kids up for failure right out of the gate and that is morally wrong.

Baby Boomers have begun to retire and there is a high demand for good paying technical jobs. I support an employer-based education system where our vocational and technical colleges are responsive to the needs of Kentucky's job market and employers. We have witnessed the success of this type of education reform in various pockets of the commonwealth and I want to duplicate that success all across Kentucky.

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