Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

As an educator, I have seen firsthand the challenges many of our students face, and the struggle with our public education system to address them with continued budget cuts and fractured support for education. The California Master Plan for Higher Education is what made California the home of innovation and responsible for our well-trained workforce. Publicly funded education is essential to creating a thriving and prosperous state and we must recommit to the notion that a public education in California is the right of each young person who seeks it and has earned that opportunity.

Supporting K-12 education

I believe we must first secure a reliable, adequate and effective source of funding to assure our public schools have the necessary personnel, programs and resources to provide a quality education for all of California's students. To achieve this, we must not tinker with the Prop 98 formula during difficult economic times but, instead, find the resources necessary to meet the needs and expectations of our educators, students and parents. To achieve this, I will continue to support closing tax loopholes that allow big corporations and the top 1% to avoid their responsibility to pay their fair share.

Strengthening our public universities and community colleges

Higher education is crucial to getting California back on track. The incentives for businesses to invest in California are our world-class public universities and research institutions and the highly skilled and prepared students they produce. But we are making our schools prohibitively expensive and therefore pricing far too many of our students out of the market. This approach is counter-productive and actually represents a "tax" on our students. In 2012, the Bay Area News Group reported that Harvard is now more affordable to a middle-income family than attending an in-state CSU. The continued cuts to public higher education are unsustainable. We need to rollback student fees so that higher education in California remains attainable and a goal for our students to achieve.

Opportunities for everyone

While we must make sure our best and brightest students are given the opportunity to attend college and get the best and highest education possible, we must recognize that most of our students do not go to college and reinstate and recommit to developing the best career technical education possible to compete in this global/21st century economy.

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