Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

Are our kids and grand-kids truly getting the best education possible? As a product of the public education system and with children formerly and a grandchild currently enrolled, I can testify that educational standards are far lower than when I grew up. It's not parents' fault, and it's not teachers' fault.

Basic skills like reading, writing and arithmetic have been replaced with standardized tests that have been structured to ensure students and schools all eventually fail. Teachers are forced to "teach to a test" instead of doing the job for which they are professionally trained and skilled.

The culprit is the usual one: millions and millions of dollars to be had testing and re-testing and providing instructional material and a slew of other services. "Successful" schools don't need extra help. So the "Other People's Money" crowd had to find a way to make sure students and schools look "unsuccessful."

They've done that by chopping our schools into "demographic" groups and juggling specific population statistics to produce "failures to progress" despite, in some cases, across the board improvements.

The problem here is that our schools aren't composed of "demographics," they're composed of individuals, each with a capacity to learn. That's why we have individual educators. That's the traditional Republican view, it's the view that's right for our democracy, and it would still be our school systems' view if artificial, unattainable-by-design standards were not being imposed from above.
Standardized testing doesn't teach anything. It was never intended to be a learning tool and it's killing our schools being used as one now.

Worse yet, we have even more expensive "Common Core" standards waiting in the wings. These people are already counting the potential windfall they'll make to dumb down curriculum and then reap the rewards of using Common Core tests to evaluate children trained on mediocre Common Core materials.

Let's not let it happen folks. Let's keep educational oversight in our families, in our communities and in our local schools. Let's trust our teachers to do the job they've been trained to do.

As your Congressional representative, I will fight to ensure parents have a place in their school district; and I will work to eliminate laws that over-regulate professional educators. It's time to bring back curriculum that will prepare our children to be responsible, INDIVIDUAL good citizens.

Let's return our public schools to states and local communities and take them out of the reach of Washington's greedy donor class. Our children's educations are not for sale.

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