Issue Position: Our Education System

Issue Position

Ensuring the Best Education for All Our Children

We must act aggressively to ensure that our children are receiving a quality education within our public school systems.

1. School Infrastructure Funding
Our school construction and renovation is necessary to ensure a high -- quality teaching and learning environment, including construction to reduce class size, appropriate heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. This is about our children's safety and well being. This current administration provided $2.876 billion of state funding for school construction including $360 million for fiscal year 2014. The estimated cost to remedy inadequate conditions in our state's public school is over 15 billion. We must support School Opportunity also known as 63-20 bonds bring together public --private partnership .The program has already brought real change to other states. This aggressive solution would instantly bring with it thousands of construction --related jobs. The bonds are financed through a leaseback wherein the public sector partner for a set number of years until the bond is paid off.

2. Curriculum Flexibility
Being an advocate for letting teachers have more flexibility in educating our students. I believe in outcome based education in student achievements. However, the current structure of the state and local boards of education handicap our brightest teachers. This also means getting to the core of the evaluation system, student testing. It needs to be changed to one that does not support children remembering things to take a test, and then dumping the information to learn something else, to testing by open book and requiring children to research answers.

3. Higher Pay for Teachers
The state of Maryland must do a better job in compensating our teachers. The teaching profession must be respected again by our students. Teachers are the conduit to the occupational world that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars to well trained individuals, however the teacher or trainers that are administering the education are not compensated comparatively.

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