• Prepares students for life after school by making them college and/or career ready
• Encourages and recognizes the need for innovative approaches to educating by loosening/waiving regulations that stifle such innovation
• Minimizes intervention of the state and federal governments
• Promotes market-based pay for teachers by
• Recognizing that different teachers/subjects/assignments have different market values
• Rejecting pay systems based on seniority and education levels
• Rewarding effective teachers through a merit pay system
• Addresses ineffective teachers through tenure reform
• Promotes teacher freedom from forced union membership
• Provides for alternative pathways to become a teacher, recognizing that traditional teacher licensure programs are not the only pathway to having a quality instructor in the classroom
• Provides an outcome-based effective finance system that
• Is both adequate and equitable
• Clearly delineates the Legislature as the body responsible for providing funding
• Rewards schools/districts for high performance and allows students to escape chronically underperforming schools
• Requires transparency in spending taxpayer dollars with full disclosure to the public on how money is spent at the building and program level
• Provides easy access to the public on school performance through a school grading system
• Encourages efficient spending through such efforts as
• Cooperative purchasing
• Combining administrative costs
• Unifying teacher benefits
• Allows parental-based school choice
• Expansion of the Tax Credit Scholarship Program
• Changing laws to allow real (independent) charter schools
• Establishing an education spending account (ESA) program that allow parents to make education choices for their children