School funding has grown exponentially over the decades, yet college and career readiness remains stubbornly low and there are enormous achievement gaps for low income students. Simply spending more hasn’t – and won’t – help students get the education they deserve and produce a qualified workforce.

Solutions

  • • Education should be student focused, not institution focused

  • • Every child deserves a quality education

  • • Parents know what’s best for their children’s education

  • • Curriculum and other instructional decisions are best made at the local level

  • • Effective teachers have the greatest impact on student performance

  • • Transparency is vital

  • • The system of funding education must be responsible to both the education system and taxpayers

  • • A “one-size-fits-all” approach to educating children does not work


  • Solution Characteristics

    • 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