Warren’s K-12 Plan: All In For Public Education
Many (including this writer) have asked over the past months: where is Elizabeth Warren’s K-12 education plan? Beyond her promise to install a former public school teacher as Secretary of Education, what does plan look like? Well, it’s here, and while it’s not perfect, it contains much of what public education supporters have been hoping to hear.
A Great Public Education for Every Student contains many many proposals that are standard promises for candidates these days–fully fund public ed, fight segregation and discrimination, provide “a warm, safe, and nurturing school climate” for students, treat teachers and staff like professionals. These are safe and common propositions, with the devil firmly situated in the details (we’ll get there in a moment). But the next proposal is a bit more aggressive: “Stop the privatization and corruption of our public education system.”
So how exactly does she propose to accomplish these goals. Which devils lurk here?
Funding.
Warren says that public education funding is a mess. Her proposal includes a four-fold increase in Title I spending (the spending that is supposed to help poorer districts get up to speed), thereby one-upping other candidates who have proposed a three-fold increase. She also wants to working with states and various experts about how they handle funding, and while “working with” can cost nothing and accomplish about the same, she also has some ideas for practical leverage, like linking that increased Title I funding to state’s finding better, fuller funding formulas.
Warren wants to spend $100 billion (roughly $1 million per school) on improvement grants, to build on what works as identified–and CONTINUE READING: Warren’s K-12 Plan: All In For Public Education