Kamala Harris Has Strongly Supported Public Schools and Cracked Down on Unscrupulous For-Profit Charter Management Companies and For-Profit Colleges
Senator Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s choice as the Democratic candidate for vice president, has a solid record supporting public schools. As California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, Harris also worked aggressively to protect California’s citizens from fraud committed by the nation’s largest for-profit charter school management company. She also won a lawsuit in 2016 to provide relief to student borrowers who had been victimized by fraudulent advertising by for-profit colleges and trade schools.
The National Education Association (NEA) reports: “Harris gave her maiden speech on the Senate floor in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos, focusing on her utter lack of qualifications and experience as a teacher. In support of the #Red4Ed movement, she also supported educators’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland, California in 2019 saying, ‘Teachers in my hometown of Oakland will begin striking tomorrow because they know they deserve a raise. It’s shameful that they don’t earn enough to live in the communities where they teach.'” The 2018-2019 #Red4Ed teachers’ strikes across the United States were instrumental for forcing a number of states to remedy some of the deep budget cuts lingering from the 2008 recession, cuts that had, in Los Angeles, for example, pushed class sizes to over 40 students in public schools serving some of the city’s poorest children, many of them learning English.
NEA reports that, like Joe Biden, Harris has pushed for “increasing funding for Title I schools to make sure every student has a nurse and social worker… in addition to providing incentives to states to conduct racial and resource equity audits, increase their public school spending, and adopt more equitable funding formulas.” Like Biden she has advocated for fully funding important and federally mandated programs for disabled students. When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the promise was that 40 percent of the cost of the programs would be federally funded. Both Biden and Harris have said that that CONTINUE READING: Kamala Harris Has Strongly Supported Public Schools and Cracked Down on Unscrupulous For-Profit Charter Management Companies and For-Profit Colleges | janresseger