Education

Through his work with City Year, Alan Khazei has more than twenty years of direct experience expanding post-secondary educational opportunities for young people in Massachusetts (and nationally) in exchange for their commitment to community and public service. By putting teams of diverse, idealistic and motivated young leaders into high poverty public schools across the country, Alan’s work with City Year also focused on improving public education for our most needy students in Massachusetts and across the US. Alan will fight to make a world-class education for all the defining civil rights and jobs issue of the 21st century.

Alan recognizes that we need to move from a twentieth century education system to a 21^st century education system that rewards success and innovation, leverages effective practices and technology, promotes lifelong learning, enables everyone to get access to some post-secondary education and prepares all of our students for the jobs of the 21^st century, while also being active-duty citizens.

Scott Brown recently voted for the largest cut in the history of the Pell Grant program for low-income college students, a $2 billion cut to Head Start early education programs, and a $31 million cut for Massachusetts K-12 education in 2011.

Alan Khazei knows that the future of America’s success depends on increasing access to education for Americans of all ages and incomes. As Senator, Alan Khazei will not support cutting education while our nation loses billions of dollars each year in tax loopholes and special interest giveaways.

Start With the Facts

• More than one-third of US college students fail to receive degrees 6 years after enrollment and the US ranks 12^th in the percentage of young adults with college degrees.
• Twenty years ago the U.S. was 1^st among industrialized nations in share of population with a high school diploma. Today, we are 9^th in high school diplomas and 18^th out of 24 in high school graduation rate.
• On America's latest exams, two-thirds of eighth-grade students were not proficient in math, science, or reading. We can and must do better in order to help our students succeed and help our economy be globally competitive.
• Only 1 in 17 children from families with income less than $35,000 get a bachelor’s degree by age 24. We can't be competitive and a fair, merit-based society unless we provide educational opportunity to all of our people regardless of background.

Alan’s Plan

Promote universal access to quality, affordable early childhood learning

• Support President Obama’s $500 million Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge
• Require 25% of all Child Care and Development Fund money to be used for early-morning and after-school care at high-quality Pre-K and Head Start settings.
• Invest in educator quality for early learning with $1 billion over 5 years.

Support teaching professionals

• Make teaching and educational leadership one of our most respected and revered professions.
• Fight for a quality teacher in every classroom and a quality leader in every school by increasing the federal investment in teacher and school leadership quality and requiring rigorous evaluation to identify and scale what works.
• Recognize and support our most successful educators
• Focus investments on reform and results

Support innovation and invest in what works

• Continue President Obama’s successful Race To the Top program and the Invest In Innovation fund that are models for how to effectively incentivize reform and innovation in education.
• Increase the federal charter school investment to support expansion of high-quality charter schools but insist that states focus on quality and accountability to help more charter schools become models for other public schools and share lessons learned.
• Make similar investments over the next five years to expand other high-quality public schools and l ink funding to districts and state commitment to provide meaningful autonomy to those schools over staffing, budgets, school schedules, and professional development - and help participating schools share lessons learned with other public schools
• Expand the school day and year for struggling schools that have students who are significantly behind grade level to create more time for meaningful and productive learning; draw on models like Citizen Schools, City Year, and other innovative approaches so that adding time in school leads to better learning opportunities in a wide range of subjects including arts, civics, technology, science, and health.
• Enact and fund the Time for Innovation Matters in Education (TIME) Act
.
• Modernize school buildings and create jobs while making schools vibrant centers of their community.

Reauthorize the Elementary & Secondary Education Act to replace No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

• Build on the strengths and fix the failures of NCLB by increasing federal funding for teacher and school leader quality.
• Invest in high-quality, useful assessments aligned to rigorous, common standards.
• Focus accountability on student improvement and not just proficiency targets.

Make a college education affordable for every American

• Pay the full costs of college (up to $10,000 per year) for each year of community or national service.
• Increase Pell Grants and reduce interest on student loans.
• Substantially simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms and invest in community colleges.

Provide students and their families with meaningful data about their college choices

• Popular rankings of “best colleges” provide few clues about how much students learn. Support research to improve the Collegiate Learning Assessment or other measuring tools to compare how students at different colleges improve their reasoning and writing skills.
• Publish scores for individual colleges gathered by the National Survey of Student Engagement, an existing survey of 1,300 colleges that currently releases only aggregate national data.

Improve education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)

• Expand public-private partnerships such as the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science – a collaboration between the State of Massachusetts and Worcester Polytechnic Institute – and encourage universities, private companies, and professional organizations to engage with our K-12 educational system to promote STEM education.
• Support President Obama’s goal to prepare 100,000 new STEM teachers in the next 10 years and invest in STEM teachers by providing tax credits of up to $1,500 as proposed in the National STEM Education Tax Incentive for Teachers Act.
• Create new and innovative ways to educate children and attract them to STEM fields. Video games and graphic novels are used by the US Army and more could be done to develop STEM-based educational games like Wolfquest (a National Science Foundation-funded game about ecology) and Whyville (a virtual world with math and science games).

Provide options for internet-based learning

• Increase access to high-quality online learning materials for students of all ages, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.
• Develop virtual schools such as Massachusetts Virtual Academy at Greenfield and encourage physical schools to take advantage of online coursework.