Education

The Future of Illinois...

It may be a cliché, but our children are the future of Illinois and we owe it to them to make sure they receive the best education possible. My wife is a teacher and we have two school-age children so I know first-hand the importance of a quality education. I believe we must set higher educational standards, more accurately track student achievement, and improve the quality of teachers and administrators.

In order to increase student achievement we must provide all students access to a first-class, 21st century education.  We must support higher educational standards and recruit and retain the best and brightest to serve as teachers. We must track student achievement is important, but what is more important is what happens once we determine that specific schools or even teachers are not turning out desirable results.  If we want students to succeed then their educational needs must be put first.  If teachers are not doing their job, then they need to be retrained or replaced.  If a school continues to fail then options must be provided.  No child should be forced to attend a failing school when there are alternatives that could be made available, simply by allowing students to move their funding with them.  This includes raising or eliminating the cap on charter schools and ultimately vouchers if necessary.

Another measure would be to have complete transparency in school funding and spending.  FOIA requests should not be required to know how our schools spend our tax dollars, and online school ledgers should be shown in real time, easy to understand formats, and standardized across districts.  This will help us determine our spending efficiency and effectiveness.

In addition, we must move education forward into the 21st century and fund innovation in education.  Students thrive and learn in engaging, digital learning environments.  Schools need to be able to compete with the digital world that students live in today.

Finally and foremost, we must re-engage parents in the education process.  Schools can make all the changes we ask of them; we can recruit the top teachers; but if students are not supported in loving homes that value education we will never move forward.

Thus, I propose that schools serve not only as learning institutions for our k-12 students, but also community centers that serve to reignite the critical bond between school, teacher, student and parent.