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Policies

Resource Equity

We believe that every child should receive an adequate and equitable allocation of resources to meet his or her unique needs. Unfortunately in too many districts across the country, a student’s zip-code dictates the quality of education they receive. Addressing inadequacies and inequities in funding is a critical component of efforts to reform and improve education. They all should be pursued jointly. Therefore, we support student-centric policies to grow public education funding overall, level it up for those currently disadvantaged, extend learning time, and increase access to effective teachers and quality facilities so that all students, no matter their race, socioeconomic status, or zip-code receive a high-quality education be it in a traditional district-run public school or public charter school.

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Teacher Quality & Preparation

We believe that good teachers are the backbone of a high-quality education. Unfortunately, students in high-poverty schools are more than three times as likely to be taught by an unsatisfactory teacher as students in low-poverty schools. Because teacher quality is the number one in-school influence on student achievement, we support policies that promote innovation and reform in the teacher preparation space so that more students receive the high-quality education they deserve.

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Accountability

We believe that a strong accountability system, based on objective data and analysis, is an essential component of a high-quality education system. When families, educators, and elected officials can see how districts and schools are performing, we are better positioned to identify struggling schools, narrow achievement gaps and ensure our kids graduate college and career ready.

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Public School Choice

We believe that parents deserve the right to select among an array of free public school options — including district and public charter schools — to ensure equity in opportunity and transparency around results. Indeed, for affluent families with the necessary resources and influence, school choice already exists. Our focus is on extending that opportunity to low-income and working class parents, who often send their child to the local school out of necessity, rather than choice, regardless of the school’s quality, resources, and ability to meet their child’s needs.

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Higher-Ed Quality & Affordability

We believe that a college degree is a springboard to higher earning potential, and college access and success should extend equitably to all students. As it stands, however, students from low-income families and students of color, separately, for a variety of reasons suffer from both a lack of access to quality institutions of higher education, and once admitted, low levels of degree completion. On America’s top 150 college campuses, you are 25 times more likely to bump into a student from a rich family as you are a student from a working class or low-income family. White students earn bachelor’s degrees at nearly twice the rate of African-Americans and nearly three times the rate of Latinos. Moreover, similar colleges with similar admissions standards, similar median SAT/ACT scores, and similar entering student high school GPAs generate wildly different levels of success with students overall and disaggregated subgroups in terms of degree completion and loan repayment. We therefore support policies that challenge state and college leaders to fix these inequities by making meaningful commitments to improving student access and success in the higher-ed space.

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