Issues - Education

The state’s greatest resource is our children, and it is our moral obligation to ensure that every child is provided an equal opportunity to the best available education. We must also change the current court-mandated education funding policy to address our current budgetary and economic situations. By improving the quality, and at the same time reducing the cost, of education we can tackle and solve the issues that are plaguing our current education system.

Over the past 20 years of court-mandated education funding policy, we have seen excessive waste of billions of taxpayer dollars. The cost of educating children in the 31 Abbott districts has in some cases grown to over $25,000 a year per child, far exceeding the statewide average. Although those districts only enroll approximately 21% of the state’s public school students, they receive 50% of state education aid. Reports have indicated that the latter could rise to 70% by 2014.

Although students in these districts receive such excess funding, the educational progress that was promised has never been achieved. As you and I know, merely throwing more money at a problem does not solve it, particularly – in this case - when the money does not go toward the children and their education, but feeds a bloated bureaucracy.

It will be the proudest day of my administration when I sign a bill ensuring that any school district that cannot provide a child with a quality education for the same per pupil cost as the statewide average will be required to give a voucher to the parent of that child to send the child to a school of the parents’ choice within that district. These parents should have the same opportunity as Michelle and Barack Obama had when they moved to Washington D.C.

This new competition for the achievement of excellence in education will also ensure that parents, not courts and bureaucrats, have primary control over their children’s education. No parent should be forced to keep her child in a failing school.

School vouchers will force competition into those districts and improve the quality of education provided to those children. Additionally, the law implementing school vouchers will drive down educational costs as it has done everywhere it has been implemented around the country.