Education

The time has come for us to revise the way we educate our children. The base of our current educational structure is a pre-industrial ideology which has come to be irrelevant. The world has changed dramatically in the latter half of the 20th century; Pennsylvania's education policies should reflect this phenomenon to ensure our children have an expanded world view that meets the demands of a more globalized society. This expanded world view should be reinforced with a renewed emphasis on the arts, languages and a variety of after school programs that foster a heightened intellectual blueprint for every child.

The first priority in educational reform should be accessibility because the goal of providing every student access to a quality education in the Commonwealth is still an unfulfilled dream. Over the past year, I have worked diligently on two measures that will help make this vision a reality. The first is the REACH Scholarship Initiative (HB 1722), which would provide a full scholarship to every student in the Commonwealth who maintains a 3.0 and 90% attendance. The second issue I am working to address is the inequitable funding of public education throughout the Commonwealth. I am currently working with a task force to reformulate the current funding mechanism based on the recommendations of the 2007 Costing Out Study. These measures are just the first in a series of educational reforms I am working on to ensure every child in the Commonwealth will have the opportunity to realize the American dream.