Education

Rodney is committed to ensuring Arizona’s children have a brighter future. Rodney’s top three priorities for education are:

• Ensure Arizona receives the financial assistance necessary to keep teachers in classrooms and deliver a top-notch curriculum.
• Improve Arizona’s capacity to recruit, train, and retain the best teachers.
• Bring our tax dollars back home to expand Arizona’s resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

Glassman’s Education Policy

• Build a partnership with state leaders to help secure Race to the Top funding. After Arizona voters agreed to a 1 percent sales tax to fund schools, the state dramatically improved its chance to share in $4.35 billion in the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” fund — the largest federal grant ever for K-12 funding. The state only just missed out on receiving those dollars. Glassman would work with local leaders to ensure the state gets the next round of funding, from the $1.35 billion in Fiscal Year 2011. Glassman would also seek to increase that funding back to the FY 2010 levels and help facilitate Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative.

• Fund or repeal No Child Left Behind. As originally passed, NCLB took a carrot and stick approach to public education. It would require schools to achieve certain standards, punish those that did not and provide money to help schools get the job done. The standards and punishments still stand but the money was never appropriated. If we are not going to fully fund NCLB, Glassman would vote to repeal it. Should NCLB be fully funded, the plan should be altered to allow for better flexibility in implementing changes and measuring success.

• Double the funds available for failing schools and use the extra money for capital improvements. Right now the federal government has $4 billion set aside to be used to turn around failing schools. While that money does go into the classroom, many of these schools are dilapidated and some cannot meet basic heating and cooling requirements. These schools are also woefully behind technologically and need broadband access.

• Create a $3 billion fund to help retain and recruit teachers in those schools in greatest need of quality teachers.

All of the programs listed above could be paid for simply by eliminating tax breaks on corporations that outsource jobs. (Source: AFL-CIO, Outsourcing America)

• Establish tax credits to businesses that partner with schools to provide job training, apprenticeships and mentoring programs for students in schools that are most in need of a turn-around. The tax credit would help give students, often in areas of high unemployment, real-life, hands-on experience in a professional atmosphere.

• Grading the success of schools and teachers based on student improvement. A teacher who takes on a ninth grade student at a third grade reading level and brings that student to the eighth grade level is deemed a failure. Meanwhile teacher who helps a student get to grade level by improving a single grade is deemed a success. That’s not right. Glassman would vote to create funding that rewards those schools that show the greatest degree of improvement and to provide merit pay to teachers who do the same.

• Provide the state emergency aid to prevent further teacher layoffs. Our class sizes should be getting smaller, not bigger. We need more teachers, not fewer. Yet states bound by their own constitutional limits are often forced to lay off teachers to balance their budgets. The federal government should make a commitment to help see states through these dire financial times and make sure our schools remain intact.

Glassman’s plan would also bring educators, community leaders, parents and even students together to discuss ways to implement successful innovations across the country. What works in Tempe can work in Tacoma. Local solutions can be copied nationally and should be encouraged at the federal level.

Arizona needs a U.S. Senator who will fight for the critical support necessary to keep teachers in classrooms, provide students with healthy meals, build and maintain our neighborhood public schools, keep technology current in our schools, and ensure the growing number of homeless children in Arizona continue receiving a quality education.

All stakeholders must be held accountable for the education of Arizona’s children, including teachers, administrators, parents, students, and elected officials.

Rodney has been an advocate for children. Through the charity that he founded and continues to manage, he has raised more than $1 million for community programs that support children.