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Create Opportunity

Education

The Great Opportunity Policy education plan to empower parents, create opportunity, and change the future.

Empower Parents	K-12 Education	Workforce and Higher Education
Parents and guardians are the authority in a child’s upbringing and education. Parents’ central role in decision making about their child must be honored and protected.	Our nation’s schools are at a crossroads, the lockdowns exposed rot at the very core of the system, and parents are rightfully fed up. We must empower parents and families to be at the center of education decisions and end tyranny that does not protect the innocence of childhood while preparing for a skilled adulthood.	Opportunity comes from helping people learn the skills they need to succeed and aligning those skills to real world demands. Higher Education should provide a graduate with workforce readiness, and schools who do not deliver on their end of the deal deserve to be held accountable.
Honor, protect, and empower the central role of parents in their children’s education with a Federal Parent’s Bill of Rights.	Leverage federal dollars to focus on what’s needed and what works in the classroom in preparing students for a lifetime of success– including phonics, civics, and financial literacy instruction.	Unleash Workforce Education so that skilled trade programs have the same support as traditional degrees and our workforce meets our real world needs. We need people to wire houses and build roads just as much as we need people to teach and provide healthcare.
Unleash Universal School Choice to support parents in choosing the best educational fit for their child. No child should be trapped in a failing school.	Elevate and instill the American values of good citizenship and community service alongside the practical skills of reading, writing, and math.	Increase access to apprenticeships and paid internships to expand the path to good paying, practical careers straight out of high school.
Hold schools accountable if they push radical ideology and age-inappropriate content on students in violation of parental consent.	Restore common-sense teacher quality standards. Pay high quality teachers more and break the unions’ stranglehold on evaluating performance.	Hold Colleges and Universities accountable for cost, debt, and the quality of the education they provide.

Education is the cornerstone of opportunity for all Americans. Good quality education is one of the most valuable weapons a person has in the fight for their future. Education helps to fight those things that bring us down or limit our potential– without a good quality education, our students are at much higher risk for future unemployment and poverty or having no hope or sense of purpose and direction. Quality education prepares people for success in life beyond just a textbook. There are so many influences coming from all directions, and education can help us decipher what we should take as true, and what we should take with a grain of salt. High-quality education creates personal opportunity, stabilizes communities, and makes our country competitive in the global economy.

No child in America should be denied a quality education because of where they live or how much money their family makes. Parents want the best options available for their child, but too many families struggle to ensure that their child receives the educational opportunities they deserve. America must do better. Our students deserve a transformational change to bring the best possible education to children in all 50 states and every zip code.

Education needs to be a particular focus now, post-pandemic. Testing has shown that students lost an average of 15-24 weeks of instruction during the pandemic. The nonprofit testing company NWEA found that math and reading achievement is still significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels. A recent study predicted this could cost the 50 million affected students up to $2 trillion in collective lifetime earnings. Minority students, low-income students, and those who were already struggling tend to bear the brunt of learning loss. This learning loss must be addressed and mitigated to avoid increasing already deplorable disparities in educational achievement and graduation rates.

Early Childhood

n the early years of a child’s life, parents increasingly face tough choices in balancing family, work, and economic security. Parents face a dizzying array of childcare choices: having a parent or caregiver stay home with the child, private or faith-based child care, or government-run child care programs, including Head Start. Investing in the early years of a child’s development is one of the smartest things a nation can do to eliminate poverty, boost prosperity, and create the human capital needed for economies to diversify and grow.

Early childhood programs serve an important role in providing stable childcare, which yields benefits beyond measurable educational attainment. Early childhood experiences have a profound impact on brain development – affecting not just learning, but health, behavior, and, ultimately, lifetime productivity and income. Children who are enrolled in intensive preschool programs are less likely to be arrested, more likely to graduate, and less likely to struggle with substance abuse as adults. Access to high-quality childcare is also important to other factors we know are important to the success of a family– one of the most important effects from early childhood education may be that these programs are places where parents have predictable childcare, allowing the parents to work a full-time job or pursue higher education, which will in turn improve opportunities for their children.
Federal and state support for subsidized child care outside the home places a bias against home-based care by making the choice to stay at home with a child more economically difficult. Much like school choice, Federal policy should be rebalanced to ensure family-care is not a financial hardship for those families that want to stay home with their children in the early years so that these children have access to high quality homecare experiences.

For families that choose child care outside the home, access, cost, and quality are at front of mind. There are not enough childcare options available, many cost too much, and too many options do not do a good job of helping prepare children for their future.

Federal funds need to be better designed to both help families make the choice for child care that works best for their family and to incentivize programs to maximize educational opportunities for children.

Kindergarten through High School

School Choice

The need for educational options is more vital today than ever before. The pandemic era of school closures and the exposure of curriculum and lesson plans has demonstrated that parental involvement in their children’s education is an urgent national priority. Americans’ attitudes on education-related issues are undergoing a historic change, animated mainly by unnecessary pandemic lockdowns (which caused catastrophic learning loss) and radical politicization of curriculum.

Students’ educational needs are as varied as students themselves – there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every child, and even a high-quality traditional school might not be the best fit for a child’s particular wants or needs. As we seek pathways to cultivate the potential of each and every young American, school choice policies must continue finding ways to bring more choice to parents and more opportunity to the table.

We need a multi-pronged approach to supporting federal, state, and local efforts to expand school choice and guarantee parental involvement. Tax credits for scholarship granting organizations, educational savings accounts, and redirecting federal aid to help families are all critical measures that must be expanded and strengthened to give families options.

Public Schools

Even as we expand school choice options, we recognize that public schools are often the best choice for many families. Public schools currently educate 90% of students, but are often mixed quality from community to community and state to state. Decades of federal efforts to impose various forms of accountability have led to an over-reliance on standardized testing, massive increases in funding, and little to show for it. It is imperative that public schools deliver a high-quality education to their students, and that accountability measures are well aligned with actual student achievement and ability, not just test scores.

Parents learned during the pandemic lockdowns what was going on in some of their children’s schools and were stunned. Unfortunately, indoctrination instead of education seems to have become the order of the day for certain teachers and administrators. Proposals to ensure transparency and accountability for what is happening in classrooms, and to give parents greater insight and say in what is taught and learned in public schools must become a national priority. Parents or caregivers must be notified and involved in decisions about their children’s education. School personnel must be prohibited from concealing information from parents about, or advocating for, gender or sexuality decisions.

Policies must be enacted to ensure children are the first consideration during teacher strikes or future health emergencies. Unnecessary school closures affect an entire generation, and we cannot allow them to ever happen again.

Charter Schools

Fewer than half of states currently fund a private school choice program, and most programs are limited to specific populations (such as low-income students or those with special needs).

A growing handful of states have some version of an education savings account (ESA) program. This means that for most students in most states, public charter schools are the only publicly funded alternative to traditional public schools available. There are roughly 7,500 public charter schools in the United States, offering opportunity and choice to families as they seek to obtain a high-quality education for their children.

Charter schools break the mold of the traditional public school by putting teachers, parents, and the local community back in charge of the operation of their schools and giving flexibility to deploy new or proven models of education. Bureaucrat policy should not be allowed to punish charter schools who effectively educate students who enroll academically behind their grade level peers or who have alternative learning needs that might not be practically measured through traditional means. Public charter schools are crucial to improving educational outcomes for students by expanding choice, increasing accountability, and challenging complacency by providing competing examples for students and families.

Choice advocates should take advantage of the momentum or recent school choice victories around the country to continue pushing to ensure that the charter school sector reflects an honest embrace of educational freedom for students and parents alike.

Workforce Training

The national debate around the value of higher education has highlighted the need to reimagine the education system. A bachelor’s degree is no longer the universal baseline credential for a good career that it once was. It is critically important that the United States have a future-ready and resilient workforce, where all Americans have access to training and opportunities for high-quality work, especially as technology and jobs evolve. The United States needs a much stronger and more responsive workforce development system to effectively serve the full range of students and workers in need of skill enhancement, including youth and adults, who are employed, underemployed, and unemployed. Workforce development is a crucial ingredient for achieving a healthy and dynamic economy that can work for all. Our labor market continues to become more and more automated and globalized, and too many American workers are getting left behind. Our workforce education system must help workers acquire the skills that employers seek in good paying jobs with strong opportunities for advancement.

Research clearly supports the importance of our workforce for our economy. Education levels are consistently one of the most reliable indicators for each state’s per capita income growth and counties with higher levels of high school graduates tend to have lower poverty rates and higher levels of labor market participation. Better education is correlated with lower levels of unemployment and higher wages, which helps protect the resiliency of entire regions. We are currently facing an unprecedented workforce shortage– workforce participation remains below pre-pandemic levels. We have 3 million fewer Americans working today compared to February of 2020, and if every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have 4 million open jobs. The manufacturing sector is one of the hardest hit- if unaddressed, the manufacturing skills gap, which is now anticipated to leave 2.1 million jobs unfilled by 2030, could cost the U.S. economy as much as $1 trillion. All in all, a mismatch between appropriately skilled workers and open jobs means too many businesses can’t grow, compete, and thrive, and too many workers can’t realize their American dreams.

The federal government has the strongest insight into the national economy and the national workforce, which means the federal government has a strong role to play in supporting both employers and educators in developing meaningful programs. By directing funding toward programs that are aligned with industry needs with proven results, the government can also provide incentives for educational institutions and hold them accountable for graduate outcomes (such as employment rates and wages) to make sure we aren’t funneling students in the wrong direction. It is imperative that the gap between good paying, available jobs and workers who have the skills to take those jobs is closed. States have proven to be labs of innovation on this front, and taxpayer dollars should be leveraged towards these high quality education models that produce results for the American workforce from corner to corner.

We have work to do in making the system more user friendly on all fronts— for students, for employers, and for educators. We need more and better apprenticeship programs. We need increased accountability around affordability and quality of programs. We need employers to step up to the plate to partner with educational institutions and invest in the advancement of their own current and potential employees, like we’ve seen at Amazon, AT&T, Chipotle, McDonald’s, and Walmart. Economic development, education, human services, and workforce-development agencies within government increasingly share responsibility for workforce development and employment and must improve their partnerships and collaboration. Access to technology that can leverage data to translate information into insights is critical— we need to know both where we are and where we are going in order to stay ahead of the curve.

Higher education

Cost

Traditional four-year colleges and universities often cost too much and educate too little. College tuition has skyrocketed in the past twenty years and total federal student debt now nears $1.7 trillion. Schemes to simply transfer student debt to taxpayers as a solution to this problem are illegal and offensive to the millions of hardworking Americans who paid for their own education or borrowed responsibly. Colleges must be held accountable for cost, student debt, and quality. Students shouldn’t be asked to pay exorbitant tuition for programs that don’t have good return of value. Colleges and universities should have skin in the game for student debt and be held responsible when students borrow too much, fail to obtain quality employment in their field, and can’t pay back their loans.

Access

We must support the critical work of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. HBCUs are a vital part of increasing higher education access in the U.S. Almost 40% of HBCU students are first-generation college students, and about 70% of HBCU students receive federal grants for low-income students, more than twice the rate of other schools. HBCUs play an important role in providing quality education necessary to lift students into a more successful life. Good education policy should strengthen partnerships between HBCUs and federal agencies and invest in HBCU infrastructure, enabling HBCUs to expand their transformational work to serve more students.

Workforce Training