Joe Biden on Education Former Vice President; previously Democratic Senator (DE)

Sub-sections under Education:
• Education Funding
• Voting Record
• Other issues under Education

FactCheck: Attended U.Delaware, not Delaware State HBCU

"No, Joe Biden did not say he attended Delaware State University, the only historically Black university (HBCU) in the state. Biden said he got his "start" at DSU, and what followed was a slew of media reports slamming Biden for claiming to have attended an HBCU. Trump's campaign has even cited the claim as one of the "17 questions Joe Biden must answer" in the first presidential debate.

"In the video, Biden was referring to the support he received from the school when he announced his bid for Senate on the DSU campus in 1972. In the decades since, Biden has maintained close ties with DSU, serving as commencement speaker in 2003. Biden has often referenced to his time as a student at the University of Delaware, where the Biden School of Public Policy bears his name."

Student debt should not crush young college graduates

Plan to forgive federal student debt & ease repayment burden

• Immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person
• Those earning less than $25,000 per year will not have to make monthly payments and will accrue no interest
• Those earning more than $25,000 per year will pay no more than 5% of discretionary income toward payments
• After 20 years, the remainder of federal student loans will be forgiven without any tax burden
• Those who participate in public service will be eligible for additional federal loan forgiveness, including $10,000 per year of forgiveness for up to five years.

Provide school lunch even if schools closed for pandemic

We have to have the best science in the world telling us what can stay open and what need be closed. Like I said earlier, the idea that we are closing schools, which I understand, but not being able to provide lunches for people who in fact need the school lunch program to get by.

I can understand the decision made to close places where a hundred or 50 people or more gather, but how do you deal with the things that necessarily have to be kept going and what's the way to do that? There should be a national standard for that. It should be coming out of the situation room right now.

12 years of education is not enough; we need 16 now, free

BIDEN: I've been saying for a long time that we're in a position where 12 years of education is not enough for the 21st century. We need 16 years of education. [I support] the exact bill that Senator Sanders introduced, a little over a year ago, capping it off at $125,000 in income. You could get free up to that point; after that, you'd have to pay for your college education. It worked for public schools, and it would work for public universities in your state. It was a good idea and I support it. Bernie happens to be right on that one.

Q: Senator Sanders, I assume you'd welcome these changes?

Bernie SANDERS: The difference between Joe and I on higher education is: four years ago, it was not a popular idea, Joe. Glad you're coming around now. Four years ago, when I said that public colleges and universities should be tuition free, people were saying, "Bernie, that's a radical idea." Well, you got states that are moving in that direction.

Your zip code shouldn't matter in access to a good education

Education is going to be the bellwether in the 21st century. The idea you can make it in the middle class and sustain yourself there with just 12 years of education is not accurate, whether you need a trade and/or you have to go beyond that. We should change the way we educate our people. For example, why is it in every school, why isn't programming part of the science curricula that satisfies your science requirement?

2005: no bankruptcy for student loans; 2015: student relief

Biden's team seems to concede that one provision of the bill that was not heavily debated at the time but has become more salient since then--a rule that made private student loans nondischargeable in bankruptcy--was probably not a great idea. The campaign notes that what it refers to as the "Obama-Biden administration" formally recommended that Congress change this in 2015, that in 2016 the Department of Education took administrative action to grant student debt relief, and that earlier in their term they took a range of measures to try to help with student debt--ranging from the "gainful employment rule" to income-based repayments.

Fundamentally, the point of the bill was to make it harder for people to discharge debts in bankruptcy. Biden's view was that this was a good idea, and Warren's was that it wasn't.

Free tuition at community colleges & state universities

1970s: outspoken Senate critic of school desegregation

Biden took a lead role in the fight, speaking out repeatedly and forcefully against sending white children to majority-black schools and black children to majority-white schools. He played down the persistence of overt racism and suggested that the government should have a limited role in integration.

"I do not buy the concept, popular in the '60s, which said, 'We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race,' " Biden told a Delaware-based weekly newspaper in 1975. "I don't buy that."

College plagiarism was honest (but careless) mistake

No Child Left Behind was left behind

PALIN: You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. We have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart.

Hire more teachers and pay them for smaller classes

For longer school day & school year, & 16-year minimum

There needs to be performance-based pay for teachers

A: The one thing any teacher can tell you is that the last person you want to judge your performance, is the administrator of the school. That’s the first thing everybody figures out if you teach. There needs to be performance-based pay. The way to do it is start at the front end. Pay those people who perform in undergraduate school. Give them the alternative to be able to go. They’d get the same pay as an engineer gets to go in and work as a math teacher, or as a science teacher. So you start performance-based pay by, in fact, paying the best- performing students who want to teach and give them a chance. Every other major country in the world is starting these students at the same salary as they start their engineers. We should be able to do that. My father used to say, “Don’t tell me what you value; show me your budget.” If you, in fact, value education, then it should be equally as important as engineering or anything else.

Teach sex ed in schools; including prevention methods

Sent kids to private school after death of their mother

A: My kids did go to private schools, because right after I got elected, my wife and daughter were killed. I had two sons who survived. My sister was the head of the history department. She was helping me raise my children at Wilmington Friends School. When it came time to go to high school when they had come through their difficulties--I’m a practicing Catholic--it was very important to me they go to a Catholic school.

Overcome racial achievement gap with early education

A: One of the things that we all talk about is this achievement gap. We should remind everybody that the day before a black child, a minority child, steps into the classroom, half the achievement gap already exists. The moment they walk into that school, they are already behind.

And that gap widens. And it widens because we do not start school earlier. We do not give single mothers in disadvantaged homes the opportunities that they need in order to know what to do to prepare their children.

You’ve got to start off and focus on the nurturing and education of children when they’re very young, particularly children from disadvantaged families. You’ve got to invest in starting kids in preschool at age four. And you’ve got to make sure you have smaller classrooms & better teachers in the disadvantaged schools.

NCLB needs more resources, but also is fundamentally flawed

A: Both. I sleep with a teacher every night -- my wife. She taught high school -- had three remedial classes and two advanced classes. Those kids in the remedial class went from sixth grade to 10th grade, and they were still penalized. Those kids in the advanced class, she didn’t have to do a thing with. They passed the test. There is something fundamentally wrong with it. And we’ve underfunded it by about $70 billion. We know the problem:

1. Classrooms are too big; we need smaller classrooms, period.
2. A lot of teachers are going to be retiring. We need a program where we attract the best and brightest students coming out of our colleges to be teachers, and pay them.

Princeton was last Ivy holdout to admit women & minorities

ALITO: Well, Senator, as I’ve said, I don’t have a recollection of having anything to do with CAP. So all I can say is that I put it down on the ‘85 form and, therefore, I must that been a member at around that time. By the time I entered Princeton, there were many minorities in my class. It went coeducational while I was there.

I oppose school busing because it fails, not for racism

BIDEN. I oppose busing. It's an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. I took that position--along with Howard Brown, a black candidate for mayor--long before the 1972 election; we were the only Democrats on record as opposed to busing. I've gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment. The unsavory part about this is when I come out against busing, as I have all along, I don't want to be mixed up with [people like Alabama Governor] George Wallace. I don't want anybody to give me credit for sharing any point of view George Wallace has. There are some people who oppose busing because they are racist, but the vast majority of the American people--the people of Delaware--oppose it because busing doesn't accomplish its goal. We should be concentrating on things other than busing to provide for the educational and cultural needs of the deprived segment of our population.

Single statewide school district tax, for equal distribution

BIDEN. It has come from the courts primarily, from people who were appointed during the 60's, at the height of the civil rights activist movements. The thrust at that time was to force integration, to eliminate racial identities. It was probably a necessary first-step then, and I would probably have shared that viewpoint, had I been around then. So what we have now is a court-administered system that is ten or twelve years behind what I believe is accurate, rational thinking. There are other things besides busing that we should be addressing to deal with these problems. For example, during my campaign I went on record in support of a single statewide school district tax, and I got clobbered for it. Well, if we'd done that, we wouldn't have to be talking about busing now; it wouldn't even be an issue. We would have undercut the argument about equal distribution of educational benefits.

Two years of pre-school; two years of free community college

$200B in emergency COVID funding for K-12 schools

PROMISE KEPT: (CNN, March 6, 2021): [In the stimulus plan]: Both the Senate and House bills would provide nearly $130 billion to K-12 schools to help students return to the classroom. The bills are in line with what Biden proposed. Altogether, $170 billion would be authorized for K-12 schools and higher education. Last year, Congress approved a total of $112 billion between two relief packages that went to K-12 schools and colleges.

Write off $10,000 in student debt, not $50,000

BIDEN: I will not make that happen. I do think that, in this moment of economic pain and strain, that we should be eliminating interest on the debts that are accumulated, number one. And, number two, I'm prepared to write off the $10,000 debt, but not $50,000.

Fund research at HBCUs for foundational support

BIDEN: I provide for a $70 billion for HBCUs for them to be able to have the wherewithal to do what other universities can do, because they don't have the kind of foundational support they need. In our administration, the President allowed me to go down and we awarded a cybersecurity laboratory [at 6 HCBUs via the CECOR program]. The federal government spends billions of dollars a year on universities, because they are the best-kept secret and where most of the major inventions come out of. And so that school now will be able to produce young Black women and men who are going to go into a field of the future that's burgeoning, cybersecurity. And that's what is going to help a great deal.

TRUMP: I have done more for the African American community [including] historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. They were on a year to year basis. They could have been put out of business. I got them 10-year funding & financing.

Increase Title 1 funding from $15 billion to $45 billion

$100B for school ventilation; part of $1T for infrastructure

BIDEN: I have laid out in detail what I'll do, and I'm going to see to it that I said we get to a net zero power grid by 2035. No president can [instantly] turn around and change what we're doing. We're going to get to net zero emissions by the year 2050 before. In the meantime, there's so much we can do and still make it better for people. We're going to invest in close to a trillion dollars over time in the near time for infrastructure. We're going to build green infrastructure. For example, I propose that we spend $100 billion on making sure our schools have the right the right ventilation, [to ensure that] your schools, in fact, are safe. Making sure schools are in a position where they are not generating the use of more energy. We're going to build back buildings that vastly cut down on the amount of fossil fuels that we use.

Triple money to Title One schools; provide early education

3X money for Title I schools; free community college tuition

$500M for businesses partnerships at community colleges

"This new round of funding will help community colleges forge new partnerships with local businesses to train workers with the skills they need for jobs available right now," said Vice President Joe Biden.

This program complements President Obama's broader agenda of helping every American have at least one year of post-secondary education and will help reach his goal of America having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

$500M for Race to the Top's Early Learning Challenges

Laid out a $30 billion plan over five years for education

$3000 tax credit for college for anyone earning under $150K

A: Absolutely, positively, unequivocally. As president, that’s what I would push for. The idea that 12 years of public education is sufficient in the 21st century is ridiculous. I have a thing called a college access program. I would allow every single solitary family making up to $150,000 to be able to have a refundable tax credit of $3,000 per student. Everyone under $50,000 now qualifies for a Pell Grant. I would change them from $4,300 to $6,300 plus the refundable tax credit. It would mean every child in America, every qualified person in America, under an income under $50,000 would have $9,300 to go to any state university in their state in America for four years. But we have to change our mind-set here, and lead with early education, with pre-Head Start and Head Start. The whole Biden plan for starting early and college as well, that whole plan costs less than $18 billion a year.

Pay teachers more to get better educational results

A: Change the fundamental way we educate our children. There’s two things everyone knows: the smaller the class size, the better the outcome; and the better the teacher, the better the outcome. In those very nations named, a teacher makes as much as an engineer. If we want the best students in the world, we need the best teachers in the world.

FactCheck: Japan pays teachers more, but not India & China

Voting for No Child Left Behind was a mistake

It was a mistake. The reason I voted for it, against my better instinct, is I have great faith in Ted Kennedy, who is so devoted to education. But I would scrap it--or I guess, theoretically, you could do a major overhaul. But I think I’d start from the beginning. You need better teachers. You need smaller classrooms. You need to start kids earlier. It’s all basic.

Voted YES on $52M for "21st century community learning centers".

Voted YES on $5B for grants to local educational agencies.

• $2.5 billion for targeting grants to local educational agencies
• $2.5 billion for education finance incentive grants

Voted YES on shifting $11B from corporate tax loopholes to education.

• Restore education program cuts slated for vocational education, adult education, GEAR UP, and TRIO.
• Increase the maximum Pell Grant scholarship to $4,500 immediately.
• Increases future math and science teacher student loan forgiveness to $23,000.
• Pay for the education funding by closing $10.8 billion in corporate tax loopholes.

Voted YES on funding smaller classes instead of private tutors.

Voted YES on funding student testing instead of private tutors.

Voted YES on spending $448B of tax cut on education & debt reduction.

Voted YES on Educational Savings Accounts.

Voted YES on education savings accounts.

Voted NO on school vouchers in DC.

Voted YES on $75M for abstinence education.

Voted NO on requiring schools to allow voluntary prayer.

Voted YES on national education standards.

Rated 91% by the NEA, indicating pro-public education votes.

The National Education Association has a long, proud history as the nation's leading organization committed to advancing the cause of public education. Founded in 1857 "to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching and to promote the cause of popular education in the United States," the NEA has remained constant in its commitment to its original mission as evidenced by the current mission statement:

To fulfill the promise of a democratic society, the National Education Association shall promote the cause of quality public education and advance the profession of education; expand the rights and further the interest of educational employees; and advocate human, civil, and economic rights for all.