Alan Khazei on Education

$10,000 college tuition for each year of community service

Make a college education affordable for every American
• Pay the full costs of college (up to $10,000 per year) for each year of community or national service.
• Increase Pell Grants and reduce interest on student loans.
• Substantially simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms and invest in community colleges.

Provide students and their families with meaningful data about their college choices
• Popular rankings of "best colleges" provide few clues about how much students learn. Support research to improve the Collegiate Learning Assessment or other measuring tools to compare how students at different colleges improve their reasoning and writing skills.
• Publish scores for individual colleges gathered by the National Survey of Student Engagement, an existing survey of 1,300 colleges that currently releases only aggregate national data.

Make public education the civil rights issue of 21st century

Guiding Principles:
• We need to make public education the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
• Every American should have access to a high-quality, public education from preschool to graduate school, regardless of how much money their parent make or the zip code they live in.
• The most important in-school variable in improving student achievement is the quality of his or her teacher and principal. We must ensure that every classroom and school are led by a great teacher and an effective principal.
• It is time to stop focusing on ideology and start focusing on results: those programs generating success for students should be expanded, and the programs that continue to receive federal money without results should be discontinued.
• Education is the key to making sure all Americans have a fair shot at the American dream. It is indispensible to reviving our economy, protecting our national security, and ensuring that our young people can compete with students across the world.

Double the federal charter school investment

We must support innovation and invest to scale what works. Alan understands that we not only need to support innovation, but also closely monitor and evaluate new programs to make sure that we are expanding the programs that work and reforming or closing the ones that don't. Examples of the innovative reforms Alan will support include the following:
• Doubling the federal charter school investment to support expansion of high-quality charter schools while investing similar additional investments over the next five years to expand high-quality public schools and support bold interventions in low-achieving schools. In each of these initiatives, states and school systems would be required to hold accountable charter and other public schools consistently failing to reach expectations.
• Expanding the School Day and Year.
• We must replace the No Child Left Behind Act with a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act that builds on its strengths and fixes its failures.

ServiceNation: volunteers for improving education& mentoring