John Kerry on Education Jr Senator (MA), Democratic nominee for President

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

FactCheck: Bush increased Pell Grants, but not as promised

BUSH: He said we cut Pell Grants. We’ve increased Pell Grants by a million students. That’s a fact.

KERRY: But you know why the Pell Grants have gone up in their numbers? Because more people qualify for them because they don’t have money. They’re not getting the $5,100 the president promised them . They’re getting less money.

FACT CHECK: Bush was correct. Department of Education figures show the number of Pell Grants awarded increased by 1.3 million. Spending for Pell Grants grew by $4.7 billion. That’s some “cut.” It is true that during the 2000 presidential campaign Bush promised to increase the maximum size of Pell Grants to $5,100 for first-year students, a promise that remains unfulfilled. The maximum grant has risen from $3,300 at the time Bush made that promise, but only to $4,050. Under Bush’s proposed 2005 budget the maximum grant would remain frozen there for most students for the third year in a row.

People qualify for Pell Grants because they don’t have money

KERRY: But you know why the Pell Grants have gone up in their numbers? Because more people qualify for them because they don’t have money. But they’re not getting the $5,100 the president promised them. They’re getting less money. We have more people who qualify. That’s not what we want.

Bush’s cut the Pell Grants and the Perkins Loans for college

KERRY: Bush’s cut job training money-$1 billion was cut, they only added a little bit back this year because it’s an election year. They’ve cut the Pell Grants and the Perkins Loans to help kids be able to go to college. They’ve cut the training money.

Bush broke promise to pay for No Child Left Behind

BUSH: Only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough. But more importantly, we’ve reformed the system to make sure that we solve problems early. He talked about the unemployed. Absolutely we’ve got to make sure they get educated. He talked about children whose parents don’t speak English as a first language? Absolutely we’ve got to make sure they get educated. And that’s what the No Child Left Behind Act does.

FactCheck: Bush never promised to fully fund NCLB

FACT CHECK: Underfunding of NCLB is an opinion and not a fact. Funding for the federal Department of Education grew a whopping 58% under Bush during his first three years, and Bush proposed another 5% increase for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, including sizeable increases in spending for children from low-income families and for special education for disabled children. What Kerry is referring to is an often-repeated Democratic charge that Bush broke a “promise” to fund the law at the maximum Congress authorized. And actually, Bush made no such promise. What he did promise was to “provide the resources necessary.” Many state officials and education experts do argue that even more funds are needed to provide resources necessary to meet the ambitious goals and standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. Still, what’s “necessary” is a matter of opinion

Fully fund No Child Left Behind

Invest in the children, not the prison system

Chides Bush for not fully funding No Child Left Behind

Roll back tax cuts for rich to fund education

National Education Trust Fund: fully fund mandated standards

Measure learning, but with flexible standards

KERRY: Correct.

Q: You say now they should also be judged by things like teacher attendance, student attendance. Isn’t the point of accountability to measure not these inputs, but the output, whether students are actually learning?

KERRY: Absolutely. The most important thing is the result.

Q: So why change it?

KERRY: Because what’s happening under the Bush administration is that they are disrespecting teachers, they’re making it punitive. The way they’re applying the adequate yearly progress standard, that you can have a few kids who enter the school and may have language difficulties that year, and they could drag the whole school into a status of failure. It’s so arbitrary that it’s destroying morale of the school systems. I want standards and accountability. But you cannot do it without the resources, and you also can’t do it in a way where you turn schools into testing factories.

Vouchers drain resources from public schools

A: I have never supported vouchers. I understand why parents want more choices and I believe they should have more choices in public schools. But public schools need resources and support, and vouchers drain them of both. Our inner-city schools and our rural schools need better buildings, more textbooks, higher paid teachers, the best principals, and smaller classes.

Stop viewing charter schools as threatening innovation

Community Day has a waiting list of over 500 kids. We need to empower every school in the public school system to apply the best practices from schools across the country.

I believe it’s time to stop viewing innovative approaches as anomalies or threats to traditional public schools and begin seeing them as part of the future of public education.

Nothing good about vouchers can’t be done in public schools

Confusing public school choice and innovation isn’t just a matter of comparing apples & oranges-it’s comparing apples & worms. There’s nothing that’s good about a voucher system-parental choice, competition, and the ability to provide innovative instruction-that can’t also be achieved by public education. But the kind of public schools we ought to have can avoid what’s bad about vouchers: the inequality; the lack of accountability; and the gradual erosion of our sense of commonwealth.

Providing student loans for college kids is an ethical issue

Supported “No Child Left Behind,” but Bush reneged

Voted YES on additional $10.2B for federal education & HHS projects.

Proponents support voting YES because:

Rep. OBEY: This bill, more than any other, determines how willing we are to make the investment necessary to assure the future strength of this country and its working families. The President has chosen to cut the investments in this bill by more than $7.5 billion in real terms. This bill rejects most of those cuts.

Opponents recommend voting NO because:

Rep. LEWIS: This bill reflects a fundamental difference in opinion on the level of funding necessary to support the Federal Government's role in education, health and workforce programs. The bill is $10.2 billion over the President's budget request. While many of these programs are popular on both sides of the aisle, this bill contains what can rightly be considered lower priority and duplicative programs. For example, this legislation continues three different programs that deal with violence prevention. An omnibus bill is absolutely the wrong and fiscally reckless approach to completing this year's work. It would negate any semblance of fiscal discipline demonstrated by this body in recent years.

Veto message from President Bush:

This bill spends too much. It exceeds [by $10.2 billion] the reasonable and responsible levels for discretionary spending that I proposed to balance the budget by 2012. This bill continues to fund 56 programs that I proposed to terminate because they are duplicative, narrowly focused, or not producing results. This bill does not sufficiently fund programs that are delivering positive outcomes. This bill has too many earmarks--more than 2,200 earmarks totaling nearly $1 billion. I urge the Congress to send me a fiscally responsible bill that sets priorities.

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 NO on Educational Savings Accounts.

Voted NO on allowing more flexibility in federal school rules.

Voted NO on education savings accounts.

Voted NO on school vouchers in DC.

Voted NO on $75M for abstinence education.

Voted NO on requiring schools to allow voluntary prayer.

Voted YES on national education standards.

Offer every parent Charter Schools and public school choice.

Create World-Class Public Schools
Now more than ever, quality public education is the key to equal opportunity and upward mobility in America. Yet our neediest children often attend the worst schools. While lifting the performance of all schools, we must place special emphasis on strengthening those institutions serving, and too often failing, low-income students.

To close this achievement and opportunity gap, underperforming public schools need more resources, and above all, real accountability for results. Accountability means ending social promotion, measuring student performance with standards-based assessments, and testing teachers for subject-matter competency.

As we demand accountability, we should ensure that every school has the resources needed to achieve higher standards, including safe and modern physical facilities, well-paid teachers and staff, and opportunities for remedial help after school and during summers. Parents, too, must accept greater responsibility for supporting their children’s education.

We need greater choice, competition, and accountability within the public school system, not a diversion of public funds to private schools that are unaccountable to taxpayers. With research increasingly showing the critical nature of learning in the early years, we should move toward universal access to pre-kindergarten education.

Goals for 2010
• Turn around every failing public school.
• Make charter schools an option in every state and community.
• Offer every parent a choice of public schools to which to send his or her child.
• Make sure every classroom has well-qualified teachers who know the subjects they teach, and pay teachers more for performance.
• Create a safe, clean, healthy, disciplined learning environment for every student.
• Make pre-kindergarten education universally available.

Three R’s: $35B for Reinvestment,Reinvention,Responsibility.

The Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention and Responsibility Act (Three R's) [is] the common ground from which bipartisan compromise on education reform will be successfully achieved. The Three R’s would provide public schools with significantly increased funding and flexibility, increasing federal investment in education by $35 billion over the next 5 years, and targeting most of those new dollars toward closing the persistent achievement gap between poor and more affluent students. State & local officials would be given broader latitude to decide how to allocate federal funding in order to meet the specific needs of their communities. In return, states would be required to set standards for raising academic achievement, and improve the quality of their teachers.

The “Three R’s” bill is based on the policy recommendations by the Progressive Policy Institute:
• Streamline our national education priorities into five goal-oriented titles, focused on:
  1. closing the achievement gap between poor and more affluent children;
  2. helping to improve teacher quality;
  3. helping immigrant students master English and meet high standards in all subjects;
  4. promoting public school choice; and
  5. stimulating innovative local initiatives
• Create a tough new accountability system that pegs program funding to academic performance standards set by the states, and require “report cards” so that parents know how their school is performing;
• Reward states that exceed their standards with more flexibility and bonus funding, and for the first time ever, sanction those states that chronically fail to show improvements, by cutting administrative funds;
• Increase funding for disadvantaged students by 50%;
• Increase funding for teacher and principal professional development by more than 100%;
• Increase funding for immigrant students by $1 billion annually to improve English proficiency;
• Continue to reduce class size in the early grades.

More foreign languages courses and exchange students.

Concurrent resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the United States should establish an international education policy to enhance national security, significantly further U.S. foreign policy and economic competitiveness, and promote mutual understanding and cooperation among nations. Includes among policy objectives:
1. producing citizens with a high level of international experience;
2. promoting greater diversity of locations, languages, and subjects involved in teaching, research, and study abroad;
3. increasing participation in internships abroad;
4. invigorating citizen and professional international exchange programs;
5. supporting visas and employment policies that promote increased numbers of international students;
6. encouraging programs that begin foreign language learning in the United States at an early age;
7. promoting educational exchanges and research collaboration with American educational institutions abroad; and
8. promoting partnerships among government, business, and educational institutions and organizations to provide adequate resources for implementing this policy.

Rated 100% 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.