Elizabeth Warren, for a long time, had been bragging about new education policy for the United States. Apart from student debt elimination and her decision to appoint a former teacher as the education secretary, she never revealed anything about her policy. However, after a long wait, it is finally here. Not exactly an ideal proposal but still gives a lot of new hopes to students and educationists around the country.
Elizabeth Warren has made it abundantly clear that the current education system is an absolute mess and nowhere near what it should be. Primarily, she’s going to focus majorly on the financially poorer school districts to cope up with the others by quadrupling their budget (Title I). With this, Warren plans to utilize $100 billion of funds to improve the standards of schooling. Half of this budget would directly go into improving the infrastructure of the schools as she plans to turn 25,000 of them into ‘community hubs’.
Elizabeth Warren vs. Trump-Devos
Warren has also made a promise to provide funding to IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). The initial idea of IDEA goes back to 1975. To fight discrimination on the basis of race, orientation, and disabilities, she plans to roll back some of the policies built under the Trump administration. Besides, special support will be provided to LGBTQ and ELL (English Language Learning) students and students belonging to immigrant families.
One major problem that has been overlooked for more than a decade is the way teachers and staff members are treated in the school. They have been a victim of tremendous pressure, hectic schedule and mediocre salaries. Funds for salaries will be provided through Title I. Other issues are however still not dealt with. There’s a provision of new personality development sessions for the teachers but that will hardly win over the hearts of the teachers.
However, Warren has made sure that she is completely against the privatization of education. For this, she has completely gone against the policies proposed by DeVos like tax credit programs. Billions of US taxpayers’ money has been wasted on establishing charter schools that failed immediately and shut down. So, there’s a complete ban on generating profits from the ‘so-called non-profit’ charter schools.
Elizabeth Warren hopes to tackle the school safety issue by investing in more safety protocols and put an end to zero-tolerance principle. Also, no school can be closed or no teacher can be fired on the basis of a standardized test. The school lunch debt will also be canceled.
So, in many aspects like school safety and privatization of education, Warren’s policy may lead her to all the way, but as said earlier, it is not exactly an ideal policy. Especially the teacher’s part which requires and has a lot of room for improvement. Overall, if implemented properly, the new education policy proposed by Warren can improve the overall ‘mess’ that the current education system is.
