Empowering Public Education
Empowering Public Education
Classes are overcrowded, teachers are underpaid, kids are hungry, programs are being cut, and millions of Americans are carrying crushing student loan debt. Everyone benefits from a strong public education system, and we have to fight to protect it.
My goal as a member of Congress is to fight for an educational environment that promotes learning and growth for all students in urban, suburban, and rural areas. I will push to pass laws and secure funding to improve our academic infrastructure and outcomes so that every student has a genuine opportunity to find and pursue what they love.
Schools in poorer neighborhoods tend to fare worse than schools in wealthier ones, and property tax based funding is a major reason why. Even in California, where a smaller share of school funding comes from local property taxes than in most states, local taxes still make up roughly 20 to 25 percent of school budgets. That is enough to produce real inequality between neighborhoods, and it is especially punishing for rural and urban schools that often trail affluent suburban ones.
I support ending property tax based funding for schools and moving to a baseline and per-capita resource allocation model that ensures every school is fully staffed and funded, regardless of the wealth of the neighborhood around it. I also support additional resource grants for schools in traditionally underserved areas, to address systemic inequities that do not disappear the moment baseline funding equalizes. Revising how local property taxes are distributed, including pooling resources for redistribution by the state, is an essential part of promoting equal educational opportunity.
At the federal level, my role will primarily be in advocating for increased federal funding for education across the board and reversing the long federal trend of cutting funds. All of our schools should have robust funding to ensure that staff are paid livable wages, students have no-cost meals at school, and supplementary programs are supported.
Congress's primary lever for promoting equal access to quality education is shaping and funding the Department of Education. The Trump administration has spent the past year actively dismantling the department, firing staff, gutting the Office for Civil Rights, and working to hand over pieces of its operation to states and private actors. I will fight to undo the damage, restore the department, and ensure that our federal education efforts are driven by the needs of students and educators rather than by corporate interests or by extremist bigots and zealots. I will sign onto and ideally sponsor legislation that:
Protects students with disabilities and fully funds IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which has been chronically underfunded since its passage, with the federal government contributing a fraction of what it originally promised and forcing local districts to pick up the shortfall. Full federal funding for IDEA is long overdue and would transform the experiences of millions of disabled students and their families.
Provides low-income students with financial and community support to help them succeed.
Enhances school infrastructure, including bus and vehicle fleets and facility upgrades.
Creates pathways for students from all backgrounds to attend college without going into crushing debt.
Undoes the harms of "No Child Left Behind" and the test-driven accountability culture it created.
I will oppose every effort to divert resources away from public schools toward private and for-profit ones, including the voucher programs and "school choice" schemes the Trump administration is pushing at the federal level. Public money should fund public schools.
We cannot have a great public education system while we underpay and overwork the people who run it. I will fight for livable wages for all teachers and school staff, safe working conditions, smaller class sizes, and the right to organize without retaliation. Teachers should be able to focus on helping our kids, not on second jobs or on fighting for basic respect from their own employers.
Smaller class sizes let educators move back to a learning model that meets kids where they are, rather than training them to pass a standardized test. Investing in teachers is investing in students, and the country gets back far more than it spends.
I will fight for universal Pre-K and childcare programs nationwide. Until that happens, I will work to secure grant funding for such programs in our district. Early childhood education is one of the highest return investments the public can make, especially because it lifts an enormous economic burden off of working families.
I’ll defend and expand the Head Start program. The Trump administration has moved to gut Head Start funding and shutter regional offices, threatening a program that has served low-income children and families for sixty years and that has extensive evidence supporting it. I will fight to protect Head Start, restore the cuts, and expand it as a cornerstone of any serious universal Pre-K plan.
I will also advocate for free school meals for every student. No child should try to pay attention in class while hungry. Universal meals remove the stigma that targeted programs produce, close loopholes where eligible kids miss out, and reflect a foundational commitment to ensuring that every student has access to nutritious food.
I support making public colleges and trade schools tuition-free as an investment in our future, alongside universal Pre-K and childcare. Our country has decided that we want an educated workforce, but we’ve made young people pay for that decision through debt that follows them for decades.
I support canceling all federal student loan debt. Student debt has become one of the largest financial burdens on an entire generation. Debt is reducing quality of life, homeownership, small business creation, and retirement savings across the economy. Canceling the debt and funding public higher education publicly is both more just and more economically productive than the status quo.
I am broadly against privately managed charter schools that funnel resources away from local communities and into the pockets of people who often do not live in those communities and do not care about the kids or families affected.
Charter schools can play an effective role in public education, but only with several important caveats. They must be nonprofit public charters, authorized and held accountable by local democratically elected school boards. They must provide a function that cannot be met in any other way by existing public schools. And they must comply with the same basic safeguards and laws as other public schools, including civil rights, public records, labor, health, safety, accreditation, and credentialing laws. While California's Constitution protects charter schools, I believe they should meet the same legal, regulatory, transparency, credentialing, and oversight requirements as traditional public schools, and they should be limited in scope and purpose to cases where public schools cannot meet a specific need.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are vital parts of a healthy education system. The Trump administration's attacks on DEI, including executive orders demanding that schools and universities dismantle DEI offices under threat of losing federal funding, are a coordinated effort to roll back decades of progress and to punish schools for reflecting the country they serve. I will fight those attacks at every turn.
Students should have the opportunity to interact with teachers, administrators, and staff from a range of backgrounds. This is especially crucial in our region, as we live in an incredibly diverse area. With strong DEI programs, students can have teachers they connect with, teachers who look like them, who understand what they are going through, and who can help them navigate barriers and challenges. DEI also exposes students to different perspectives and experiences, cultivating empathy and connection instead of xenophobia and bigotry. Students should learn about varied identities, experiences, and perspectives as early as possible, preparing them to understand and collaborate with people from all walks of life.
Young people need to be able to learn about this country's history, unvarnished. That is how we give future generations the tools to mitigate injustice rather than repeat it. I will oppose the Trump administration's attacks on honest teaching of history, including executive orders targeting so-called "divisive concepts," the federal pressure campaign against teaching about race and gender, and the ongoing wave of book bans in schools and libraries. These are blatant attempts to produce a generation of Americans who cannot recognize injustice when they see it.
Students' rights need to be protected as well: the right to protest, the right to take an active role in their education, and the right to be who they are without fear or negative consequence. These are basic democratic rights and functions that a free society needs to practice in its schools.
Attitudes about punishment in schools are shaped by our broader carceral logics and practices. There are absolutely cases where students need to be removed from a particular environment, but current systems tend to shuffle "problem" students from school to school, into "alternative" schools, and eventually into the school-to-prison pipeline. Administrators too often seek to make these students someone else's problem, when the focus should be on identifying and remedying the stresses and problems driving kids to behave in damaging ways.
I will fight for increased funding for school counselors, mental health support training for staff, and supplemental programs that give students healthy outlets to interact, learn, play, and grow. Meeting kids where they are, early and often, prevents the kinds of crises that end in expulsion or arrest.
School Resource Officers have proven tremendously problematic in schools across the state and country. We need systems to ensure students stay safe at school, but replicating racist, punitive law enforcement systems in schools is not the solution. SROs have a documented record of excessively harming and punishing students of color, particularly Black students, and of reinforcing carceral thinking in institutions that should be oriented toward growth.
Identifying adequate solutions for hard problems, like preventing guns from entering school grounds, is not easy, which is why we need to invest in research and piloting of new safety protocols. I will push for major federal investments in school safety research so that we can build approaches rooted in evidence rather than in fear.
After-school and extracurricular programs build retention, socialization, and well-roundedness, especially when they involve parents and the community. I will advocate for essential services as part of baseline education funding and for expanding extracurricular and advanced learning programs so that every student who can benefit has access to them.
I will also advocate for additional funding for extracurriculars in the arts and sciences, rather than pumping yet more money into already well-funded sports programs. Students should have a variety of opportunities to find and pursue their passions–a public education system worth its name gives every kid that chance.
My Education Checklist
Increase funding across the board
Fix inequality in property tax funding
Revitalize the Department of Education
Pay teachers and staff a livable wage
Prioritize funding to reduce class sizes
Provide meals to all students at no cost
Cancel student debt
Reform charter schools
Commit fully to DEI
Stop propagandizing American history in schools
Stop the school-to-prison pipeline
Increase funding for extracurricular programs