Quality Education

By Tom Lantos

As a former professor for three decades at San Francisco State Unaiversity, I am committed to improving the quality of public education by adding new teachers and reducing class size, assuring necessary federal funding for our schools, and making college affordable and available to all.

• Add New Teachers; Reduce Class Size. Reducing class size is an important step necessary to improve the quality of our children's education. Teacher retirement and record student enrollments have increased pressures on schools and led to teacher shortages. Over the next decade, we will need to recruit, train, hire, or retain more than two million teachers. In addition, many communities face difficulties hiring qualified teachers in specific subject areas such as math, science, special education, and bilingual education. Many school systems are granting emergency credentials to unprepared or under-prepared teachers, or are assigning teachers to subjects they are not equipped to teach.

• No Child Left Behind. The bipartisan education reform bill, called the "No Child Left Behind Act," which was adopted by Congress in the previous Congress, calls for significant increases in funding to help communities hire and train good teachers and reduce the number of children in each classroom. The Republican leadership of the Congress, however, has undermined the important goals of this new legislation by refusing to provide the necessary funds. My Democratic colleagues in the Congress and I are fighting to assure that education reform can succeed and that the Federal government provides its proper share of needed funds.

• Adequate Funding for Education. Consistently the budgets that have been adopted under the Republican House leadership with the support and guidance of the Bush Administration do not provide the necessary and promised funds for states to reduce class size and improve teacher quality. As a result, far fewer new teachers will be hired and thousands and thousands fewer teachers will be trained next year. The President has frozen funding to train early childhood teachers, despite the increasing demand for preschool education programs and urgent need to train teachers to meet this need. I have fought and continue to fight for needed school funding. In recent votes for education funding, I opposed Republican budget cuts: they voted to deny 2 million elementary and high school students help they need to develop basic skills in reading and math because existing programs were not funded. Republicans also broke their promise to make education funding a priority, and as a result over a million children will not have access to important after-school programs. Instead of expanding the groundbreaking Head Start program for more children, Republicans voted to cut off enrollment and eliminate the program's high standards.

• Our Public Schools Deserve Our Support. Our public schools educate 90 percent of our country's children, and they deserve our full support. I have opposed efforts of the Republican Congressional leadership and the President to cut fundamental investment in our nation's public schools while at the same time enacting a new tuition tax credit which could divert nearly $5 billion over the next six years to private elementary and secondary schools. Public schools are fundamental to our nation's well being and they deserve strong federal support.

• Making College Affordable and Available. As a former college professor, I know the importance and value of a college education and the importance for the federal government to help students go to college. With tuition and other college costs rising, it is essential that federal programs provide help for eager students. Despite the rising costs of tuition, however, Republicans recently voted to freeze federal Pell Grants at last year's level, rather than providing students help to pay for college education.