Issue Position: Boosting Funding for Public Education.

Issue Position

I am a product of public schools -- from kindergarten through college. It helped propel me from a single-wide trailer in a small town in northern California to working for President Barack Obama in the White House. I believe everyone has a right to quality public education and I will support legislation to reduce teacher shortages, increase funding for K-12 public schools, invest in community colleges, and ensure our public universities are accessible and affordable for California residents. We cannot let access to safe schools and a good education be determined by where you live, the color of your skin, or how much your parents make. Our legislature must be a champion for educational equity through specific funding increases for resource-starved schools and by giving teachers the tools they need to lead disadvantaged students on the path to success. We can find that funding by taking a hard look at corporate loopholes under Prop 13, among other strategies.

California once had the best public schools in the country. Families moved west in search of better opportunity and quality education for their children. Unfortunately, California now ranks 47th out of 50th in standard of living for children. One in four children go hungry every day. We rank 41st in the nation on spending per child. More troubling, access to quality schools all too often is determined by where a child lives. Thus, there are glaring racial and socioeconomic inequities.
We are failing many our children; especially children of color. It is unconscionable. We urgently need a "kids-first" agenda, one that prepares our students for the changing workforce of the future. An educated workforce is not only critical to our economic growth, but essential in our ability to combat the growing wealth inequalities that are so pervasive in California.
Here's what I will fight for:
More Funding For Schools
We must invest in our children by investing in our schools. California has only recently dug out of the deep hole created by the recession, and we remain woefully behind other states when it comes to ensuring our public schools have the resources they need to prepare our children for college and careers.
The quality of a school depends on the teachers in the classrooms, and therefore we must ensure teaching is a profession that is desirable and viable. We should provide more professional development, coaching, mentoring, and resources for continued education. We should pay our teachers more. In areas with a high cost of living, like Assembly District 15, we need to provide housing assistance so our educators can live within the communities in which they work.
We have a significant teacher shortage, particularly for science and math, and have the highest teacher to student ratio in the country. We should reinstate recruitment and incentives programs to attract and retain racially and culturally diverse teachers.
Address the Needs of the Whole Child
We know learning in the classroom is significantly impacted by circumstances outside of the classroom. It's critical we look at the whole child and address their social, emotional, and behavioral growth to provide each child the opportunity to thrive. Children living in pervasive poverty and experiencing trauma need schools with more resources to address their social and emotional needs. These resources should include school psychologists, nurses, librarians and an investment in restorative justice programs.
Children who are socially and emotionally developed handle challenging difficult situations better; they create positive relationships, learn to check their emotions, and can calm themselves when upset. The ability to hone these skills enable children to learn and achieve at higher levels.
Learning Starts on Day One
Since children begin to learn from the day they are born, we should think of early child care as education and as an entitlement, like elementary school, social security, unemployment benefits or Medicare.
To this end, we should subsidize quality child care on a sliding scale and fund universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. We should professionalize the care industry by unionizing the workforce, providing professional development and apprenticeship programs and increase their educational requirements so early caregivers can receive the same pay as elementary school teachers.
Early childhood educators should have access to free community college as well as housing assistance as a way to live where they work. The more affordable and quality early education our children get, the better a society we are.
High Expectations and Accountability for All of Our Schools
Every school should be great. We should expect the best from all of our public schools, both traditional public schools as well as charter public schools. Along with increased funding and support for our public schools, we should set high standards informed by multiple measures for accountability -- academic achievement, dropout rates, rates of suspension, graduation rates, etc -- and clear transparency in how resources are spent.
We should support and model the successful elements of high performing public schools so other students can benefit. For consistently low performing public schools, increased funding should be coupled with clear accountability and a focus on supporting and developing strong school leaders.
Charter public schools can serve a need in our community, but we need more transparency and accountability in how they are run. Charter public schools must be subject to the Brown Act, the Political Reform Act and the Public Records Act, as this would enable parents and the community at large more insight into how taxpayer dollars are being spent.
We need to make it easier to identify poor performing charter public schools and to take action to quickly fix or shut those schools down. We need to find ways for charter public schools to work with district schools. Collaboration requires both the district as well as the charter to both come to the table in partnership. Lastly, we need to outlaw for-profit charter schools -- I applaud the passage of AB406 which does just this -- and under no circumstance should we consider vouchers for private schools.
Preparing Students for Life
We should be preparing students with tangible skills for life. I believe we need more project-based learning opportunities, where students learn by completing inter-disciplinary projects that solve complex real-world questions. Kids learn through doing and collaborating, and hands-on projects are a vehicle for gaining skills traditionally taught through lectures and worksheets.
Project-based learning emphasizes higher-order learning skills -- critical thinking, synthesis, and evaluation -- over comprehension or memorization skills. For instance, we should start financial literacy at a young age, and teach our kids the basics, like how to save, how to spend within their means and how the stock market works.
Research has shown that students who engage in regular project-based learning demonstrate better problem-solving and critical thinking skills, and do better on standardized tests than their peers. In order to successfully implement this model, teachers need training, coaching and high-quality planning materials. Partnerships between secondary schools and higher education should be strengthened to leverage resources and provide additional opportunities for students through mentorship programs, professional development for teachers, curriculum materials, and early college preparation instruction.
Reinvent Higher Education
In 1960, California's leaders set us on the path to becoming the 5th largest economy in the world by developing the Master Plan for Higher Education. The Master Plan represented an innovative commitment to world-class quality public higher education that lifted up generations of other Californians.
Today, nearly 60 years later, California needs a new plan to meet the urgent challenges students face and to propel future generations of Californians. As California lawmakers work to build that new vision, students and families in our district need to know that I will fight for each and every one of them to be able to earn a college degree or credential that helps them land a great job.
That starts with making our community colleges free and open to all, something my friend and our next Governor Gavin Newsom supports too. But as a community college graduate, I also know that tuition and fees are only part of the equation. We need to do much more to make sure students have enough financial aid to afford meals and a safe roof over their head, so that no student has to choose between going hungry and buying a textbook or paying for class credits.
As a state lawmaker, I will fight to fix funding for the California State University and University of California systems to end the vicious cycle of rising tuition and fees. We need to secure a permanent funding source for these systems, so that we can begin rolling back tuition and fees and expand our university system to serve many more students. Since 1980, California has built 22 prisons but just 1 new University of California campus -- it's high time we re-prioritize our students and our higher education institutions in our state funding processes. And the state investment in our colleges and universities more than pays for itself through their contributions to innovation, job creation and increased incomes for graduates. At UC, within five years of graduation, the majority of Pell grant recipient students will earn more than their family. As the state grapples with the growing income inequality, investments in education can advance social and economic mobility while supporting state workforce needs. But we must invest more public dollars.
Finally, we need to do much more to support students so that they can graduate on time and get a great job out of college. That means dramatically expanding the number of counselors and mental health resources, protecting Dreamers on campus, and making it easier for students to pick and fulfill majors that will lead them to high-paying careers. It means better coordinating statewide higher ed data systems to better understand which programs most support student success, creating incentives for students to attend under-utilized campuses, and leveraging our online learning resources.
Our district should be a place where every student can get an advanced degree -- whether it's a professional certificate or a bachelor's degree -- after high school, and I'll fight to make that happen as your Assemblymember.
Feeding our Children to Create Lifelong Nutritional Habits
We have a tragic paradox -- a quarter of our kids go hungry every day, and yet 33% are obese. We add to the problem by not feeding our children appetizing, nutritious food nor are we giving them enough time during lunch to eat in our crowded urban schools. No school should be serving chips, pizza, soda and candy for lunch.
We need to prepare our kids to make good nutritional habits starting at a young age in order to combat our obesity, heart disease and other weight-related illnesses. Studies show that nutritional school lunches raise student achievement. We should be incentivizing and bringing to scale ideas like the Edible Schoolyard Project, born right here in AD15, which interweaves student-led urban gardening with nutritional lunches to serve healthy meals to our students. We should increase public funding for Farm to School programs. As it does on many issues, California should be leading the way nationally on providing the most nutritious school lunches available.
So how are we going to fund these principles I believe in so strongly? One way to provide more revenue, is to close the Proposition 13 commercial property loophole. By doing so, we will add $9--11.4 billion into our state budget every year. This would mean that big corporations like Chevron, Transamerica, and Disney would be required to pay their market-rate fair share of property tax. This would infuse the critical resources our state needs to ensure our children have the quality education they deserve, and these corporations would benefit from a better educated workforce.

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