Issue Position: Expanding Educational Opportunities

Issue Position

As a former Baltimore City public school teacher, Bill Ferguson is passionate about continuing his work expanding educational opportunities through smart, sensible work with parents, teachers, administrators and government.

AS YOUR MARYLAND STATE SENATOR, BILL WILL:
* Ensure that Baltimore City's 21 transformational community change in our City.

* Expand opportunities to recruit and retain highly effective public school teachers and school leaders.

* Promote innovation in education by preparing students for a globalized economy through technology, trades apprenticeship learning, and STEM educational programs. Invest in Labor Colleges and other labor-related worker retraining, skills development programs.

* Champion Maryland's Race to the Tots Initiative - an innovative initiative to expand high-quality public pre-kindergarten for Maryland's working and middle class families.

* Develop a statewide program to close the digital divide. Promote data-sharing in the interest of kids. Create linked and dynamic youth databases to target atrisk populations at an early age. Ensure that such a system utilizes benchmarks to measure "on-track" graduation.

* Engage in a Maryland Race to the Top initiative to stimulate innovative school reform throughout the State, including measures of arts integration in metrics of school success. Ensure that high-achieving students have access to advanced academic programming in their neighborhood schools in the 46th District.

* Create pipelines of great school leaders from non-traditional pathways. Foster a system for incentivizing great principals to work in at-risk schools. Adjust the certification requirements for principals to attract non-traditional candidates to lead schools.

* Establish the "Maryland Promise" -- all students receiving free and reduced lunch meals may attend any Maryland 4-year university at no cost with successful graduation from a Maryland public high school.

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