Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson released his education plan Friday, pledging to support school choice, limit federal intervention and reward good teachers.
“To be successful, we must take the federal bureaucracy out of education and concentrate on empowering the American people,” Carson says in the plan, released exclusively to Breitbart News.
The plan includes five simple principles: school choice, empowering parents and local districts, encouraging innovation, rewarding good teachers and a simpler student loan process.
Though the plan is short on detailed specifics, Carson says he would support school vouchers and charter schools. He also pledges to “cut red tape and reduce the size and authority of the Washington educational bureaucracy.”
On innovation, Carson says, “Rather than micromanaging … educational innovators with one-size-fits-all regulations that suppress their ingenuity, we should promote innovative ideas in education.”
On rewarding good teachers, Carson does get fairly specific. “I will advocate for flexible block grants to the states to advance and reward teacher quality, and to develop teacher evaluation systems that focus on effectiveness in advancing student achievement.”
Carson’s approach to student loans is fairly radical: “The Department of Education needs to get out of the lending business.” He goes on to say, “We need a simpler, more streamlined and transparent financial aid process that gives students and their families the kind of simple, reliable information they need to make good decisions.”
Although none of Carson’s five principles focus on the Common Core academic standards, he mentions the controversial standards in the introduction. “2015 Math and Reading National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed a continuation of the achievement gap between white and minority students, even after the implementation of Common Core Standards in 42 states and the District of Columbia.”
“The key thing is that the best education is the education that is closest to home, not education that is dictated centrally from Washington, D.C.,” Carson said in an interview with Breitbart News Daily. “A lot of people wonder why we have these high dropout rates. It’s not because the kids are stupid. It’s because they look around and say, ‘I’m not getting educated anyway, what’s the point in me being here?'”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
