Tuition-Free College

The United States is the wealthiest nation in history, and as such should have the best education in the world.

As a math teacher, I saw up close and personally experienced the continual funding cuts that deprived students of effective public education, all in service to an agenda of providing tax breaks to the largest corporations and wealthiest people. The funding cuts, along with high-stakes testing, have proven to be absolute failures, and they must be reversed.

Teachers and other education staff from all across the country, from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona to even here in Washington state, engaged in strikes not only to increase their own pay and benefits but to help their students as well.

I will fight for:

Implementing the Thurgood Marshall Plan to protect public education.
Fully and equitably funding public education so that every child has a first-rate education from Pre-K to post-secondary schools.
Eliminating disparate disciplinary treatment of students based on race, which has created the school-to-prison pipeline.
Guaranteeing all teachers are paid at least $60,000 a year.
Prohibiting for-profit charter schools, and prohibiting non-profit charter schools from existing outside of school board control and union bargaining.
Significant increases in supportive funding for Native schools and Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs).
Tuition and fee-free public college, university, and trade schools.
Providing living stipends to adult students.
Abolishing existing student debt.
Setting a per-student floor for education spending.
Free school meals and abolishing lunch debt.
Eliminating all public school fees.
Fully funding arts education.
Implementing basic self-care education.
Funding extracurricular transportation so participation in athletics and clubs is equitable for working families.
Eliminating standardized testing.
Eliminating homework from the public school curriculum, as the best education systems in the world do not have homework.
Universal public childcare.
Ending the use of the prefabricated curriculum.
Significantly increasing the community school budget.
Fixing school infrastructure nationwide, including rebuilding them to the standards of the Green New Deal.
Tripling Title I education funding to eliminate disparities.