The following commentary was published in August of 2016 by the Syracuse Post-Standard.  You can find it online at syracuse.com 

As election season nears, I would encourage state and federal candidates to consider a new platform for education and schooling. Business leaders and politicians advocating for accountability, efficiency and free-market choice in education have dominated public policy efforts for over 15 years. But public schooling gains little from top-down practices heaping burdensome demands on schools and teachers. Public education has as much to gain from improving the lives of children outside of school as it does from guiding instructional practice within the classroom. Here are 10 proposals that could vastly improve education in the United States – only some of which are specifically about schools and schooling.

1. Provide a solid foundation for school readiness during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. Support children and families by expanding birth-to-3 policies like infant and toddler visitation programs, subsidies for affordable, high-quality day care, paid parental leave, early literacy library programs, and community-based family resource centers.

2. Promote equity and access starting in preschool. Make universal full-day high quality pre-K free and available in all school districts, and provide adequate funding to ensure that every classroom has a fully certified pre-K instructor with a status and salary equal to K-12 teachers.

3. Care for the health and welfare of every child. Improve the physical lives of children by making health care — including dental and mental health coverage — affordable and accessible to all families. Institute housing subsidies and practices ensuring that no child will live in substandard or dangerous conditions.

4. Improve the balance between employment and parenting. Promote family-friendly employment practices including living wages, predictable hours, sick and vacation days, and increased flexibility for employees with young children.

5. Demand equal and equitable funding. Insist on strong and equal funding for all schools and districts regardless of a community’s wealth, with increased financial support for schools and districts with the highest poverty rates.

6. Foster an environment conducive to successful teaching. Improve working conditions for teachers by increasing the time dedicated to planning and collaboration during the regular workday, and providing additional paid summer planning opportunities.

7. Promote high expectations for teachers. Ensure that classroom instruction engages all students around meaningful and rigorous curriculum. Move instruction beyond rote memorization to helping students ask good questions, apply and analyze knowledge, communicate clearly, think critically, evaluate existing ideas, develop new ideas and solve new problems.

8. Resist accountability-only solutions to education reform. Reject the prevailing over-reliance on top-down accountability measures like high stakes testing and Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) while increasing support for greater transparency into the daily operation of schools, classrooms and districts.

9. Redesign teacher training. Provide better incentives for high-achieving college students to enter teacher education programs, make admission and graduation requirements for those programs more rigorous, and decrease the rigid demands that make teacher licensing overly burdensome. Extend these incentives to all instructional subject areas, not just science and math.

10. Lower the financial barriers to college. Make higher education more affordable through dramatic increases in state and federal financial aid programs – especially Pell grants and subsidized low-interest student loans.

Few of these ideas are new, and some have already caught the attention of policymakers. But as a comprehensive platform for education reform, these ideas require our renewed moral support, intellectual energy and financial backing. Many would help parents be better parents and children become successful learners. A few would promote greater professionalism and improve the status of teachers. Most importantly, ideas like these would send the right message about the kind of society we wish to be by investing our hopes, dreams and resources in children, families and the institutions that support them.