Rep. Kowalko with Lily Peterson, a graduate of Newark Charter School who won Delaware’s 2017 Young Environmentalist Award.
“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” — Plato
I believe in securing equal access to all publicly funded education opportunities. Delaware needs a practical, informed approach to improve our educational system. The significant flaws in our education policies and laws have caused a great deal of conflict and confusion, resulting in an inability to focus on the fundamentals and a fracturing of our communities. We need to engage educators, including superintendents, school board members, principals, and teachers, as well as parents and the community into the process to develop a well-informed, innovative, and visionary approach to legislating our public education system before enacting misguided or unrealistic laws that must be later reformed or repealed. I will not waver in my resolve to do what is right and just for the children, parents, and taxpayers of Delaware.
I plan to address the failures to fully and adequately fund public education, teachers’ salaries, support positions, infrastructural stability, and the needs of the impoverished and struggling families to have equal access to education opportunities. Increased funding and restoration of cuts to public education need to come from a dramatic reduction of the bloated Delaware Department of Education (DOE) and an abandonment of ineffective mandates imposed by the federal Department of Education as well as recovering the money being squandered on corporation privatization groups and the host of ineffective, state-imposed consultants with no educator experience or background. We must also reject the senseless, unproven standardized test culture that drains time, resources, and money from our schools.
- We must restore the draconian cuts to public education that have been imposed over the last 10 years. Governor Carney has cut an additional $36 million from education funding on top of the $30 million cut under the Markell Administration. These cuts have resulted in a continuation of overcrowded classrooms and an inability to fund reading and math specialists in our schools, thereby losing one of the most effective ways to increase student proficiency.
- I continue to oppose the Governor’s plan to close Wilmington neighborhood schools that are comfortable, familiar, and accessible places for parents, grandparents, and their children. The plan to refurbish two monolithic buildings to house K-8 Wilmington/Christina students in a less-than-welcoming environment will not promote a better learning environment for these kids and could result in more adversarial conditions and less individual attention, and also impede families from participating in that educational experience.
- I opposed and will continue to fight against using State funds to sustain consultants and bureaucracies created by the corporate reform agendas. These agendas remove local control and drain needed financial resources from public education. We must also oppose the profiting from our public education system by private entities such as RODEL, TFA, the Gates Foundation, Bank of America, and similar organizations.
- We must revamp our education funding mechanisms so that additional resources are provided to follow the needs of the individual students and ensure adequate funding from the State does not shift the taxation burden disproportionately to the local taxpayers. Our public education system is approaching a crisis with the arcane funding mechanism of referendums. It is vitally important that the funding mechanisms for our public schools are reformulated and repurposed to ensure equitable distribution of resources and enable those children who are currently at a disadvantage to experience an equal opportunity to learn and prosper.
- I fought for many years to successfully bring to fruition state-funded full-day kindergarten options for all public schools, including testifying before the Joint Finance Committee to offer realistic funding mechanisms and authoritative studies validating the benefits of full-day kindergarten.
- I will continue to support various “SEED” programs and other efforts to make college and other higher education opportunities available and affordable to Delawareans.
I have opposed and remain highly critical of standardized tests with no proven accuracy or data driven validity being used to measure our students, teachers, or schools. These tests come with huge price tags and are misused, not as measures of accountability, but as punitive resources with little to no evaluative capabilities. Tests must measure a student’s abilities and progress, in the moment, to be effective at addressing that student’s needs.
In 2015, I introduced legislation (HB 50) protecting the rights of parents and students to “opt-out” of the annual statewide test, the Smarter Balance Assessment. The DOE uses this unproven system to punish students and teachers while completely failing to identify the educational needs of individual students. This bill passed both houses of the Delaware General Assembly by more than a two-thirds margin and then was unceremoniously vetoed by former Governor Markell when we were out of session. I tried to have it reconsidered for an override vote as provided by the rules but the House leadership chose to ignore those rules and stopped it from coming to the floor for a vote of the full body. This is parental rights’ bill strongly supported by DSEA and the PTA as well as tens of thousands of Delaware parents and professionals along with three of the largest school districts in the State.
I will continue to work to remove the highly damaging and punitive regulatory processes imposed by the DOE and instead allow active, majority participation by educators and communities. Teachers and schools need to be the movers of education policy for their students. We cannot expect teachers and students to learn under the draconian conditions imposed by the Delaware DOE, the federal government, and outside “consultants” such as RODEL. We need to have our State Board of Education elected rather than appointed, and the State and federal governments need to get back to their original purpose of providing revenue for high needs students, equalizing disparate educational opportunities, and ensuring equal rights, while schools should return to local and community control. My personal measure of the success of any public education system is that to be considered successful, an education system must provide the opportunity for all children to reach their full potential. Anything short of that can never be satisfactory or acceptable.
Rep. Kowalko with Mr. Sedacca’s 4th grade class, who worked to protect the gray fox as Delaware’s state animal.
I will concentrate efforts on trying to correct the inconsistencies and vagaries in our education laws to allow a true available choice for all parents while preserving the intent of alternative programs such as charter schools to flourish as laboratories of innovation that can be replicated in traditional schools. Many charter schools are not subject to adequate oversight or accountability, resulting in financial mismanagement and exclusivity of access. I support a fair and accountable application system that provides for input by local communities.
I support collective bargaining and due process rights for teachers and support personnel. I have fought every year for adequate compensation in the Budget for our educational professionals. Teacher and support personnel salaries must increase at the starting levels to attract teachers and incentivize college students to join the teaching profession, and compensation should be provided for skills and knowledge and the willingness of teachers to pursue those self-improvement avenues. We also need to adequately support the talented and dedicated teachers who voluntarily choose to work in hard-to-staff schools. Schools should be funded appropriately to address their student needs, including reasonable classroom sizes, adequate support staff, and resources available for students in the most dire straits.