EDUCATION
According to the McCain website, Senator McCain will:
Fight for the ability of all students to have access to schools of demonstrated excellence, including their own homes.
Empower parents with school choice to send their children to the school that can best educate them.
Provide parents the ability to move their children, and the dollars associated with them, from [a] failing school.
Pursue reforms that address the underlying cultural problems in our education system.
Broaden access to high quality early education programs.
Ensure the neediest children have access to a range of high quality programs.
Build Centers for Excellence within the Head Start program.
Work with states, Head Start parent councils, high quality early care and education providers, and other stakeholders to ensure that state and federal pre-K programs are well coordinated.
Encourage and enable states to better align Head Start with their own pre-K programs.
Promote the replication of professional development programs with a proven record of preparing our children for kindergarten.
Encourage more research to determine what skills and training make the most difference for young children.
Educate parents on the basics of preparing their children for a productive educational experience.
Modernize our universities by:
--encouraging the government to support innovative approaches to education, and
--removing regulatory barriers that prevent us from moving forward with new ideas.
Simplify higher education tax benefits.
Eliminate earmarks [to] immediately and significantly improve the governments support for university research.
Expand the lender-of-last resort capability of the federal student loan system.
According to the Obama website, Senator Obama will:
Provide critical support to young children and their parents through a Zero-to-Five plan which will:
--place key emphasis at early care and education for infants,
--create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state Zero-to-Five efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.
Quadruple Early Head Start.
Increase Head Start funding.
Improve quality for both early childhood programs.
Provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.
Improve assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace.
Improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner.
Support schools that need improvement, rather than punish them.
Double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools.
Support states that help the most successful charter schools to expand to serve more students.
Recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession.
Address the dropout crisis by investing in intervention strategies in middle school.
Double funding for after-school programs (the 21st Century Learning Centers program) to serve one million more children.
Support outreach programs to encourage more young people from low-income families to consider and prepare for college.
Create a national Make College A Reality initiative to increase students taking AP or college-level classes nationwide.
Provide grants for students seeking college-level credit at community colleges if their [schools do not] provide those resources.
Support transitional bilingual education.
Recruit, prepare, retain, and reward teachers.
Make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that:
--is universal and fully refundable,
--will ensure the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans,
--will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university,
--will make community college tuition completely free for most students,
--will require recipients of the credit to conduct 100 hours of community service.
Streamline the financial aid process.
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