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Education Reform Too Important for Partisan Gamesmanship
posted by: Cindy Omlin | February 26, 2013, 09:42 PM   

Nor could we agree more with Senator Rubio when he delivered the republican response using almost exactly the same words. "Helping the middle class grow will also require an education system that gives people the skills today's jobs entail and the knowledge that tomorrow's world will require."

Sure, the formulas for how each party would get us there differ some. The President's included a call for universal pre-K access and more support to help students afford college. But it also included themes that appeal across the aisle, like cost controls and more fiscal flexibility for innovations like performance pay. And while Senator Rubio called for reforms that rattle many Democrats-things like broader parent choice-he echoed the President's case for career training, as well as for the importance of college student aid and the costs controls need to preserve it.

A non-partisan commitment to reform is a core value in the PIE Network; in fact, it was a founding principle that started the network. PIE was founded by leading policy organizationsthat cross the ideological spectrum, and whose leaders disagree on many things, but they agreed that education reform is too important to be left to ideological gamesmanship. They put their collective reputations behind common commitments to education reform that still guides the network today.

Education is one of the last bastions of bipartisan cooperation in this country. And it's essential to the challenge both the President and Senator Rubio laid out that it stay that way. No one political party should own the agenda for improving our nation's schools any more than any one parent should own the duty to care for their children. It only works when we work on this one together.

Originally posted on the PIE blog by Executive Director Suzanne Tacheny Kubach.

 

Originally posted by Alix at AAE.


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