Education
“It is time that our policy and funding priorities take a new direction for our children. That means investing in education. When we do that, we invest in our future.”
-Congresswoman Barbara Lee
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Congresswoman Lee's support of education revolves around several central goals: providing ample funding for public schools, ensuring equal access to education for every student, expanding support services for education, and ensuring lifetime learning – making early education (pre-school, Head Start) and higher education accessible for everyone.
This year, the 112th Congress will also consider reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The original NCLB was intended to address the laudable goals of maximizing student achievement and closing disparate learning gaps between our young people.
However, the federal mandates imposed by NCLB to reduce class sizes, expand early childhood education and after-school programs, and improve professional development for teachers and education have largely gone unfunded and as a result have overburdened our school systems with unachievable goals. Although NCLB was also designed to raise the reading and writing levels of America's children and provide measurable means of testing those abilities, it has instead forced teachers to "teach to the test" in order to meet the mandates of the legislation.
These and other gaps in the legislation require thorough scrutiny and reform as Congress considers ways to improve the NCLB. Congresswoman Lee will continue to fight for better education for our nation’s children as discussions on the reauthorization of this important legislation get underway.
As a member of the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education (LHHS) Appropriations Subcommittee, Congresswoman Lee has been instrumental in:
- Protecting access to higher education through Pell Grants:I worked to protect funding for Pell Grants in the Fiscal Year 2012 (FY12) Labor Health and Human Services (LHHS) Appropriations bill, which will help millions of low– and middle–income families pay for college by investing $42 billion and maintaining the maximum Pell Grant at $5,550.
- Protecting funding and access to after school programs: The FY12 LHHS bill maintains funding at $1.15 billion for after–school centers.
- Increasing funding for Head Start: The FY12 LHHS bill expands Federal support for early childhood education, which has an enormous payoff to society. It includes $8 billion for Head Start services, which is $424 million over last year.