Putting Students and Teachers First
Common Sense Ideas & Solutions
The opportunity for every child to get a quality education is the promise of America. For Robin Carnahan, strengthening our public education system is about more than expanding opportunity and fulfilling the American dream—it’s also about making sure the U.S. remains competitive in the global economy. Our nation faces serious challenges, and we will need all hands on deck to meet them.
Robin Carnahan’s steadfast commitment to improving schools and helping kids comes in part from her family. Her grandparents both taught at small rural schools in southeast Missouri, where her grandfather started a hot lunch program and vocational agriculture classes to help students and their families. When kids lived too far away to make it to class regularly, her grandparents opened up their home and took them in to live with them during the school year. Robin’s father, the late Governor Mel Carnahan, known to many Missourians as the “Education Governor,” always believed that serving as president of the Rolla school board was one of the most important jobs he ever held.
Robin will work hard to ensure our students have the tools they need to become the next great generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. Instead of imposing inflexible and unfunded mandates on local school systems, Robin will fight for commonsense education policies that empower local school districts, improve teaching and learning conditions, encourage more family and community involvement, and ensure public resources and revenue go towards public schools.
Robin’s priorities for education include:
- Improving teaching and learning conditions: Robin believes that good teachers are the most important key to learning. One teacher’s influence on a single child can have ripple effects that span generations. That’s why Robin will work to support and reward good teachers with competitive salaries and benefits and greater access to professional development. Robin will also make reducing class sizes a priority—because smaller classes mean more individual attention for students and a more rewarding work environment for teachers. Finally, schools across Missouri—from our inner cities to our rural communities—must have access to the modern technology and learning tools necessary to teach 21st century skills.
- Getting parents, families, and communities more involved: Schools must be held accountable for their performance, but the success of our schools also depends on parents being informed about and engaged in their children’s education. As senator, Robin will work with PTAs, local businesses and civic organizations to promote parental involvement and develop solutions—such as school–to–work programs and internships—to help schools, students and families thrive. The Parents as Teachers program, developed in Missouri in the 1970s and championed by then-Governor Kit Bond, became a national model for how to give parents the information and support they need to raise high achieving students. It’s a model that works and deserves to be expanded.
- Reforming and funding No Child Left Behind: Robin supports the No Child Left Behind Act’s goals of boosting student achievement through transparency and accountability, but she also has seen how underfunding and inflexibility have made it hard to reach those goals. That’s why Robin wants to reform NCLB by reducing its emphasis on “teaching to the test,” and instead promote critical thinking and problem solving and ensure that student achievement is measured by more than just test scores alone.
- Ensuring children are ready to learn: Missouri has had a proud tradition of early education ever since Susan Elizabeth Blow founded the nation’s first successful public kindergarten in St. Louis in 1873. Early education pays off because it builds the foundation that kids need to enjoy learning throughout their lives. Study after study has shown that children who attend high–quality pre–kindergarten are less likely to be held back in school, have higher test scores, and better social skills. Still, more than 75 percent of four–year–olds have no access to state–funded pre–K programs. Robin will work to ensure more young children have access to resources such as Head Start and Parents as Teachers programs, which will improve their chances of academic achievement and productivity later in life.
- Making college affordable: For 170 years, since the University of Missouri’s founding as the first public university west of the Mississippi, Missourians have shown a strong commitment to higher education. But too many of today’s students and families struggle to afford the cost of higher education. Robin believes that no parent should have to tell their child that college is financially out–of–reach and no student should be saddled with an unsustainable amount of debt after graduation. That’s why she supports funding for federal student aid and loan programs and will work to combat skyrocketing tuition costs. Robin will also be a champion for Missouri’s community colleges and continuing education programs by promoting initiatives like the A+ Schools program, which has unlocked access to higher education for thousands of Missourians.