Matthew Berry for Congress in Virginia’s 8th District

For America to compete and win in the global marketplace, we must improve our education system. In our country, the primary responsibility for K-12 education lies at the state and local level. This is as it should be. After all, no one knows local schools better than local parents and teachers.

When it comes to education, I therefore believe that the federal government should focus on encouraging state and local governments to empower parents and teachers. In particular, parents should be provided with more options for their children, and teachers should be rewarded for performing well. Here are my specific ideas:

1. Encourage states to expand charter school programs – Charter schools provide parents with additional choices and often offer a wide range of innovative educational programs. The federal government should therefore provide financial incentives to encourage states to permit the creation of more charter schools and provide such schools with the autonomy necessary to innovate.

2. Encourage merit pay for teachers – To promote excellence in teaching, we should reward good teachers with higher pay. In most professions, pay is linked to performance, and good performers are rewarded with higher salaries and bonuses. Such a system makes sense because it creates incentives for workers to excel. Teaching should be no different. If a teacher is excelling in the classroom, he or she should be paid more than colleagues who are not performing as well. The federal government therefore should encourage local school districts to adopt merit pay by providing those districts with additional financial resources.

3. Establish a pilot K-12 federal opportunity scholarship program – Too many children are trapped in failing schools because their parents lack the resources to send them to anywhere better. I therefore believe that we should establish a pilot program that would allow low-income parents in selected cities to apply for K-12 opportunity scholarships they would then use to send their children to the schools of their choice. Such scholarships will empower parents to choose the school that is right for their child and allow children to escape from failing schools. School choice programs are already working in cities such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, and I believe that we should test school choice in cities across the country. The pilot program should include a rigorous testing component to see if children participating in the program make academic progress.

4. Make it easier to fire bad teachers – While good teachers should be rewarded with better pay, we must at the same time make it easier to remove bad teachers from the classroom. Unfortunately, it is now exceptionally difficult to fire incompetent teachers because of tenure protections. The current tenure system must therefore be reformed, and the federal government should provide financial incentives to encourage such reform. If a teacher is not performing satisfactorily in the classroom, he or she must improve or find another line of work. Our children’s future demands no less.

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