Let’s take a look at what education under a Biden presidency may look like.
According to Anne Dennon’s article of July 20, 2020 posted on Best Colleges, Joe Biden’s education policy can be summarized as such:
- Biden offers more progressive approach to education than President Trump
- His proposal is partially modeled after Senator Bernie Sanders’ plan for free college
- Biden promises to replace Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and roll back Title IX changes
Looking at community colleges, Biden shares President Obama’s views on vocational programs and community colleges and aims to invest heavily in this sector and ensure access to low-income students.
Here are some of the highlights of Biden’s education policy for America:
- Triple funding for Title 1, the federal program funding schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families and require districts to use these funds to offer educators competitive salaries and make other critical investments prior to directing the funds to other purposes.
- Invest in teacher mentoring, leadership, and additional education.
- Help teachers and other educators pay off their student loans.
- Double the number pf psychologists, guidance counselors, nurses, social workers, and other health professionals in our schools so our kids get the mental health care they need.
- Invest in schools to eliminate the funding gap between white and non-white districts, and rich and poor districts.
- Improve teacher diversity.
- Allocate funds to build the best, most innovative schools in the country in low-income communities and communities of color.
- Reinstate the Obama-Biden Administration’s actions to diversity schools by reinstating Department of Education guidance that supported schools in legally pursuing desegregation strategies and recognize institutions of higher education’s interests in creating diverse student bodies. And, provide grants to school districts to create plans and implement strategies to diversity their school.
- Ensure children with disabilities have the support to succeed. The Biden Administration intends to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, signed into law in 1990, that promised 40% of the extra cost of special education required by the bill. Currently, the federal government only covers roughly 14% of this cost.
- Invest in school vocational training and partnerships between high schools, community colleges, and employers. These partnerships will create programs that allow students to earn an industry credential upon high school graduation. Career and technical education can also be used to increase access to middle- and high- school courses in computer science so that students learn computational thinking and are prepared to lead in fields such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
- Provide high-quality, universal pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-olds. For families with young children, finding high quality pre-K is a major financial, logistical, and emotional burden, with potentially life-long consequences for their children.
- Provide funds to ensure that there is an early childhood development expert in every community health center. Also, provide grants to help cities place early childhood development experts in other pediatrician offices with a high percentage of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program patients.
- Expand home visiting to be addressed through the Affordance Care Act, under which health and child development specialists make consistent, scheduled visits to help parents through the critical early stage of parenting.
- Provide for two years of tuition-free community colleges. Expand the policy of tuition-free four-year college for students from families with incomes up to $125,000.
- Double the maximum value of the Pell Grant to allow students to cover cost for books, transportation, and other expenses.
- Relax repayment requirements for low-income individuals and improve existing loan forgiveness programs
- Immediately reverse DeVos’ updated Title IX sexual misconduct rules.
For more details on Biden’s education policy, please refer to these links:
https://joebiden.com/education/
https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/joe-biden-education-policy-2020-presidential-election/
The Academic Credentials Evaluation Institute, Inc. (ACEI), was founded in 1994 and is based in Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACEI provides a number of services that include evaluations of international academic credentials for U.S. educational equivalence, translation, verification, and professional training programs. ACEI is a Charter and Endorsed Member of the Association of International Credential Evaluators. For more information, visit www.acei-global.org