Visit Educators for Seals and Students for Seals

Education

It has been said that at the starting line of life, everyone deserves an equal opportunity.  Our education system needs to reflect that aspiration.  From early education to adult education, we need to make changes in order to ensure that more Americans are able to compete in the international marketplace.

Dan Seals began his career as a teacher in Japan and continues to teach at Northwestern University because education is important to him.  Every American student deserves a high quality education in a safe environment. Every teacher deserves support, respect, and resources. Every school must be able to properly prepare its students for today’s economy.

This isn’t just the right thing to do—it is the smart thing to do as well.  Investments made today in both our public schools and in our institutions of higher education will ensure America succeeds in this globally competitive environment.

Investing in Early Education

Study after study has shown that Head Start is an effective tool for helping children—especially poor children—to get off on the right foot and reduce the achievement gap that forms over time. For every dollar we put into Head Start programs, experts estimate our society gets $9 of benefit. Increased funding to this program is a winning issue for our country and our children.  Therefore, Dan’s goal is to make Head Start universally available.  In the interim, we can increase the bang for the buck this program creates by ensuring Head Start teachers meet higher education standards and Head Start administrative staff have more stable funding streams to guarantee continuity for Head Start students.

Overhauling No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act

NCLB began with good intentions aimed at increased accountability, but has failed to achieve those ends. Dan proposes three major changes to the law.

First, NCLB has to be fully funded. NCLB has not lived up to its obligations to fund school districts, but then penalizes those districts for not living up to unrealistic standards. Second, we need increased flexibility of standards to account for different subgroups (such as ESL or Special Needs students) within each school, rather than treat all students as identical. Third, we need a more comprehensive way of measuring progress. An overemphasis on test-taking forces teachers to teach to the test, which isn’t the same as teaching. By reforming this act, we can make schools more accountable and effective in the interest of creating a better educational system.

Helping Teachers Earn More

Dan believes we need to make teaching a more desirable career for our nation’s best and brightest, while also working to see that every school has access to the best teachers available. One way to encourage more Americans to teach is to tie their pay to their performance.  The Teacher Incentive Fund managed by the U.S. Department of Education supports performance-based compensation incentives for teachers and administrators working in at-risk settings.  This is a program we should support.

Making Higher Education More Accessible and Affordable

A college diploma today is what a high school diploma was for our nation’s previous generation. It is a requirement to fully participate in today’s global economy and can be the key to a better life. Yet, over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100%, from $7,857 in 1977-1978 to $15,665 in 2007-2008, while median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18% over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of income.

Paying for college has become exceedingly difficult at best and untenable at worst. Simply to ensure that a child attends a four-year public university, a family in the country’s lowest-income bracket now has to pay, on average, 55% of total income (up from 39% in 2000); for a middle-income family, the average is 25% (up from 18% in 2000); and for an upper-income family, 9% (up from 7%).

Not surprisingly, student debt has become an issue as well. Today, the average debt of students graduating from college with loans in 2008 was $23,200— an increase of nearly 25 percent, or $4,550, when compared with those who graduated just four years earlier.  Public college loan debt: $20,200, Private non-profits, $27,650, For-profit schools: $33,050.  Dan recognizes the need for our nation to return to making long-term investments in education–shifting from high-interest loans to grants–to ease the financial burden placed on students.

While our tax code is meant to make it easier for our children to go to college, it offers too much complexity and not enough help. Many families face confusion when deciding to send their children to college. The IRS 970 booklet, which outlines tax benefits for education, is over 80 pages in length and details 12 different higher education tax benefits, which apply to different income levels, expenses, and kinds of schools. As a result of this complexity, the Government Accounting Office estimates that over 600,000 tax filers every year fail to claim higher education tax benefits they are entitled to.

That is why Dan has proposed collapsing all of the different higher education tax incentives into one, easy-to-understand $3,000 tax credit, which would cover half of the cost of tuition at the average public university. He has advocated for expanding access to the credit to more middle class families by making it available to individuals making up to $80,000, and married couples making up to $160,000. Also, under the current law, families who have no income tax liability—nearly half of all families with children—are not eligible for the available tax credits. Seals’ proposal would benefit these families for the first time by making the credit partially refundable.

Dan also supports shifting resources from loans to Pell Grants where possible.  This will help reduce the crushing debt that can break a young career before it even gets started.

Strengthening Adult Education

In a knowledge-based economy, education can no longer be something that we only do in the first quarter of our lives. To stay competitive, today’s workforce needs to have a way to sharpen its skills or add new ones. A strong network of community colleges can do just that.  This is why Dan strongly supports plans to refurbish community colleges across the country.  This will allow American adults a chance to learn new job skills and earn higher paying, more secure jobs.  Dan also supports the expansion of state programs helping qualified community college students the ability and financial assistance to transfer to a 4-year program.

See Videos of Dan at the Media Center