Education

Marina Kats is determined to bring excellence in education back to our local schools. This will not be accomplished by simply putting more money into stagnant public education systems. A fundamental shift in education must occur though competition at all levels.

Marina personally knows and understands from her own life experiences how priceless a good education is to our children. A quality education goes hand-in-hand with the ultimate economic self-sufficiency of an individual, their long range quality of life, and even one’s overall health throughout the course their lifetime. The quality of an American education has slipped in recent years due to many factors including: popular cultural phenomena such as the ever increasing acceptance, availability, and use of mind altering substances such as marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs amongst public school-aged children; the failure or inability of local school districts to maintain and enforce standards of excellence for their teaching staff; contractual requirements of teachers’ unions; agenda driven education policies; and a failure by adults to instill in our children at an early age the true value of an education all of which leads to a general attitude of indifference towards their schoolwork by too many of our young people.

Marina has a first-hand understanding of the education issues facing parents and their children today as she is raising two school-aged daughters of her own. She also knows that the efforts by so many parents to pass-on a value system of high moral standards and ethics to their own children are far too often thwarted once the children enter our public school systems.

For these reasons Marina Kats fervently supports the concept of school choice whereby parents are given more control over their children’s education. Parents and their children should be given the opportunity to select a school of their own preference, one that is in keeping with their own values and expectations of a high quality education. In conjunction with a viable school choice program Marina will also support tax credits and deductions for expenses related to schooling- including home schooling expenses, and school vouchers to attend nonpublic schools. While it is often argued that school choice is an expensive option, the reality is that privately run schools typically operate at a cost between 25% and 50% of a publically run education system and produces better-quality graduates. Competition is the cornerstone of our free market society; it is what is responsible for the prices of all goods and services. It forces the suppliers of these goods and service to produce the highest quality products at the lowest cost to the consumer. By giving parents a choice of schools we also force competition amongst the various education systems available for a child to attend. Such competition will break up and drain the stagnant pools of the uninspired and unaccountable; this will force inefficient ineffective school systems to either drastically improve their standards or face their own demise at the hands of better and more efficient education systems.

Marina also wants to see the education systems evaluated for effectiveness and efficiency in education. Those educators who don’t perform must be shown the door and those systems that fail to produce must be overhauled. A system of genuine accountability must be implemented. One’s job security and career track must be directly linked to one’s ability to effectively educate our children. The low expectations and standards that have become the norm in so many schools cannot be allowed to continue; the future of our nation and the viability of our local economy acutely depends upon having a highly educated population that is able to comprehend and address a universe of increasingly complex issues. We must also be able to compete against the ever increasing educational standards of the international community, many of whom are our sworn enemies.

Marina also strongly believes that English should be the official language of the United States of America and therefore every child graduating from a high school in our country must be proficient in the English language before receiving his or her diploma.