Last Updated: September 01, 2026
The Equal Opportunity in Education Act
A modern economy runs on skilled people, and every rung of the education ladder — Pre-K through college — is an investment in national productivity. But the ladder of opportunity that lets every child rise as far as their talents and hard work will take them has broken rungs: wealthy districts spend $20K per student while poor districts spend $8K, college costs have exploded while wages stagnated, and student debt crushes young Americans before they even start their careers. It’s time to restore educational opportunity for all.
What it includes:
- Universal Pre-K for all 3-4 year olds
- Free, high-quality pre-kindergarten nationwide
- Proven ROI: $7 return for every $1 invested (better earnings, less crime, healthier adults)
- Oklahoma and Georgia models show this works
- Cost: $75-100B annually
- Free tuition at all public colleges and universities
- If you get in, you can afford to go
- Covers tuition at public institutions (not private colleges)
- Precedent: GI Bill, California Master Plan (free through 1970s)
- Cost: $75-100B annually
- K-12 Funding Equalization
- Federal grants to states that adopt equitable funding formulas
- Ensure every school meets minimum per-pupil spending regardless of local property values
- “Separate and unequal” persists 70 years after Brown v. Board—time to finish the job
- Cost: $150B annually
- Testing That Helps Instead of Punishes
- Keep testing—it’s how we find out which schools are being shortchanged
- But stop using scores to close schools, cut their funding, or fire teachers
- That’s what No Child Left Behind did, and schools responded by dropping art, music, history, and science to drill for the test—worst of all in the poorest schools
- Australia tests its students too, without attaching those penalties, and didn’t lose the rest of the curriculum
- Schools report how much time they spend on each subject, so narrowing shows up instead of happening quietly
- Every student keeps access to art, music, civics, history, science, and PE—these can’t be quietly stripped from struggling schools to make room for test prep
- Washington does not pick your curriculum. States decide what’s taught and teachers decide how to teach it; this only stops the subjects from being cut
- Cost: nothing—it’s a rule about how results may be used
- Student Debt: Fix the System, Cancel the Fraud
- If a school lied to you about jobs or accreditation, or shut down while you were enrolled, your loans go away — automatically, without you having to prove it one borrower at a time
- Same if a loan servicer’s mistake cost you interest or wiped out forgiveness credit you had earned
- What this is not: a blanket write-off for everyone who borrowed. That would help one group of people and charge everyone else — including those who already paid, and those who never went
- What fixes it going forward: no-interest federal loans, the right to discharge student debt in bankruptcy again, payments capped at 5% of discretionary income, expanded public service forgiveness, and shutting off federal money to colleges whose graduates can’t repay
- 45 million Americans owe $1.7 trillion. The answer is to stop the machine that built it, and pay back the people it defrauded
- Media Literacy Curriculum
- Federal grants for states to teach the specific habits that actually work, not vague “critical thinking”
- The main one: when you hit an unfamiliar source, open a second tab and see what independent sources say about it. That’s what professional fact-checkers do, and it can be taught in an afternoon
- Also: how to spot the standard manipulation moves—fake experts, false either/or choices, blaming a scapegoat, pretending to be someone else
- Non-partisan by design, not just by promise: none of this asks anyone to give up a political position, which is exactly why it works across the spectrum when arguing about facts doesn’t
- Programs get measured on whether people get better at telling true from false—not just more suspicious of everything—and lose funding if they can’t show it
- Cost: $5-10B annually
- Crack Down on For-Profit College Fraud
- Restore “gainful employment” rules: Colleges must show graduates earn enough to repay loans
- Cut federal funding to institutions with high debt, low earnings outcomes
- Prosecute fraud aggressively (Trump University, Corinthian Colleges precedent)
What this means for you:
- Every child gets quality early education
- College admission = college affordability
- No more choosing between education and crippling debt
- Schools funded by student need, not neighborhood wealth
- Young people graduate ready to participate in democracy
Why this is federal responsibility:
- Equal Protection Clause requires equal educational opportunity
- Federal government can condition funding on equity requirements
- Student loan system is already federal; can be reformed
- Commerce Clause: Education affects interstate economy
Connection to democracy:
- Informed citizenry requires quality education
- Civic knowledge at all-time lows (only 13% of 8th graders proficient in U.S. history)
- Media literacy essential to resist misinformation and demagoguery
- Economic opportunity reduces anti-democratic populism