Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware has ranked among the worst public school systems in the country in terms of proficiency levels for elementary and middle school students, raising concerns from leaders statewide. A recent legal settlement on equitable educational opportunity has also put school funding in the crosshairs.
The state of public education in Delaware has not been so troublesome in years, but post-COVID declines in student proficiency rates, the re-balancing of school budgets following a transformational lawsuit on education equity, and the continued growth of the state’s charter school network will make the topic one of the top priorities for the next governor.
We asked the candidates for their opinions on several hot topics in public education, and the three Democrats – Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer and former chief environmental regulator Collin O’Mara – responded directly to our questions, while Republicans Mike Ramone, Jerry Price and Bobby Williamson did not. We have compiled their relevant comments from other interviews on the campaign trail.
Below you’ll find abridged versions of each candidate’s answers. They are ordered alphabetically by last name.
Do you have a plan to address the low proficiency scores seen by Delaware public school students in recent years?
Hall-Long
A student’s ability to show up to school ready to learn is directly impacted by their physical and behavioral health and the societal conditions in which they live. We have to tackle the external issues affecting Delaware students, whether it’s the mental health crisis, food insecurity, housing, physical and emotional trauma, or other factors. They all have an adverse impact on our children, and their effects don’t stop at the school doors.
I will work to provide universal free breakfast and lunch for all public school students; address student behavioral health challenges by fully funding mental health professionals in schools and strengthen the pipeline of these essential education professionals; invest in school-based wellness centers and wraparound services in schools; and ensure all students have access to social-emotional learning programs in schools.
As lieutenant governor, I launched the Basic Needs Closet, a public-private partnership that provides free hygiene products and school supplies for students in more than 35 high-need schools across our state. I will expand this program to reach thousands more children.
We can have world-class schools with unlimited resources, but we must work to resolve these problems so our children can fully realize their potential.
Meyer
There are many extraordinary district leaders, school leaders and educators working many overtime hours across our state. But the outcomes are not what they should be. It is our failure, a failure of leadership, that I will seek to address as governor.
We must ensure that all Delaware children read at grade level by third grade.
Third-grade reading levels are particularly important because children who can’t read well by that grade are four times more likely to drop out of school than their peers who can read proficiently.
The Seaford School District is the only high-poverty district in Delaware where, in 2022, students finished their third-grade year performing above standards on the Smarter Balanced exam and then, as fourth graders in 2023, grew more than a full academic year. How did they do it?
By following the science of reading and creating consistency across all aspects of teaching and learning — using high-quality curricula matched to student assessments, and training teachers in how to use both well. They combine grade-level reading and writing into one daily block that sticks to grade-level texts, even for students who are behind, providing supportive instruction where needed. To help students who might be struggling with grade-level text, a teacher and the entire class read the text aloud together, a technique known as choral reading, with a clear focus.
As governor, I will:
● Embed scientifically-based reading instruction in school curricula and hold programs accountable for literacy outcomes.
● Include scientifically-based reading instruction in the teacher certification process, specifically for elementary school certification. By 2015, 14 states required some form of a reading instruction assessment for teacher certification. Delaware should join them.
● Require pre-service teachers seeking certification to pass a Foundations of Reading assessment, as states like Ohio, Arkansas, and Connecticut do.
O’Mara
To improve proficiency in reading and math, we need to revolutionize 0-5 early childhood development and continue that progress throughout our public schools.
This starts with improved maternal health services, higher quality and more affordable childcare, and lifting children out of poverty through a refundable Child Tax Credit and an improved Earned Income Tax Credit.
We must also enact universal pre-K to ensure every child is receives high quality instruction and socioemotional support, so they’re prepared for kindergarten.
We must also faithfully implement the child literacy legislation developed by State Sen. Laura Sturgeon to ensure evidence based reading instruction based upon the best available science, including using phonics instruction that ensures that all students can recognize the graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) – and ensure that all future educators are trained in these techniques.
Studies are also clear that providing free breakfast and lunch for all students increasing their focus and retention in the classroom and reduces behavioral challenges, all of which improve academic achievement and learning conditions.
Similarly, providing wrap-around services for physical and mental health are essential.
We must also support our educators, because improving educator working conditions, improves student learning conditions. This includes ensuring competitive pay for all educators, restoring teacher autonomy, improving classroom ratios to reflect student needs, and ensuring sufficient time for lesson planning. By doing all of these things, we can ensure that every student has the opportunity to read and perform math at grade-level.
Price
A lot of this comes down to the family structure. When you go out to eat, everybody’s on their cell phones. At home, maybe the father isn’t there.
I was raised by my mother. She raised three boys, who all became police officers, but family structure has to be the start of it. And I don’t know how to get this done. I can’t tell somebody that you have to take care of your kid. They should know that they should sit down with their homework, and that’s where a lot of the problem begins, and with feeding their kids.
I want to make school breakfast and school free, and we do have money in the budget for that, they need a healthy meal.
Ramone
We have to reconfigure how we fund the educational environment to get more money in the classroom.
Unless you have more money in the classroom with the teachers and the children, unless the children are going to schools that are feeling good and full and not falling apart and empty, unless we are paying teachers and maybe creating performance-based incentives for those teachers to be great teachers and stay in three classrooms, until we start to understand social promotion is a failure, until we enable those children who are in the most deprived portions of our of our state the ability to go to a school that is being successful and not one that has 3% reading and 4% math results, [we won’t be successful].
It’s just wrong. We have to do better. We have to reconfigure the way we do education. We need to be bold and let me just say again: This problem didn’t happen last year. It’s been around for a long time. There’s a lot of band aids. We throw money and band aids like they’re nothing.
We need to start resolving solving problems with good results.
Williamson
My incentives to do better teaching in the schools would be to accept the value system of the individual child, whether that is charter schools, trade schools, etc. Whichever schools is going to do the best for that child’s education and career path.
Of course, they need to learn the basic skills. They need to learn more than the basic skills. They need to learn the histories, the sciences and also how to cover basic living needs. Some of our kids now don’t know how to balance a checkbook.
We need to know the basics so we understand what the digital world is giving us. That way we know whether or not it’s accurate or not.
We need to do these things and to allow the teachers to be used as a resource and to get new skills, so that they can get better pay. We also need to watch administration costs to find efficiency and avoid officials just collecting a big paycheck.
Do you believe Delaware spends enough money on its public education system?
Hall-Long
The better question is whether we are investing our dollars strategically into improving our education system. We can invest more heavily into education, but it must be done in a manner that will improve outcomes for children and ensure all Delaware students can get a quality education, no matter their ZIP code.
We must invest in our educators, to ensure we are recruiting and retaining quality educators, and then incentivizing placing them to work in high-needs schools where they can have the biggest impact.
Improving Delaware’s highest need schools requires us to bring our most experienced educators to them. We can do this by incentivizing educators to work at these schools and ensuring they have the resources and supports to meet their students’ needs.
Meyer
We must invest more in Delaware’s public education system and distribute resources more equitably, according to student needs, to support low-income students, students with disabilities, and English language learners. The current funding system, known as unit count, is archaic and was established in the 1940s. This is not just about doing obscure budget math. This is a moral imperative.
As governor, I will:
● Increase investment in Delaware’s public education system, consistent with the AIR study. Funding cannot change overnight but must increase with urgency. Educational equity is fundamental to an equal and just society.
● Better align our state’s funding system with the AIR report’s recommendation of an additional increase of $3,400 to $6,400 per pupil. Several states have either exceeded or met these funding benchmarks.
● Create greater transparency. The existing system comprises multiple formulas, each distributing different staffing positions or funding allocations primarily through a unit system that is hard to convert into dollars of funding. I will implement a weighted funding formula based on dollars instead of positions, in order to provide greater funding transparency to all Delawareans, including policymakers, school administrators, teachers, and families.
● Address local capacity and tackle tax inequity. The state’s effective tax rates vary substantially amongst school districts, with some shouldering tax rates almost four times higher than others. A formula considering both state and local revenue, generating target funding levels for each district or school, will contribute to balancing local capacity. This will ensure fair funding levels, accounting for both state and local revenue variations, ultimately fostering educational equity across the state.
● Increase school impact fees for new development. The state charges fees on new residential developments that enable the local school district to accommodate the resulting increased student population. Because such fees are insufficient, districts in our state with rapid population growth more frequently hold referenda.
O’Mara
Delaware does not spend enough money on its traditional public education system and the most important job of the next governor will be to increase funding significantly and equitably by $600 million to $1 billion, as recommended in the Assessment of Delaware Public School Funding report.
While there is incredible inefficiency and duplication in administrative bureaucracy that must be reduced among the 19 school districts and the ever-growing Department of Education, the reality is that while we must reduce administrative overhead by a few hundred million dollars, we will still need to increase funding substantially.
I fully support the recommendations to ensure that students experiencing poverty, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities have equitable access to resources. I believe that we can do this through a blended formula that keeps the unit count as base funding, so schools have the predictable funding necessary for teaching and support positions, while at the same time creating a new transparent foundation formula to equitably distribute additional needs-based funding above and beyond the unit count funding.
I don’t believe that the current Opportunity Fund is the best model, because so much of the money has gone toward consultants and planning documents, rather than direct support for educators and students in the classroom.
Price
When we talk with educational funding, we’ve got to understand first that not everything is bad. But I can’t promise everybody, everything. That that would just be a lie.
There’s always a way to change stuff for the better. We’ve got to sit down with the Finance Committee and get it down to the penny to see what we could do this year.
Ramone
We’re what are we third or fourth in spending? And we’re like, what third or fourth from the bottom in results? Spending doesn’t actually affect results. Results are affected by very smart, concise environments that are set up to guarantee success. We set up environments that more guarantee failure.
My vision in business is if it works, make a very gentle, very planned growth pattern that you can then keep adding more and more. And if it doesn’t work, close it.
The biggest problem in education today is the way we do funding. We are the most complicated funding mechanism in the nation.
A lot of other states use weighted funding to make sure that when it gets to where it’s supposed to go. I would tie funding with autonomy, and I would do it at the school level. I would give a principal the ability to have the funding and the support to be able to run his or her school in a successful way.
Williamson
My vision would be to have the allotment per child to where the parent and a child can work together to decide the future career of the child and what their goals are, and then have proper schools, whether it be charter schools, private schools or public schools, or any trade school or specialty science school.
I believe that’s going to make it more of a free enterprise system on schools, which will make some schools, especially the public schools, have to step up if they want to retain the students, and also to give incentives.
Schools need to let the teachers do more of what the teachers are good at, which is teaching, and stop restricting them down on all these bureaucratic things that distract them from actually educating our children. If they do that it will also help raise the income for our teachers, because the teachers are well underpaid.
And we have so many administrators with high-dollar salaries that we need to maybe eliminate.
Do you believe that Delaware needs to enact universal pre-K? If so, do you have a plan to pay for it?
Hall-Long
In the Hall-Long Administration, passing and implementing universal childcare is a top priority. As lieutenant governor, I chaired the Delaware Office of Early Learning Advisory Committee, which released a report in 2023 that will serve as a guideline for implementing universal childcare.
During a child’s first 1,825 days, 90% of their brain is developed. High-quality early childhood education has long-term benefits such as improved cognitive and social-emotional outcomes, better employment prospects, and enhanced health.
Universal childcare will be a massive boost to our economy, increasing equity and results in our public education system. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Delaware had 33,000 job openings in February 2024. Around 67% of Delaware’s parents are in the workforce. Studies show that there are a lot of parents who are staying at home with their children due to the cost of childcare.
O’Mara
Yes, one of primary reasons why more than half of fourth graders cannot read at grade-level is that only 7% of our students attend pre-K. We should ensure that every 3 and 4-year-old has the opportunity to attend pre-K by the beginning of the 2027-2028 school year (ramping up over three years). It’s estimated that universal ore-K will cost $130 million annually. Of the revenue options currently on the table, the property reassessment that is finally nearly completion represents the most equitable way to
fund a large portion of the needed increase and ensure that it’s adaptive to meet future needs.
Equalizing property tax rates statewide could fully fund pre-K and a large portion of the equitable funding needs. There are also other ways to raise revenues, such as increasing and dedicating excise taxes for cigarettes, vaping, and alcohol where our rates are incredibly low compared to many other states and we could also dedicate the anticipated $30 million to $50 million from marijuana revenues.
Meyer
As governor, I will provide universal access to pre-K throughout the state by the end of my first term.
I will also:
● Expand home-visiting nursing programs to every first-time expectant mother in poverty in Delaware, starting in pregnancy through the child’s second birthday.
● Make affordable, high-quality childcare and early childhood education accessible to all parents. At present, 47% of the state’s population under 5 live in Sussex and Kent County, while only 38% of programs are available in these counties.
● Prioritize the growth and support of professional development opportunities for those working with children in early childhood settings. I will ensure that we recognize the value of the work undertaken by early childhood education professionals by providing wage increases, job training opportunities, degree completion funding, and accessible mental health support.
Has the growth of charter schools impacted traditional public schools negatively or positively?
Hall-Long
Charter schools have been part of Delaware’s educational system for decades.
Thousands of students attend these publicly funded schools, and families seek out these schools for their children. They are interwoven into our system. Our goal should be improving the quality of education at all schools, striving to provide the best possible services to students, regardless of ZIP code.
O’Mara
I am unabashedly pro-traditional public schools and am a traditional public school parent myself. While some charter schools have provided incredible opportunities for some students, the economics are clear that the rise of charter schools has reduced the resources available for traditional public schools, since resources follow the students attending charter schools.
This has been exacerbated by charter school assessment exams and geographic boundaries and transportation requirements to take advantage of school choice, which combined have prevented many students from accessing the opportunities beyond the school for which they are zoned.
While no one should be forced to remain in an underperforming school, the reality is the students in traditional public schools are experiencing higher rates of poverty, are more likely to be multilingual learners, and more likely to have special needs — and we effectively reduced the funding for our students in traditional public schools while continuing to operate under an inequitable 1940s funding formula.
This is why we need transformational change, including equitable funding levels and a new funding formula, regionally competitive pay for all educators, improved student to teacher ratios based upon student needs, restoration of teacher autonomy, provision of universal free school meals and full wrap-around services.
Meyer
Every Delaware child deserves the opportunity to get the highest quality K-12 education.
Every Delaware family deserves the opportunity to send their children to a safe, high-quality school. Every Delaware teacher deserves to serve our children in a safe, high-quality workplace. And every Delaware company deserves to have a ready pool of Delaware graduates, well-prepared to enter the 21st century workforce.
There are traditional public schools that are doing extraordinary and inspirational work educating our students. There are charter schools doing extraordinary and inspirational work educating our students.
Charter schools that set admission criteria – geographically or otherwise – that serve to exclude certain demographics do impact traditional public schools negatively. We need to work collaboratively to improve the quality of public education for all of Delaware’s children and to improve the equality of public education for all of Delaware’s children.
