This journey from my letter of intent late last year to the weekend before Delaware County’s Republican Primary has gone too fast and been so exciting! The past few months I have talked with you about our home towns, our wonderful state, and the best country in the world. More importantly, I’ve heard from so many people from across this county about the many different concerns affecting your lives. Thanks to all of you for giving me a renewd perspective of Ohio and the American Dream.

To sum up my opinions, I’ve put my articles back into bullet points so you can concisely see where I stand on the vital issues touching us all:

• Beth Lear: I grew up in Delaware County, worked my way through Ohio State University, served at the Pentagon during Operation Desert Storm, briefed officials as an Ohio legislative aide, and helped the Buckeye Institute in education and transparency. I am blessed with two great kids and a loving husband of nearly 18 years.
• Lower Taxes: By simplifying our complicated tax brackets for personal incomes, lowering business taxes and fees to attract more jobs to Ohio, eliminating the Estate Tax, and guaranteeing better tax-voter representation, Ohio will race to the top from its current position of 49th in the nation in economic performance.
• Cutting Wasteful Spending: If Ohio stops wasteful spending and begins to cut government back to the size it was 10 to 20 years ago, Ohio will stop seeing businesses
  leave because of the cost of government and need for taxes will fall substantially.  Then our entrepreneurs will receive the benefits from a freer economy, a pillar of the Republican Liberty Caucus platform.
• Protecting Citizens: Following the lead of groups like Family First and Ohio Right to Life I will protect life – born and unborn – and work to create a culture that respects life – old and young, abled and disabled – in Ohio.
• Protecting the Second Amendment: I have always been a gun advocate and will continue to defend our God-given right to protect our families and freedoms. Supporters such as Buckeye Firearms Association will work with me to protect and improve our gun rights.
• Transparency: Every Ohioan deserves to know the facts about what lawmakers and bureaucrats are doing who are spending our tax dollars.  For our government to be of the people, for the people, by the people, the people need to know what’s going on.  And our elected leaders need to be temporary servants, not would-be rulers.
• Education: Ohio is seeing little improvement with its huge spending hikes in education funding and alternatives need to be considered for a better future. Charter schools, vouchers and tax credits all need more attention in the Buckeye State.  We also need freedom from unfunded state mandates, and a serious reduction in the size and responsibilities of the Department of Education whose job can be better handled in large part by our elected state and local school boards.  And if Ohio is serious about improving education and stopping the continued cost increases, we must disentangle ourselves from unbending, costly union contracts.

“Properly educating our children is the most important duty we have in creating a better world. Today’s kids need to become critically-thinking, logical adults to help them become intelligent, free citizens of the greatest country on earth and so they are able to help future generations of Americans advance as well. To do this we need to ease public charter school regulations and expand vouchers and tax credits universally because these forms of education are substantially less expensive and are more likely to produce the best results.” – Beth Lear

Education is the vehicle for future American greatness.

As an Education Analyst at the Buckeye Institute, I studied the relationship between costs and benefits in school districts in Ohio and across the US. Time after time, I found more
money doesn’t solve the problems our schools face each year – the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute agree with me! Education has been hijacked by both bureaucrats and teacher unions and it’s time to stop the failing monopoly our state has and instead provide our children the best tools to succeed in life.

Bureaucratic Blindness from the Nanny State

Too often the Ohio Department of Education, much like the federal Department of Education, approaches the legislature with empty hands, claiming if they had more money then test scores and graduation rates would improve. When faced with accounting for current spending, many point to the poorest districts as models they are forced to follow, even as those models have failed Ohio students for decades. In reality, researchers are finding spending increases only marginally improve student performance – certainly not enough to justify taxing citizens more for meager results.

More Spending Doesn't Mean Better Results

The graph lists national education statistics but we can look at Ohio, where we will spend over $22 billion for our Department of Education and see similarly stagnating results.

Unions Fail Kids

While school boards and teachers have the best of intentions of helping children, teacher unions have impeded our goals and kept our children from advancing at the same rate as the rest of the industrialized world.

Choice Always Helps

If Ohioans are serious about education reform, we need to make education accountable in one of the few natural ways in which most services and businesses succeed: Competition. As we have seen in cities like Dayton and Cleveland, many districts have expanded their educational options to both take pressure off the traditional public system and help students receive a more personalized curriculum.

Drastically reformed public schools: Instead of being handcuffed by state and federal education bureaucrats, we need our schools to have the freedom to give their students skills and knowledge that communitiesneed and approve. If education is brought back to the local level, Ohioans will bring their local talents to the world stage.

Charter Schools: Historically more autonomous than public schools, a charter institution brings in real educational entrepreneurs to help our children. Parents are happier and children are safer in these environments.  And, contrary to the typical union manta that “charters are failing academically” and “charters take money away from public schools”, charter kids are learning at or above the level they were in the district school and charter students leave local tax dollars behind at those schools who have more dollars per student to spread around and still can’t successfully educate kids.  For more information on this fact, please see the report I co-authored with Matthew Carr at the Buckeye Institute, Public Charter Schools: A Great Value for Ohio’s Public Education System.

Private Schools: Not directly publicly funded, this category includes religious and specialty schools that have been around long before the government got involved in teaching children. Many politicians feel these independent schools take money from their education departments, especially with voucher programs, but government needs to understand: all the money they have is not their money!  And, like charter students, voucher students receive a fraction of the dollars that public district students get and receive a better education in spite of that.

After I’m sworn in to the legislature, I will use my experience in education policy to diversify Ohio’s educational options and cut the cost of education by substantially cutting the unfunded mandates with the help of my districts Superintendents, school board members and teachers. The resources at our children’s fingertips should not be limited by bureaucrats in government.