BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Republican Caroleene Dobson and Democrat Shomari Figures agree on the role education plays on workforce development and its economic impact, but diverge on issues of school choice and the federal role in education.
The candidates for Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District shared their views on education with Alabama Daily News, answering questions focused on the federal government’s role, school choice, college options and student debt. Voters in the south Alabama district will decide Tuesday who will represent them in Congress.
Figures views the federal government as essential in protecting students’ civil rights and that it should be driving federal investments to local school systems and state governments. Federal funding should equip local teachers to prepare students for the workforce, he added.
“At the end of the day, public education systems are the number one workforce development program that we have in America,” he said, emphasizing the need for greater investment in public schools.
He is concerned about federal officials setting standards and metrics that schools need to meet.
“I think it’s best left up to states and local governments in terms of educational curriculum and setting and implementing the standards to which they need,” he said.
Dobson said the federal government should play a limited role in both K-12 and higher education, especially regarding how federal education funding is used.
“Our federal taxpayer education dollars need to be supporting our students and compensating our teachers and rewarding our teachers, and not paying for a bunch of high-dollar administrators in Washington, D.C.,” she said.
Education needs more dollars invested at the state and local level, she said.
“We need that funding not in D.C. lining the pockets of bureaucrats, but on the state and local level, to spark innovation when it comes to vocational programs, when it comes to partnerships to allow young people to have the tools that they need to have high-paying 21st-century jobs.”
School choice
Dobson supports school choice. She said students need customized, localized approaches to education to meet the needs of local communities and Alabama’s passage of the CHOOSE Act, which allows families to use public tax dollars to attend private schools or home school starting next year, will give parents the freedom to make good choices.
“There are too many students that are trapped in failing schools,” she said. “What the CHOOSE Act does is ensure that parents in the lowest income brackets now have the opportunity and the agency and are equipped with funding to provide more options for their children. Again, whether that is different public school alternatives, charter schools, private schools, home schooling or supplemental education and tutoring.”
Dobson said parents should “be in the driver’s seat” and should be the ones to make sure their children have what they need to succeed in successful careers and to provide for their own families.
Figures said the CHOOSE Act will hurt public schools and in turn, hurt Alabama’s economy.
“What we’ve seen is, everywhere (education savings accounts are) implemented, it costs more than they project,” he said. State lawmakers have allocated $100 million for ESAs in 2025 and each year thereafter, with the understanding that the annual amount allocated could go up in the future.
“The reality of it is: That’s going to cost jobs, that’s going to cost schools, that’s going to cause schools to close – certainly threaten it. That’s going to decrease the ability of our public school systems to be able to recruit and retain the best possible teachers they can. That’s going to ultimately harm our economy,” he said.
Public schools will continue to educate the majority of students, he added.
“Which means that we are divesting from our largest educational asset, which just makes no sense.”
In the United States, K-12 education is seen as a state responsibility both in funding and setting academic standards. Local boards of education are responsible for the day-to-day operations. In Alabama, the state provides the majority of funding for K-12 schools, but federal tax dollars add up.
Prior to the 2020-21 school year, when Alabama began receiving $3 billion in federal pandemic relief funding, federal tax dollars accounted for about 14% of all K-12 spending. At the school level, though, federal funding can account for as much half of the total dollars spent at the school.
The bulk of federal K-12 funding supplements education for children with disabilities and children in poverty.
Before the pandemic, federal funding accounted for one of every five dollars spent on students in 300 schools. By the 2022-23 school year, the number of schools receiving 20% or more of their total student funding ballooned to 743 schools – more than half of all public schools in the state.
Funding for higher education is a blend of federal student grants and loans, research grants, student-paid tuition and state funding.
The cost of higher education
While the candidates agreed that the cost of college is too high, they had different views on how to address it.
Figures said student debt should be forgiven for certain occupations.
“People that work in public service positions, they don’t go in there to get rich,” he said. And student loan forgiveness could be leveraged to attract health care workers, including doctors, to areas in need.
“They save the government money,” he said. “They do much more than the cost of their degree because they are dealing with the problems of society.”
A program similar to the one Figures describes, called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, allows student loans to be forgiven after 10 years of public service work for an eligible employer and the equivalent of 120 payments are made on the loan. The PSLF program, created by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2007, had been criticized for denying 98% of applicants, and only 7,000 student loans had been forgiven through September 2021. The Biden Administration is credited with working through problems with the system that processed PSLF applications and has now forgiven more than a million loans totaling $74 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In Alabama, more than 15,200 student loans have been forgiven through the PSLF program since Oct. 1, 2021, totaling $1.2 billion.
Figures said the federal government has an “obligation” and a “vested interest” and needs to do “everything that it can” to contain the cost of higher education. “The more we keep that cost under wraps, under control, that’s less money that the federal government is guaranteeing in the form of student loans,” he said.
“… If we don’t control the cost of education, we know what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s going to become accessible to fewer and fewer people, and demographically, that’s going to look like people who come from better financial backgrounds. It’s going to look like people who come from less diverse backgrounds. It’s going to look like people who don’t come from many of our rural areas.”
Dobson said Americans have “sticker shock” when it comes to the cost of college and that she’s seen college tuition double since she graduated 15 years ago. She doesn’t want to see the federal government over-regulate college costs or try to control pricing. “(That) can actually have the opposite effect and not lower costs.”
Federal funding for post-secondary education should be more equally spread among college and non-college routes, she said.
“Currently, about 20% of federal education dollars used in the post-secondary space are dedicated to non-college routes,” she said. “I think that needs to be increased so that we are prepared — whether that’s technical college, whether that’s on-the-job training, whether that’s vocational programs.”
“The truth is we need a prepared workforce and for some of that workforce college is the appropriate route for preparing them,” Dobson said. But there are high-paying jobs that don’t require a college education, she added.
She would like to see institutes of higher education held accountable for their graduates’ employment outcomes possibly through a type of incentive program.
On whether the federal government should pay off student debt, Dobson said no.
“It is unfair to make all American taxpayers pay for students’ loans when not all Americans have the opportunity to go to college,” she said.