Quality teachers in all subjects are essential to excellence in education. Each of us can name a teacher that really made a difference in our life. Mark's 11th grade bookkeeping teacher was not one. He told him he would have to hire someone else to do his taxes. Luckily, Mark had excellent teachers like Mr. Monical and Mrs. Loken who challenged him to excel, so that as a CPA, other people hired him to do their taxes. These excellent teachers deserve to be rewarded. We want to keep them in teaching. Mark wants to pay them more. Yet an overly bureaucratic system insists on maintaining an outdated, unfair pay structure. It can’t just be about who has been there the longest. We must give better pay for our better teachers so our children get a better education.

To better prepare our kids, Mark supported a major brand new grant program for low-income college students who take to rigorous math and science in high school, and for college juniors and seniors who are pursuing majors in the science, mathematics or engineering. He has also promoted efforts to create paths for non-traditional students to prepare for the rewarding technology careers of tomorrow, worked to help current math and science teachers upgrade their skills and to recruit top graduates to teaching.

Mark believes that raising standards, rewarding excellence and demanding accountability gets results in education. And with a dad who was on the school board and a wife who was a teacher, he also believes that the decisions about educating our kids need to be made by people who know their names – parents, teachers, and local school board members – not by Washington bureaucrats.