Education System

Life Skills Curriculum

Taxes, contract interpretation, financial literacy, nutrition, firearm safety, and internet hygiene. Essential competencies taught in every school, for every student, regardless of the path they choose after graduation.

Trade School Parity

Vocational programs receive equal funding and equal respect. Electricians, plumbers, machinists, and welders are vital to the economy — they deserve the same institutional investment as four-year degree programs.

Concretely: trade and vocational certifications become eligible for the same federal aid — Pell Grant eligibility and federal loan access — currently reserved for two- and four-year degree programs. A welding certification and a sociology degree draw from the same federal aid pool, on the same terms.

Student Loan Reform — Individualized Caps

Borrowing caps are set individually per student based on projected lifetime return. The calculation: age at enrollment, projected graduation age, career life expectancy of that specific degree, and total projected lifetime earnings. The maximum loan is 10% of projected lifetime earnings.

A 22-year-old nursing student with a 40-year career runway projecting $77,000/year in earnings has a lifetime projection of $3.08 million — and can borrow up to $308,000. A 45-year-old taking on debt for a degree with a 20-year career runway and $40,000/year projection has a cap of $80,000. The math protects students from debt their future income cannot support.

Existing Student Debt — Interest Holiday and Restructuring

The $1.7 trillion in existing student debt requires restructuring — not forgiveness, which is not fiscally or politically achievable. As an immediate bridge measure, the Education Department will implement an interest holiday on all existing student loans for the duration of a Sunset Party presidency. This can be done via administrative action without Congressional approval. Balances stop growing. Existing federal student debt — all $1.7 trillion of it — is converted into income-share agreements. Instead of a fixed principal-and-interest schedule, borrowers pay a set percentage of their income for a defined period. This is not forgiveness — the obligation doesn't disappear — but it ties repayment directly to ability to pay, the same logic already applied to new borrowing under the lifetime-earnings cap above. The infrastructure for this already exists in part: income-driven repayment plans already calculate payments from IRS-verified income data, so the government is not building an income-verification system from scratch — it's extending one that already runs.

One State Already Figured This Out — We're Applying It Nationally

Louisiana's 2012 Early Childhood Education Act — Act 3, passed bipartisanly and signed into law under Governor Bobby Jindal — is one of the most successful state-level education reforms in the country, and it receives far less national attention than it deserves. This platform credits Louisiana directly for what it built, and proposes extending that model to the rest of the country.

Before Act 3, Louisiana's early childhood system was fragmented: childcare, Head Start, and pre-K were governed by different state agencies, held to different standards, measured by different metrics, and funded through disconnected channels. A family navigating those programs encountered three separate accountability systems with no consistent quality benchmarks between them. Act 3 changed that with a single structural reform — moving governance of childcare licensing, federal childcare block grant funding, Head Start coordination, and all three state-funded pre-K programs under the Louisiana Department of Education, with one unified accountability system applied equally across every publicly funded early childhood site in the state.

The results are real and documented. From 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood programs in Louisiana scoring proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) — a nationally recognized measure of teacher-child interaction quality — rose from 62% to 85%. Louisiana K-3 reading scores jumped 10 percentage points in a single year on the state's first universal literacy screener, with 27% more kindergarten students and 14% more first-grade students reading on grade level by year's end. Economically disadvantaged 4th graders improved from 42nd to 11th nationally in reading proficiency between 2019 and 2022. Louisiana went from near-bottom in early childhood outcomes to a nationally recognized model — not through additional spending alone, but through structural unification that made the spending already happening more coherent and more accountable.

This platform's federal position: every state should have the option — and federal funding preference should create a real incentive — to adopt the same unified structure Louisiana built. Childcare, Head Start, and state pre-K programs unified under a single state education agency, held to consistent quality standards, measured by a common accountability system, with outcomes publicly visible. This connects directly to the Child Social Investment Fund established in ARSA elsewhere in this platform — that fund is designed to progressively displace $233 billion in current means-tested, fragmented annual appropriations across exactly these programs (Children's Medicaid/CHIP, school nutrition, Head Start, pre-K, child care). A unified governance structure is what makes that funding coherent rather than fragmented once it arrives: ARSA funds the system; the Louisiana model tells us what the system should look like.

One honest limitation worth naming rather than hiding: Louisiana's model works in part because of sustained local network-building — 65 parish-level Early Childhood Community Networks that include every publicly funded early childhood program in the state. That local infrastructure took years to develop and can't be replicated overnight at the federal level by passing a single bill. The federal role is to set the standard, provide the incentive, and get out of the way of states building it — not to impose a top-down federal structure that bypasses the local capacity-building Louisiana's own experience shows is essential.

Three Changes That Put Learning Back in the Classroom

First: no cell phones during the school day. Not in pockets, not in backpacks, not face-down on desks — secured in a designated storage system from the first bell to the last. New York State mandated exactly this for all K-12 public schools starting fall 2025, requiring bell-to-bell prohibition with secure storage, and explicitly specifying that backpacks do not qualify as compliant storage. This platform supports the same standard federally, tied to federal education funding through Title IV-A (Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants), the same funding lever New York's own guidance anticipates states will use for implementation costs. The research basis is well-established: adolescent access to smartphones during the school day is associated with reduced attention, lower academic performance, and increased anxiety — and the policy is popular, with student, parent, and teacher support across the political spectrum.

Second: backpacks and bags stored outside the classroom. Lake Shore High School in St. Clair Shores, Michigan implemented this in September 2026 alongside its phone-free policy — students store backpacks in lockers before entering classrooms. Harford County, Maryland implemented the same policy for middle and high school students in 2025. The dual rationale is real: it removes a distraction and concealment vector from the classroom, and it changes the physical and psychological environment of the room itself. A classroom without backpacks piled under desks and chairs looks and functions differently. Students aren't rummaging; the space is clear; attention is forward. This is a Sunsetter commitment at the local school board and district level, where these decisions actually live — not a federal mandate, but a standard this platform endorses and encourages districts to adopt.

Third: federally funded color e-readers as textbook replacements for every K-12 student. Textbooks are heavy, expensive, outdated the moment they're printed, and inaccessible to students who can't or don't bring them home. Color e-readers — specifically devices using color E Ink or Kaleido display technology, not tablets — solve all four problems simultaneously: at roughly $150-$300 per device in 2026, they cost less than a single year's textbook budget per student in many districts; they display full-color textbook content with the same readability as a printed page; battery life runs days to weeks rather than hours; and they don't run social media apps, games, or browsers, preserving the distraction-free classroom environment the first two policies establish. The existing federal Open Textbooks Pilot program funds open-licensed textbook development at the college level — this platform extends the same logic to K-12 with a dedicated device funding stream, expanding the program's scope to include both open-licensed digital textbooks formatted for K-12 use and the color e-reader hardware to read them on.

The three policies are designed together, not separately: removing phones and bags from classrooms eliminates distractions, and replacing physical textbooks with e-readers gives students the materials they need without reintroducing the weight, cost, and obsolescence problems that made textbooks a burden in the first place.