U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter will visit Peabody, Mass., Tuesday, Aug. 14, where she will join Rep. John Tierney and Peabody Mayor Edward Bettencourt for a town hall meeting on college affordability and access. During the meeting, she will discuss education reform, the need to make college affordable and accessible for all students, and outline the Obama Administration’s major proposals and how they will impact Massachusetts. A Q&A session will follow her remarks.
The forum is being hosted by Rep. Tierney and will bring together community leaders, students, local educators and other stakeholders.Congressman Tierney, the only New England member of Congress on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, is a leading voice in the effort to strengthen K-12 education and make college more affordable for all families. In recent years, Democrats in Congress, the Obama Administration and the Department of Education have taken substantial steps to ensure all students can access the education they need.
To strengthen education, the Obama Administration has launched innovative programs like Race to the Top, the Investing in Innovation fund, and the Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which encourage educators to use data to enhance their classroom instruction and accelerate student learning. The administration has encouraged the creative use of technology to increase equity and access to high-quality education and is making investments in courageous leadership at the local level to take best practices to scale that are closing achievement gaps and raising the bar for all students.
The administration also is undertaking initiatives to make college more affordable and costs more transparent, as part of a larger effort to achieve the President's national goal to once again lead the world in college completion by 2020.