During a town hall meeting on November 7, 2015, Clinton expressed her support for public schools and discussed the role of charter schools. She said, “I have for many years now, about 30 years, supported the idea of charter schools, but not as a substitute for the public schools, but as a supplement for the public schools. Some of the issues she brought up was the fact that charter schools do not usually take the hardest-to-teach-kids, or they do not keep them. Therefore, the public schools are left in a situation with limited resources and support that they need to take care of every students individual academic needs. Therefore, Clinton’s stance is that every parents should be able to exercise choice within the public school system — not outside of it — but within it because I (Clinton) am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity.
In a statement released released October 24, 2015, Clinton voiced support for the Obama administration’s plan to eliminate unnecessary standardized testing. Clinton stated that, While testing can provide communities with full information about how our students are doing and help us determine whether we have achievement gaps, we can and must do better. We should be ruthless in looking at tests and eliminating them if they do not actually help us move our kids forward.
In March 2007, Clinton criticized the No Child Left Behind Act. She said, “While the children are getting good at filling in all those little bubbles, what exactly are they really learning? How much creativity are we losing? How much of our children’s passion is being killed?” Clinton “called for universal preschool, higher teacher salaries and schools that emphasize self-discipline and respect, not just test scores. Clinton also criticized what she described as the outsourcing of tutoring and other services to private companies,” according to the Concord Monitor.