Issue Position: K -- 12 Education

Issue Position

The best investment we can make in America's future is to upgrade our public education system. The next generation not only needs to compete nationally, but globally, so we can continue to thrive in the global arena.

Many politicians talk about how California is 42nd in spending per capita on educating our students and promising to do something about it. Now, I'm going to say something that may not make me popular: Throwing more money at a problem in a system that is not working will not fix our education challenges. We need to investigate real reform in education so that our kids get the quality education they truly deserve and need to succeed in life. Here are some questions I will ask and seek answers to if I am elected to represent you in the State Assembly:

Would it benefit our families and students to have more local control over programs and funding designed to address local needs -- rather than have all education decisions come from the Department of Education bureaucracy in Sacramento?
What should we do to encourage creativity in learning and thinking amongst our students -- as opposed to our current system of evaluating student performance which is hyper-focused on test scores which cannot fully measure a student's capability to learn?
With regard to teachers, all families have experienced, like in any profession, that there are great teachers in our public schools and also not-so-great teachers. Our students are in school in the care of our teachers 7 hours, five days a week. Should we be doing more to acknowledge teachers that excel (not determined via test scores) at teaching our children and less for those who don't?
I am an advocate for charter schools in regions where they are requested as a way to better "tailor" education to the needs of a community's students. Charter schools must adhere to the same high standards as required in all our public schools. Where I live, we have an excellent charter school where its students and families are happy with the quality of education and interesting new programming that takes place there. Is there more we can do to assist communities that would like to investigate the option of creating a new charter school?
What can we do to pool resources to create more modern regionalized school facilities for our students -- facilities that house state-of-the-art technology and teach skills that students need to learn (industrial, computer and otherwise) -- regardless of whether they are college-bound or not?
How can we tap California's brightest minds (we have many resources) to brainstorm new ways to make a bigger difference in learning in our K-12 public schools?

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