Candidate for
Governing Board Member; Liberty Union High School District

Standards and Benchmarks

The State's new emphasis on Standards and Benchmarks is a welcomed developement. This is a program which can be used to propel California students to top of the list of best educated students both in the country and in the world. As a leader in educational reform I had been calling for much of the legislation that has recently been enacted including ; class size reduction , uniform statewide standards , high school graduation requirements , re emphasizing phonics as a method of teaching reading . If we are to move foward and improve our children's educational standing in the world community many more things must be done.

We need to have more local control of program. Every community is different and has different needs. The state needs to set Uniform Standards and then give school districts unencumbered funding and the freedom to develope programs that meet the standards and the communities needs.

Test scores have become the focus and measure of success. It is unfair to tell a student who has gone through 8 years of an academic career unheld by standards, that promotion hinges on their meeting these standards without the Math and Science backgrounds needed to do so. The politicians in Sacramento need to be convinced that this is a long term program . It can only be successful by implementing standards and benchmarks , year by year ,starting in the lowest grades and expanding upward as children progress.

Someplace , somebody , decided that to improve our educational ranking we must prepare each and every student in California for a university career. Many of out students will leave high school and become productive adult members of our society without going to college. We need to prepare those students as well. A new emphasis must be made in the area of Vocational and Technical Education as well as offering the kinds of math , science and language programs that will allow our children to enter into the adult world prepared for a successful life.

As we increasingly demand higher preformance from our students and teachers classroom behavior becomes more and more important. Each time a teacher interupts a lesson to repremand a student is time stolen from the rest of the class. Well behaved students also have the right to an education. We need to work to empower the classroom teachers ability to remove a student who is consistently disruptive.

Finally it should be noted that our society went from horse and buggy to walking on the moon in under 70 years ,mostly on the backbone of public education. We still have energetic students and devoted teachers. We are back on the road to success . We need candiates who will keep us on that road. I am that candidate.