Candidate for
Board Member; Grossmont Union High School District

I've chosen to use this page to focus more on my Educational Philosophy then my political philosophy.

The following are excerpts from various authors, of whom, I subscribe. This is merely one aspect of my philosophy and I believe a good place to start.

Parents "create" the thirst for knowledge in their children yet they are paradoxically sponges that absorb everything. The purpose of education is moral virtue.

Seriously, we do not honor our teachers by making them behavioral managers.

The first thing we can do to honor teachers is acknowledge the learner as the core around which education is organized, not the teacher. True teachers understand perfectly well that they owe their job to the fact that a learner wants their help in achieving a personal goal. And true teachers are not exclusively professional, they are parents, neighbors, friends and every caring human being who helps someone else learn.

An education system organized around learning has to listen to its learners and discover their goals. From within the context of those personal goals, our society is perfectly positioned as a collaborator that can respectfully temper personal ambition in the fires of collective reality and still support every individual to thrive with whatever unique talents and challenges those individuals offer.

The second thing we can do to honor teachers is to put their relationship to students first. In schools there is nothing more important than protecting the trust a student puts in his or her teacher.

Finally, we can most immediately honor teachers by opening a dialogue with schools to re-establish proper relationships throughout the school community. Empowering citizens to participate in celebrating the highest ideals that this country was founded on.

Too often it does not matter that children are complex individuals with a diversity of needs that cannot be met in any standardized way.

"No Child Left Behind" works on the premise and the logic of the industrial assumption that all the components must work together like a well oiled machine. It is much more important to measure our success by meeting the needs of specific children.

How would the law measure up to a bi-partisan commission investigating educational performance from the assumption that schools have an obligation to nurture children instead of judge their future economic worthiness?

What if we expected schools to help children become good people, not just good test takers and workers?

I take issue with Government intrusion; We do not need a Federal Department of Education, and where is it prescribed in the Constitution?