The Reason I'm Running for Office

By Harald G. Martin

I have rarely, if ever arrested an "A" student. Same goes for those students who are getting "B's" and "C's". I have arrested many "F" students - they are the gang members, the drug addicts, and the problem children of the community. So, from a totally selfish perspective, I felt that if I could help students do better in school, I wouldn't have to work so hard at arresting them. The fewer kids I have to arrest, the better it is for all of us.

I believe that the greatest problem these students have in common is that they are unable to see how getting an education will help them later in life. Furthermore, they have been promoted from grade to grade without ever being really required to do any work. An "F" student still goes on to the next grade to make sure that we don't hurt his self-esteem. Unfortunately this backwards bit of psycho-babble has harmed thousands of students over the last ten years. What they learned was that nothing is required to get ahead. They come to the very obvious conclusion, "I will still succeed (get promoted to a higher grade) even if all I do is play". All that happended was that they got further and further behind. Many got so far behind that they just plain gave up. Those were the kids that I got to see on a regular basis.

I sincerely believe that our children were never the real problem in the education realm. It was the so-called education specialists who came up with one bad idea after another and foisted those "solutions" on the students. I believe that it got so bad that these specialists were forced to blame the children and their parents for their poor performance. But, kids didn't learn to read because these "experts" did away with phonics and replaced it with whole language - the look at the pictures and guess at the words - reading concept. They were also the ones that said kids shouldn't memorize multiplication tables and they came out with NEW math. When that didn't work they came out with NEW-NEW math. And when that didn't work - yes - they came out with the NEW-NEW-NEW math. During the latest pow-wow of all the math experts in the State they came to the conclusion (guess real hard at this) that it was O.K. for kids to memorize the multiplication tables. Memorization it turns out is not a bad thing after all.

These are some of the things I want to correct - and have been working to correct over the last 4 years. I have been working at holding the system - and the individuals that run the system - accountable for what is happening in our schools. It is beginning to work. Common sense is taking hold over "expert" opinion. I plan to keep things that way.