Candidate for
Trustee; Sacramento City Unified School District; Trustee Area 6

My overall educational philosophy can be summarized in the following bullets:

~It is a government responsibility to provide free, quality education to K-12 grade students. It is never to be a "profit center" for those in the business of education.

~OUR GOAL IS EXCELLENCE in education, not "proficiency!"

~Teachers are the key to student success. Powerful and effective teachers produce fantastic graduates. It is the role of all those non-teachers in education to support the teachers who actually do the work of teaching our children. We must recognize that "any true school reform is dependent upon empowering those at the bottom, not punishing them from the top." (Carl Cohn)

~Standardized tests are great diagnostic tools to help individual students, parents and teachers measure progress. However, student tests are a terrible measure of teacher performance. If you primarliy judge our teachers based on test scores then you probably think the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team was actually better than the USSR team. There is a reason the USA victory was called a "Miracle on Ice!" Thirty years later I am still proud of and celbrating our nations sport's victory, but it is silly to judge the quality of the Russian team bsed on one night's play and it is just as flawed to judge the quality of education of a student based on one day's performance on a test.

~Principals must be leaders, not administrators. PRINCIPALS ARE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR TEACHER PERFORMANCE. Principals must be "master teachers" with the skills to guide improvements in teacher performance, motivate them to excel, and build high-performance, professional teams on campus. Any time a principal takes action to dismiss a teacher it is a public announcement that the principal has failed in his/her primary assignment, leadership. The same holds true anytime a superintendent and school board votes to close a school due to poor performance. It is their job to apply the leadership and resources necessary to improve performance and not to throw up their hands and quit, passing their responsibilities onto others.

~I only support charter schools that can meet the following standards:

+Run by non-profits (it is the proper role of government to provide quality education using public funds to K-12 students--it is never proper for it to be a corporate profit center.)

+Focused on attracting all students that need the most assistance. Charters should never be created to skim off the top students and then claim that they are superior to public schools.

+Charters should be hot-beds of innovation in an attempt to find more effective ways to reach the educationally challenged students in our community.

+Run by excellent leaders with experience, vision, determination to succeed whatever the challenges and proven team building skills.

~A comprehensive and mutually supporting K-12 curriculum is essential to properly educating our children.
+Comprehensive means more is taught than proficiency in reading and math. It must include social sciences, languages, P.E., sciences, art, music, etc.
+Mutually supporting means that the skill set mastered in the second grade curricula must prepare a student for the challenges of the third grade and so on.

~Trustees must do the job they are elected to do without political considerations. I am not a politician and I am not interested in being elected to another public position. I want to serve my community by researching thoroughly all issues until I have found the right (not the easiest or most political or expedient) path to take forward. Then I want to use my decades of experience in moving forward to a solution using team building leadership and common sense. My late father, a retired police sergeant, taught me that "just because something is hard, doesn't mean you don't do it." I have always taken on hard, complicated assignments and achieved good results through hard work, a sense of humor and by asking, "Is this the best way possible?"