Citizen Voices

I often overlook local election issues in favor of presidential races and state propositions - and my guess is, many people do the same. Despite receiving a "Voting Guide for Republicans" in the mail each election, I do my research on the issues rather than blindly fill out my ballot with the guide's recommendations. (I do wonder sometimes how many people use political party guides as command rather than recommendation. My recommendation is do a little research on an issue or don't vote on it at all.)

But researching local candidates is often tedious. Here in Vista, we are electing Vista Unified School District governing board members. And I do care - aside from working towards being a public school teacher myself, I may one day have children in the Vista Unified School District - but even after looking over candidate bios, I find few meaningful ways to distinguish the candidates.

Elizabeth Jaka is a "community volunteer" who seeks to "provide quality educational programs that will give our children the tools they need to succeed in the 21st century." Sounds great! Steve Lilly is a retired educator who wants to see "increased student learning" and assessments that "provide teachers and principals timely data on student performance" (what a concept - tests that indicate performance). Also noble! Angela Chunka wants to give students access to the latest technology and close the achievement gap - no argument here! Stephen Guffanti and Eileen Fernandez want to see students reading and writing English at grade level - a no-brainer, right?

Chuck from Escondido, CA
October 22, 2008 at 07:13 PM
I know many school teachers, teacher unions and PTAs also have access to information on their local school board races. Just went to a great meet-the-candidates night last week hosted by the Temecula Valley Educators Association where the candidates and interested citizens were able to mingle over dinner and talk about the issues.

Matthew C. Scallon
October 22, 2008 at 08:30 PM
I have been similarly disappointed in trying to find information about the candidates for the Chula Vista Elementary and Sweetwater Union High School boards. It's not that our son will go to these wastes of taxpayer dollars, but I am interested if they support school choice and, should one of them go on to a state or federal office --school boards being the minor leagues for professional politicians-- I want to make certain I don't send some foul beast off to Bethelehem to be born, to paraphrase Yeats. Yet, I only find out about the meet-the-candidates forums ex post facto . Even then, they are times and places I can't go given work schedule and transporting of our son. I've resorted to e-mailing those candidates who have provided e-mail addresses to independent voter Web sites like Smart Voter. I've received some responses from Assembly and Congressional candidates but nothing from the school board candidates. Sigh.

A Musing Reamus from Calsbad
October 22, 2008 at 10:51 PM
democracy has a small "d" Democrat and Republican generally both have a capital letter. I will continue to protest any blogger who suggest that people "don't vote at all." Turn out, partiicularly low turnout is what get some of these clowns elected. The more people who do vote, the more minds need to be made up. Isn't that a good thing? The guides sent by the parties may not be unbiased, but compared to most information bases, reading throiugh it would do them more good that reading the Drudge report or listening to talk radio. How is it that "Obama" manages to get into most of your posts (and not always in the nicest way)? I thought this was about the Vista school board race. What his position is on Charter Schools--which you have mischarcaterized--isn't very relevant to that subject is it?

Matthew C. Scallon
October 22, 2008 at 11:32 PM
@A Musing Reamus, Obama is the front-runner, so you can't cry fowl when his name comes up in other places. No, Jessica didn't mischaracterize Obama's opposition to school choice. He, like other anti-school choice activists, prefer the Henry Ford Model-T approach to education: you can send your child to any school you like, so long as it's a public school. That's not school choice. And, while I support parents' choice of charter schools, if that's what works best for their child, charter schools are not the only schools out there. From my own family experience, I can see how dangerous the lack of school choice can be. My brother has a learning disability. As part of his education back in Illinois, he spent half of the day at a school focused on his learning disability and then was mainstreamed to a regular public school. The mainstreaming to the public school traumatized my brother so badly, with the abuse he faced from the public school students, he nearly attempted suicide. When my mother tried to have my brother mainstreamed to the Catholic school, the school district refused. Nevermind that no one was required to pay for his tuition at the Catholic school. Nevermind that the Catholic school was across the street from the learning disability school, saving a great deal on fuel consumption and environmental degradation. The public schools were more concerned with control than education. The only solution we had was taking him out of the learning disability program and enrolling him full-time in the Catholic school. His grades improved, as did his emotional state, although I still believe maintaining the learning disability program would have helped him more. I may be a bit biased, since, as a student at that Catholic school, I used to volunteer with the learning disability program. Still, without school choice, we had to make a "lesser of two evils" decision. I don't want other parents to have to do what my parents had to do.

Jessica Jondle
October 23, 2008 at 01:14 AM
A Musing Reamus, Obama makes it in to my posts because the presidential race is on my mind and education is not merely a locally-regulated institution. The educational policies that Obama backs or does not back are of great interest to me personally. And you are quite right, I do not always refer to Obama in "the nicest way". That actually made me smile! I am an opinion blogger and was hired as such - not an unbiased journalist or a disinterested third party. You might want to check the blog history of some of my colleagues...and see how often they have referred to McCain "in the nicest way." We all have opinions, and mine are quite strong - so yes, I'll bring Obama up when I think of him in relation to an issue. It wasn't actually a strategic or manipulative move on my part - I'm not really naive enough to think I'm swaying KPBS readers anyway! It was because, in the course of my thought process on school vouchers (not specifically charter schools), I thought of him. Matt, Thank you for your personal account. It is tragic that your brother's story is repeated across the country. Public schools may want "control", as you put it, but I think it is more about money. (That may be the kind of control you meant - control of government funds.) My own story of school choice actually involves two public schools. I lived in the zone for one of them, but another one was a better fit for me. (There was no high school in my city, but each of these schools was in a neighboring city - one to the north and one to the south.) My parents had to fight for me to go to the school that was a better fit - and these were two schools that were not too different in rank and were both public, so "money following the student, not the school" wasn't even the issue. Eventually, I got to go to the school of my choice due to health accommodations. (Never mind that the school I ended up attending later threatened to fail me - a straight A student who maintained those grades when ill - due to the class time I missed while on dialysis or having surgeries!) The point here is that children should not be punished for a school's failings. The teachers union feels threatened by the idea of public school money going into private schools, but the best interest of individual children matters. There are also some excellent public charter schools that get their start by agreeing (in a "charter") to address certain measurable needs not met by public schools in the area. A family member of mine was an administrator at just such a public charter high school that used alternative instructional methods in an effort to improve the achievement of students who traditionally fall at the lower end of the achievement gap. The school also attracted a fair number of high achievers. A quick wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Carlos,_California) check reveals that my hometown was the first city in California to open a charter school (it is a public elementary school and not the one I was referring to above) and verifies what I vaguely remembered, that Bill Clinton visited that school in 1997. Matt, I might disagree with your statement that Obama thinks it's ok to go to any school you like, as long as it's public. Like I mentioned, he himself sends his daughters to a private school - certainly nothing I would fault him for (see! I can say something nice about the man!) and something that shows his support for private education. But not all of us have that kind of money in the bank! Why should a quality education be limited to the wealthy? Our country recognizes education as compulsory, but surely we mean a good education. We need to heal sick public schools - but if a child is in the middle of an unsatisfactory one, we should support parents' efforts to heal a sick educational experience before it's too late.

Matthew C. Scallon
October 23, 2008 at 04:22 AM
@Jessica, thank you for your kind words. Like all the rest of us, my brother is still a work in progress, but he's making progress. Let me expound on my bumper sticker comparing Obama to Henry Ford. Of course, Barack Obama supports private schools for his own children. Most people at his pay grade do. The problem is that Barack Obama, along with Clinton, Gore, Jackson, and the entire Congressional Black Caucus oppose the choice of private schools for anyone who isn't in their pay grade while supporting for their own children, even though a majority of African-Americans support school choice. The sad truth is that we already have "vouchers" for our schools. We have Head Start funding for any preschool, regardless of religious affiliation. We have Pell Grants and G.I. Bill payments for colleges, be it Notre Dame or USC. But, when it comes to K-12, except for those few students whom the public schools either cannot or will not teach, parents of children in those grades are out of luck. K-12 education is the only place where the government schools have a monopoly on money --and, you're right; control does come down to money-- to the detriment of the students and, ironically, those very same schools.

aaryn b.
October 23, 2008 at 08:18 AM
Vouchers (in conjunction with NCLB) are just another way of taking money, resources and power away from schools that most need them and are part of the larger, continued assault on the ever-flimsy barrier between church and state. Jonathon Kozol, the esteemed author of "Savage Inequalities"---a must read if your concern about the achievement gap between white children and their brown counterparts is sincere---puts it this way: "My own faith leads me to defend the genuinely ethical purposes of public education as a terrific American tradition, and to point to what it's done at its best - not simply for the very rich, but for the average American citizen. We need to place the voucher advocates, the enemies of public schools, where they belong: in the position of those who are subverting something decent in America." Excerpted from a short piece here: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/voucher_report/v_soskoz.shtml

A Musing Reamus from Calsbad
October 24, 2008 at 12:12 AM
I do not see Obama's position on federally funded Charter schools in apposition to your view. Vouchers weren't in that discussion. "Nicest way" has nothing to do with it. You can call him spinach for all I care Jessica, I just think he has less to do with a post about Vista school Board members than you do. I know the history of the bloggers here, so there is no reason to lecture me about it. In my opinion, a gratuitous comments doesn't do much to move public discourse forward. Saying what is on your mind is why you do this I presume. I found the post a good one until the "been open to this idea early in his campaign" comment. Let's try to find a way to get local "down ticket" candidates to tell us more about themselve and what they stand for. I know more than I need to about. Obama and McCain. That is what it is. Federal invovement in schools is more about unfunded mandates and reguation mandated by Congress than it is about real life.

Cindy R from North Park
October 24, 2008 at 04:55 PM
I just listened to the talk about Mike Aguirre and Jan Goldsmith. At no time did I hear a mention of the fact that the City Attorney of San Diego is elected by the populace at large for the people at large--it is not an appointed position meant to give comfort and solace to the CIty Council, or legal cover for whatever they feel like doing. I agree tht Mr. Aguirre is somewhat abrasive and has made some mistakes, but he has done his job and he knows what his job is. It is clear that Mr. Goldsmith thinks the job of the CIty Attorney is to enable the City Council. Until such time as that position is appointed by the Council, let someone with some intestinal fortitude like Aguirre keep that post.

Matthew C. Scallon
October 27, 2008 at 07:42 PM
"...something decent in America," huh? Let's list some of the "decent" things that public schools have brought us: (1) segregation by race, (2) subjugation of religious minorities, be they Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, etc., (3) corporal punishment for any non-English speakers, whether French-speaking Cajuns or native Navajo, (4) indoctrination in abortion-on-demand under the sheep's clothing of "sex education," while censoring any opposing viewpoints. I could go on from there, but I believe I've made my point about the "decency" of public schools. Now, I'm not a Pollyanna about non-public schools. Some of them are just as bad, but, if non-public schools don't perform well, parents have the right --nay obligation-- to stop supporting that school by pulling their child out. When public schools don't perform well --and, invariably they don't-- we taxpayers are expected to increase funding for them. That's the problem the "decent" program of government monopoly on K-12 education.

Elizabeth J from Oceanside
November 08, 2008 at 12:23 AM
Jessica, You're absolutely right: It's very difficult to get valid information about the candidates. The best options are to be involved (which, in your case, isn't practical) or to know someone who is. Then, of course, you're dependent on that person's point of view. For a school district race, I think talking to teachers and parents is the best way to get a fix on the candidates. For a more open give and take, forums are an option. However, sometimes the folks hosting the forum are so focused on being "balanced" that everyone gets the same softball questions, and it's STILL hard to differentiate one candidate from another. For the VUSD area, there were four public forums this time around. If you missed them then KOCT televised their forum, along with recorded candidate statements. These programs aired multiple times on the local access channels in October, and were also available for viewing online at KOCT.org. There are probably similar programs in other areas. If I'd come across your column/blog sooner, I would have offered to meet with you at your convenience. Even though the election is over, I'm still willing to do so if you're interested. Either way, I'm glad you took an interest, and that you didn't take the other side's website at face value. (And for the record, I'm not a Democrat.) Thanks!