WHAT IS MY LONG TERM GOAL

By Cynthia Lee Coon

My goal, if I am elected to the Lafayette School Board, is to promote the high quality academic education our children are receiving here.

• developing creative thinking in the classroom
• making learning fun
• getting rid of rote learning by developing analytical thinking skills

In the nineties, I attended CSUH for my Masters in Educational Psychology, and later Holy Names College for my Certificate in Educational Therapy. I discovered that the views of my liberal professors at Berkeley in the sixties were now quite conservative. Currently the educational focus is on helping the slow or struggling students in most areas. Efforts to promote quality education for our average and for our brightest students exist only in selected areas such as the Lafayette School District.

Advocacy groups for "special" students are powerful. As I sat in graduate classess, I found myself wondering. 'Where is our advocacy for our brightest students and more so our average students who are not considered "special"?' Parents tell me their average students are invisible in many classrooms throughout the state.

The reality is that we have limited funding for schools and therefore limited resources. Those resources must be divided fairly in a public educational system. The goal of our educational system must be academic excellence for everyone, rather than helping struggling students be competitive as special interest groups would lead us to believe.

We need to inspire our brightest students to develop intellectually so they can pursue higher levels of scholarship and achievement. We must help our average students find their strengths so they can have fulfilling and satisfying careers. We need to help our special needs students to function well, but not to the extent that learning is compromised throughout the entire student population.

Let me clarify that when I discuss problematic educational policy, I am not referring to the administrators in Lafayette School District who are dedicated to high academic standards. In 1998, the State of California has initiated testing and curriculum for the purpose of raising academic standards in all schools. I approve these measures. My fears for our educational system are related to when educators discover that there are many students who cannot accomplish high academic achievement. One concern is that important funding will be taken from high performing districts such as Lafayette to be given to poor performing districts thereby compromising our educational programs. The other difficulty is that educators will change their policy once again, claiming that academic excellence is not really so important. The proponents of the whole child approach developed by Howard Gardner might request that his educational approach replace the high academic standards which are in place in school districts at this time.