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The Archives
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11.23.09Does It Hurt to Ask?For as long as I can remember, I have had a hard time asking for money. My mother said that even when I was little, she would offer to buy me something and I would say, “Oh no, that costs too much.” As a fiscal conservative, I will probably bring some of this same frugality to my work on the State Board of Education. I’ve been bothered by how much money the current board wastes, what with unwise investment decisions and millions spent on initiatives like abstinence only, which was ...
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11.02.09How to Fix a Broken Board of EducationWe need to restore three basic values in order to fix the Texas State Board of Education: 1) community, 2) economy, 3) respect. Let’s put students, teachers, and the local community back at the center of education. The State Board of Education has been micromanaging school curriculum for almost twenty years, and the results have been disastrous, putting us in 51st place in high school graduation rates in the US. Teachers and students are tied to a grim routine of preparing for TAKS tests for most of the year, under the threat of firing or loss of school accreditation. Teacher creativity and ...
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10.30.09Environmental Education in TexasI was an environmentalist long before I knew what the word meant. Growing up on a farm in northern Indiana, I learned from my father how to identify insects, birds, and animals, and I learned from my mother how to grow a garden. My parents had a 460-acre farm, and my father was constantly researching how to reduce artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and disturbance to the land, because it made good economic sense. He used crop rotation as the best method for fixing natural nitrogen in the soil, and he took advantage of the government soil bank program—which has received ridicule ...
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10.21.09Setting Out on the Campaign TrailWild Ride on the Campaign Trail Joining the ranks of people on the campaign trail has been a wild ride for me, filled with much more excitement than I ever would have imagined. When I decided to run, I pictured myself at events where I would have a hard time staying awake. Instead, this campaign takes me back to my early days of the Peace Corps in Chad, where an intense group of idealistic people kept a grueling schedule, with passion and enthusiasm. I was twenty-three, fresh from graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington. At our first Peace Corps dinner with ...
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10.02.09How I became a candidate.“Mom, you have to do this!” Back at the beginning of 2009, it seemed like every week I would shake my head over those crazy statements coming out of the State Board of Education. My friend at work told me, “You should run for the board. You have kids who went to public school in San Marcos and you have a background in education and public service.” At Texas State University I have been teaching students who come through Texas public schools for 28 years and I’ve seen how hard many of them have to work to catch up – to ...
