January Meeting (2 of 2)

[Michael Marotta]

[This is from the LinkedIn Group Discussion for Austin Tech
Republicans. We are also on Facebook; but I do not participate there.
-- MEM]

Our guest was Jeff Fleece (www.jeff-fleece.com), the only GOP hopeful
for State Board of Education who could join us. He had the floor.
Like all of our best candidates, Jeff brings an impressive inventory
of experience, starting with his degree in mechanical engineering from
U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He also served a year as an
exchange student at Annapolis. After passing Airborne school at Ft.
Benning, Capt. Fleece came to Ft. Hood as an armor scout and joined
the 7th Cavalry. After detachment, Jeff settled in Austin, earned an
MBA at UT, and went to work for Dell, where he now brings cloud
computing solutions to realization. During this time, he also worked
for the State, upgrading the computer systems at Health and Human
Services.

Jeff Fleece outlined for us the three duties of the State Board of
Education: approving curriculum, including teaching methodologies;
managing the Oil & Gas Endowment for Education; and approving charter
schools. He is dismayed at the shift away from phonics, memorization,
cursive, and discipline. While phonics has returned to the classroom,
there remains too much reliance on calculators.

For Jeff, the hidden snare in curriculum approval comes from the shift
to electronic textbooks. Like all software, e-books go through
versions; and they do so inherently and seamlessly, in a way that
printed media do not. His concern is that vendors and political
progressives will suborn the standards set at the time of purchase
with incremental changes that are not under state control – or even
awareness. Jeff also said that he believes in local control.
Neighborhood schools should be allowed to craft technology solutions
that reflect the needs of their populations.