If I make it onto the school board, then the math and science guy will be from Franconia District. This shares with Mount Vernon District and Springfield with being the areas of the county where students get discouraged and give up. One of the main reasons they give up is math education in K-12 has flaws. The students think they are the ones with the flaw instead of it being in the curriculum itself.
This part can be fixed. But it takes a math person who understands foundations of math and logic, because that is where the flaws are in K-6 and Algebra 1 education. There are problems with how signed numbers are talked about. In Algebra 1 there are some inconsistencies and errors in parts of the standards.
The students in Franconia, Mount Vernon, and Springfield will think those inconsistencies and errors are their lack of understanding and drop out. This is something that can be remedied.
I come home to Pinewood Lake in the 22309 zip code. This is one of the most diverse and struggling zip codes in the county. So I see this and hear about it. Having the math science guy on the board going home to these parents is a benefit.
As an economist, I also see how the difficult labor market for many in my area links to the hopelessness in schools. If there is no good job after school, it is easy to give up. Giving up in school means no good job after school. I can partly fix that by fixing the gaps in math education in early grades.
I can also help fix it by focusing on the labor market issues that are linked to education. Most critical is that the expansion of the labor supply at the bottom of the labor force has to stop. This is the number one factor driving down wages and driving down employment to population ratios. This is basic economics.
Wages go like capital over labor, stock market goes like labor over capital. If labor goes up, both ratios can’t go up. The stock market has gone up a lot while wages overall have been flat, and below college, some segments have gone down. The rise in the stock market shows that labor has gone up relative to capital. That means capital relative to labor went down, so that pushed down wages. Because total factor productivity went up modestly, overall wages are flat while the stock market went up a lot. TFP pushes up both wages and the stock market.
