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David Kovacs for District 7 School Board

Campaign website: VoteKovacs.com

On February 25, David Kovacs from Akron was endorsed for region 7 State School Board. He is a graduate student at the university of Akron who advocates for accurate science orientation in the state school curriculum. Visit his campaign website, www.VoteKovacs.com.

After graduating from a private Catholic School and going to a public university, David Kovacs noticed one striking difference between the education he received and the education his peers had received in public schools: Whereas he was taught the value of independent thought, critical thinking, and the importance of questioning conventional authority, other students were too willing to accept whatever they were told.

Drawing upon his education in civic values and social justice, Dave first became involved with the Ohio Green Party during the 2000 election, when he supported the Presidential Campaign for Ralph Nader. Again, he acted on a connection between Green politics and the values he learned in school: The importance of a living wage, health care as a basic human right, affordable housing, and ecological wisdom.

As he worked on his philosophy degree in college, Dave took courses in logic, the art of analyzing arguments. During this time he first began to believe that Logic courses should not be college level electives but, rather, required for high school graduation. Based on the premise that everyday young people are barraged by arguments, from corporate advertisements, politicians, military recruiters, pop culture, and employers, it seemed sensible that students should receive, as early as possible, lessons in how to properly assess these arguments.

In late 2005 and early 2006, when Dave Kovacs was first considering running for office as a Green, the Ohio Board of Education had more public attention than any time in recent memory as the representative from District 7, Deborah Owens Fink, made every attempt to weaken the state science curriculum by attacking evolutionary theory and replacing it with creationist alternatives. At this point, Dave decided to seek to take Fink’s seat from her.

Dave Kovacs will work with the Ohio Board of Education to remove corporate advertisements from public schools, to re-emphasize areas of education which are being neglected, especially education in civic virtues, to ensure that minority students have an equal opportunity in the educational system, reverse the trend toward standardized testing that now dominates how students are measured.