2026 Virginia Candidates Meet & Greet Q/A (2): How to improve Virignia's public School #VA election

I want to ask a question. People come here because we used to have the best public school in the United States, Thomas Jefferson. But so sad in the past five years, this public school is no more the top one, no more the top five, don't even the top ten. The question I think for all the Asian families is we treasure education. Education being American good again, our future generation good again. Do you have any plan that would bring the number one public school back to Virginia, Maryland, or DMV? Yeah, that's a great question. And that is one of the big issues with my campaign. What you're seeing is, and once again, this is why it's important that you vote for who is going to take care of you and your issues. And so when you talk about the Wake ideology, CRT, all of these things that they're trying to put into our school systems instead of teaching the basics, math, science, history. And that is, we have to get back to just common sense where you're talking about and doing the things that are going to help Virginia. And we've lost that, unfortunately, because we're trying to be, once again, going to the further left, becoming the socialist, communist, and bringing all of these things into the education system and into our culture. And so what you're seeing is this clash of cultures right now. And once again, you have to educate other people that aren't as politically savvy and let them know what's going on. And the way that we win is by winning elections. And so make sure that you check us out. These are the things that I've been talking about since day one. And we absolutely can change it. We absolutely can turn it around and make sure that our kids are learning. Okay, thank you. Anybody else? Everybody else? Okay. Thank you for that. And it's weird how these seats are getting a little bit light, and I wonder where the rest of my Democratic opponents are going. Ms. Berner, thank you for staying here. Because these are hard questions. And when people walk out of hard questions, that tells you exactly what it is. They don't have solutions. I can tell you, I'm a first-generation Filipino. My dad came over here through the Navy. And I can tell you that the American dream is important. And earning is important. When you give without earning, the person doesn't really learn much of self-worth. And I can tell you, growing up, I grew up in Nashville, California, a place where I thought that everyone owed me something. And that was a pill, or a seed I was placing in my head, that I wasn't good enough. And people just handed me things. But through going through the military, people saw more of me than I saw of myself. And they believed in me. They brought me better. They made me better. They brought the best things out of me. And I can go back, 16-year-old Tony, brought me back to Nashville, California. Please look it up. Highest crime rate in all of California, per capita, with the amount of people there. He asked, 16-year-old Tony, would you be running for Congress? Would you go into the Secret Service, CIA? He'll tell you, no, that's not for me. And why? Because ingrained in my head that what I see in front of me is all I have. The American dream is not that. People saw more of me and showed me what the American dream is. And what we're going to do is we're going to ensure that merit base is pushed out there. We're going to build kids up. We're going to give more towards them, and we're going to make sure that they believe that they can do it on their own and not give in. And that's the American dream. We didn't need to pass by the ladies. Okay. So, again, my name is Lena Brunner, and my background includes being a semi-retired public school teacher. Also, I worked in higher education admissions for nearly 10 years. Also, I've advocated for, especially with AAUW, American Association of University Women Public Policy, that has to do with education. And I have to say, I've been a military spouse, an Air Force officer. Our first tour was overseas in England. He was a fighter co-pilot. The thing about it is, one thing that's been very important to me is education. We traveled the world, we traveled the state, and our family, and we always looked at the ranking of schools as very safe. And to you, I'm from Stafford, and I envy this area for your school, for your students. And it's disappointing to hear from you here personally that it's gone down. I know in Stafford County, with a mother of five, we couldn't afford, and if I could afford it, I wouldn't have been here. But with that being said, you need to go. I don't know how your setup is here, but if you have school supervisors in the school board, you need to go to them. You need to talk to them and make them accountable. What I did as a single mother of five children, I used the public school system. I was very hands-on, very involved to the point of all of my five children were accepted into, from the public school system, three youngest ones in UVA at the same time. My oldest daughter, a mother I've had five, my oldest son was accepted into two colleges, universities, from the public school system. My second child, three from the public school system, three engineering degrees from, you know, John Hopkins University, University of Southern California, and then my three youngest daughters were in the UVA at the same time. So my point is this. You have to get involved. You have to talk to the school supervisors. You have to let them know that this is your concern and it's their responsibility to listen to you and come to you and support you and your children. Thank you. So according to our Constitution, education is under the province of the state level of government. As I say, states educate, they medicate, and they incarcerate. But I believe education is one of the two main public goods along with national defense. I'm a very strong proponent of education. I would never have gotten anywhere in my life if I didn't have the opportunity to be educated. Neither one of my parents went to college. So I want to make sure that America remains the premier nation for education. Our institutions of higher learning, I had the privilege of going to Harvard, three different programs there. I think that we need to reserve the positions at some of our premier institutions for U.S. citizens, and I think that'll have a trickle-down effect. I'm not the pessimist that David is on AI. I do agree with some of his points, but all the companies that are coming out with AI products are U.S. companies. I think I got that correct. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, I think there's like five of them. That doesn't mean that the employees there are necessarily Americans. We need to get the WTO to start enforcing intellectual property standards because there's wholesale theft of them. So that's number one. I think we need to start off by reserving our key educational positions all the way down to the Thomas Jefferson School that you referenced, which is one of the best high schools in our nation for U.S. citizens first and foremost, and then we have to make sure that foreign students that come here are not allowed to steal what they are getting from our U.S. educational system. So thank you. Education is so important to me, and it really bothers me why we're giving more money to counties that are teaching these woke ideologies, and their test scores are part of the lowest test scores in the whole commonwealth, and yet counties that are not getting a lot of money on the south side, they have the best test scores. We're incentivizing the wrong educational behaviors, and we're also not doing our jobs to make sure that that money is used properly and effectively, and that's why I'm running to combat the fraud and inefficiencies across federal government to include exactly that. That is not holding those schools accountable, those counties accountable, and that's what I want to do is hold programs accountable. When it comes to the higher ed, when I was talking about my center of excellence for cybersecurity, I want to actually work with the schools. I was actually on the National Cybersecurity Institute board where I helped with the curriculum for our national NSA and the DHS cybersecurity personnel, so I want to take that expertise to create and work with the colleges to create that curriculum to help get people through and graduate with cybersecurity degrees so we can immediately hire those employees to fill those center of excellence cybersecurity jobs and also help our veterans and our military transitioning back to civilian life. They, too, if they want STEM or trade schools, we need to make sure that we have the educational opportunities for them to do that so they can help transition to civilian life as they come off the field. So TJSAT scores fell 80 points this year. What they did was to increase diversity of enrollment, they lowered the standards. And by the way, Fairfax County overall SAT scores have fallen about 30 points since 2018 despite a huge increase in spending. Spending more money in public schools does not improve achievement. But how to fix it? The problem is in grades 1 and 2. If you haven't mastered reading and arithmetic by the third grade, you rarely catch up and you will never be competitive for TJ. And for decades, our public schools abandoned phonics-based reading and drill in arithmetic, which were the traditional ways to teach reading and arithmetic. So what happens is the affluent kids learn their math facts and their phonics at home. We have a big minority, persistent, decades-long minority student achievement gap because their parents are working two jobs. They can't work the school. They count on the school to do it right and they haven't done it right. I've been fighting this battle for 29 years, 30 years, to try to get the Fairfax County public schools to teach phonics and arithmetic drill. Virginia passed the Virginia Literacy Act a few years ago, which requires all schools to teach phonics, so that's good. But the implementation in Fairfax County seems glacial and it's not a priority for the school board. They're doing nothing about improving arithmetic. And so the battle is lost by third grade. And the administrators who pick these bad curricula are completely insulated from the consequences. If the children don't learn, the administrators still get their step increases and their pensions and their generous retirement. They need... The only thing I think that would fix public schools is competition and school choice. Thanks.