School Board president runs to improve graduation rates
If elected to second term, incumbent Choate says he will continue to 'burn the candle at both ends'
After 10-year-old Skylar Lee Kim was killed in a traffic accident in 2003, Mark Choate was asked to put a dollar value on the Glacier Value Elementary School fifth grader's life.
Choate, a lawyer by trade, was representing the boy's family in a civil suit, and he traces his desire to run for a seat on the Juneau School Board to that act. He had to make assumptions about where Kim's education was going, if he would be among the many Juneau kids who don't graduate, and calculate the lifetime earnings of someone without a high school diploma.
He couldn't help being reminded of his own son in Kim, both of whom are half-Korean and half-white. The morbid actuarial work yielded a low figure.
"I just thought, 'That's not right,'" Choate said.
It translated into a School Board run centered around improving graduation rates, and a priority of improving school pedestrian safety.
Now Choate, the incumbent president of the Juneau School Board, is reluctantly seeking a second three-year term on the board. He is one of five candidates vying for three at-large board seats that voters will decide in an Oct. 6 election.
"It's not very popular in my family. It takes a lot of time, and I work very hard. It just means I burn the candle at both ends," he said. On a recent Tuesday after 8 p.m., he was still at work at his downtown law office.
"He has no Saturday, no Sunday," his wife, Sun Hee Choate, said. "But it's good things."
Asking Choate to describe problems in the education system opens a huge historical and philosophical can of worms. He talks about sweeping trends across hundreds of years of Western history: Reverberations of the Protestant Reformation in 1600s England on modern political rhetoric; the pedagogical need for sequential, linear teaching in some core subjects and the contrary influence of nonlinear learning styles from technology such as the Internet; the gradual loss of professional satisfaction from work due to the transition from an industrial economy to a service and information economy that yields less tangible end products.
He reads a lot of popular nonfiction. From a living room end table, his wife produces some recent reading: Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code," both books that dissect success.
It suggests a technocratic attitude, which he has demonstrated. Choate takes credit as the first board president to create task forces made up of local experts to study and effect changes in school policies, while the historical precedent was to establish ad hoc committees of School Board members who oftentimes were not experts in the topics at hand. In his first term, that's included task forces for school drug testing, safe school routes, and budgeting that have or are expected to effect meaningful policy changes.
He ticks off other ongoing goals:
• Identify the district's top educational programs and establish them district-wide.
• Improve relations with the Native community.
• Establish very high student expectations, perhaps experimenting at a school with uniforms, longer school days and shorter summers.
• Create an educational approach that emphasizes personal progress, rather than relative rank.
• Raise graduation requirements.
Choate adds a fittingly grand goal of getting Juneau's attitude toward education to emulate the constant, ubiquitous reinforcement of its importance that he's seen in his wife's home country and other industrialized countries.
"Somehow, in America, we've lost that. We kind of say it, but I'm not sure we really feel it in our gut," he said.
• Contact Jeremy Hsiehat 523-2258 or e-mail jeremy.hsieh@juneauempire.com.