Steve Barton MSEE, JD, MD, MBA, Republican
Steve is an electronic engineer with integrated circuit design, computer architecture, and logic design experience at Intel, Ford, and Crystal Semiconductor, and a patent lawyer with a medical degree. He proposes saving the kids by reforms including evicting leftist politics from schools and introducing basic business concepts to schools while improving real science, math, and history education. Some of these reforms may require the board to request the legislature change Colorado laws. Steve’s proposals include:
Basic Reforms
Involve parents, because they may have good ideas and many can also work with their kids when they need extra help—if they are informed of the type and extent of help their kids need. Too many board rules exclude parents. The Democrat ideal of schools taking full charge of educating, feeding, and raising kids should be changed—Schools should have mindset of being a support and aid to parents in raising and educating kids unless parents have abdicated that responsibility.
Grade school districts on parental involvement in curriculum decisions and textbook selection to force districts to involve parents.
Remove State requirements for personally-identifiable dossiers on students —district reports to the state should be statistical and lack personally identifiable information.
Improve financial efficiency by scoring school districts on their administrator-teacher ratio, and streamline state board reporting rules and grant procedures to allow school districts to spend more on classrooms and less on administration.
Evict politics from the classroom, prohibiting teachers and schools from sending political literature to parents. Reduce identity-politics indoctrination to the minimum required by State law while ensuring broad coverage of historical events — including conditions in socialist countries.
Prohibit granting credit or excused absences for political activities and demonstrations.
Rename and reschedule “spring break” as “Easter break” and “winter break” as “Christmas break”, their traditional names..
Require districts notify parents of student sex transitions, not hide them from parents as some districts do today.
Audit districts to ensure fraud and corruption is eliminated.
Improve Classroom Experience
Strictly limit classroom screen time and ban cell phones from classrooms. Yes, I contributed to older computer designs as an engineer, but that does not mean second and third graders should spend all day glued to screens.
Boot boys from girls’ sports, locker rooms, and bathrooms. We need a compromise giving birth girls better protection while still including trans folk in academics. It may be necessary to fund a 3rd set of bathrooms designated unisex with fully private stalls. As to sports, those having experienced male puberty have physical advantages making boys in girls sports (as has happened in some districts) unfair to girls. We must protect all by prohibiting rooming of those having testicles with those having ovaries on overnight activities regardless of “sexual orientation” as has happened in some counties. This may require recommending that the legislature and governor change state laws. See posts.
Reintroduce Christian morals like the “Golden Rule” and require Christianity be treated as well as other faiths.
Improve security by arming selected staff or teachers- no soft targets.
Overhaul Curriculum
Encourage districts to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic in grades K-3 using traditional methods that work, like phonics and times tables. The READ act rule does use a phonics-derived instruction method, but demands dossiers and micromanages implementation.
Bring outsiders like engineers, scientists, nurses, doctors, businessmen, pilots, seamen, and veterans into schools to teach reality. This includes teaching students and teachers how astronomy and physics were reformed with math in the 14th-17th century scientific revolution, and electricity and electronics in the 19th and 20th centuries, how math is used to calculate medicine doses and vector sums for navigation, how rapid multiply-and-add is key to artificial intelligence, what businesses do to make a profit and why they need profit, the many countries where socialism failed, and history as seen by those who lived it. This will help students see how important math is in life, and thus better motivate them to learn math.
Encourage discussion of the religious motivations in historical events that are often now avoided. This is critical to a full understanding of important historical events such as Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic church; the Spanish Armada; the Reformation in Europe and 100 year’s war; the founding of Massachusetts (Mayflower pilgrims), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and settling of Utah; Cortez’s conquest of Mexico and other conquistadores; the decline, fall, and separation into East and West, of the Roman Empire; the Islamic conquests of 622-750, significance of the Battle of Tours, and the reconquest of Spain in 1492; the Crusades; the first foreign wars of the USA - the 1801-1805 and 1815 Barbary wars; adoption of the 1st Amendment; and the abolition movement of the 1850s that culminated in the Civil War, These events are hard to understand when stripped of underlying motives. The first amendment does not require avoiding historical facts!
Ensure history courses cover the Revolution; the impact of disease on, and sometimes harsh treatment of, native Americans as the US developed; the causes of the Civil War; and the vast consequences of the failed diplomacy that followed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Europe, Middle East and elsewhere including the wars it triggered such as WW1, WW2, Russian revolution, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq war and modern Mideast conflicts. This must include events like the collapse of the Ottoman empire and “mandates” in former Ottoman provinces, nationalists and communists in China with Japanese invasion, failed 1940-1941 “economic sanctions” that led to Pearl Harbor in 1941, etc. This historical background is essential for understanding the current world situation in Korea, Taiwan, Middle-East, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Require expanded civics, including the US Constitution and bill of rights, in schools. This must include teaching about the right to, and importance of, a lawyer if arrested, and the vast changes brought about by the US Civil War and the 13th-16th amendments as the US central government became far stronger than it was under either the Confederation or the pre-civil-war US Constitution.
Since today’s kids will be affected by technology throughout their lives, introduce Engineering as applying science and known principles to solve real world problems from Roman aqueducts through modern airplanes, roads, and automobiles to computers and artificial intelligence.
Upgrade Teacher Training
Require math-based science for teacher’s licensure. Science needs to be taught using math, and math needs to be taught with real applications including science and business. The handwaving-level science typical teachers now take leaves them unable to do this. Teaching math with science, and science with math, was even suggested by Nobel Laureate (physics) Richard Feynman when he was on the California textbook approval board over half a century ago.
Require teachers to learn enough business to know what a profit is and what it takes to make one. Most teachers mean well, but many fall into leftist traps because they have never worked outside government and don’t understand reality. Further, basic accounting can make wonderful math problem sets with calculations of cash flow, property tax, social security tax, unemployment tax, sales tax, etc. Imagine if we used long-form 1040s as arithmetic exercises in 6th grade—we could sink the tax prep industry!
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Copyright © 2026 by Steven Barton