I applaud Congressman Michael Honda’s recent convening of the STEM Advisory Council, which I attended last Friday at Applied Materials with 60-plus engineers, educators, policy makers and non-profit leaders. We must act now, as more and more firms in the U.S., like Applied Materials, require science, technology, engineering or math degrees to satisfy their employment mandates.

In order to move on from partisan gridlock on education reform, we must deal with the facts of what works to increase performance for all students. Looking at two new bills coming out of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, that isn’t happening right now.

Two bullets have the potential to change the world. One pierced the heart of Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in Florida early last year; the other penetrated the head of Malala Yousafzai on Oct.9, 2012. Trayvon died the night he was shot, while Yousafzai recovered from critical condition to triumphantly address the United Nations last week. It is my hope that Ms. Yousafzai’s passionate speech can help transform the conversation about equality, justice and education. Let me explain.

Last month I asked: How many more years will Silicon Valley put up with broken promises made to our children, before it is too late for us to recover from the lack of political will? The clock is ticking on a very real domestic threat.

As we swelter with unseasonably hot weather this summer, too many children are sitting at home, losing months of instructional gains produced during the academic school year. The educational leaders know this to be true based on a wide variety of studies that indicate children without summer enrichment activities lose several months of achievement gains made during the school year.

Each fiscal year, San Jose’s councilmembers are allocated $20,000 in “HP grants” that can be utilized to provide grants to cultural, educational or recreational groups. These funds are allocated solely at the discretion of the elected official. My allocations, listed in this column, represent my personal priorities and values not only as an elected official, but also as a proud citizen of San Jose.

There have been a lot of reports in the media recently about teens and children being bullied at school and through social media. Dating violence among teens has been studied for years, but the relationship to online harassment is a new issue.

Every year around this time, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and the City Council hold a series of public meetings regarding our city’s budget, which the council must pass it before the summer “recess” in July. This year, the city should needs to make libraries one of its top priorities.

Santa Clara County residents enjoy longer life expectancies and overall better health than the rest of the state and nation, but stark disparities based on wealth and race persist.

How many more years will the country and Silicon Valley put up with broken promises made to our children, before it is too late for us to recover from the lack of political will? This year we commemorate the 30-year anniversary of a national report that provided a clarion call to improve our public education system.

The Great Recession devastated shelters for battered women. And while government funding has declined, the need for such services has drastically increased. This issue will be one of many discussed at Tuesday’s county Board of Supervisors meeting, including a federal grant to develop news strategies to find long-term homes for foster children.

San Jose Parks Foundation’s plan has always been to build a base of individual donors large enough to support a lean organization that leverages funding from other sources and directs those funds to programs and projects for our public parks and trails.

Recalcitrant school boards and some teacher unions are at the core of a new education battle. A report in the Mercury News last week found that the Evergreen School District’s teachers have been “working to rule”—which means only doing what’s required according to contract, and nothing more—for several months. This type of posturing only hurts students. It also damages the perception of teachers, and will only encourage the continued growth of non-union charter schools. Courageous leaders on both sides have the power to prevent this type of action, or a threatened strike vote by teachers. In order to restore the trust, board members need to take action to form a settlement.

If NY Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman is correct, and I believe he is, the world beyond schools no longer wants to know how much you know, but how you can use what you know. Our concept of schooling in America today is quite archaic if Friedman’s assertion is right. However, there is a strong and hopeful effort, the Common Core of Standards, to steer the ship of public education to a better place.

It is so difficult to get things done in Washington that one has to wonder why we wanted to get here in the first place, uttered a pensive U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week. It was a tragically sad but candid comment about where we are in this fractured system of democratic government.

The school “choice” movement was originally embraced by the right side of the political aisle; today, for the most part, it is bipartisan. The public and California’s teachers unions should carefully pay attention to what is transpiring in Alabama and other states. With one watershed election, all things and calculations can be thrown on their proverbial head.