Flight 93 memorial, Bloomberg, etc
Sacred Soil Having read Jonathan V. Last's, "The Memorials We Deserve" (May 28), we would like to provide a more accurate description of the Flight 93 National Memorial design, which incorporates a...
...Many Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists felt the need to run their own schools, and by the 20th century religious people of numerous stripes were battling secular groups for control of public education...
...In fact, the percentage of the city's 8th graders scoring at or above grade level on the state math test rose 9.1 percentage points during this time...
...Horace Mann (1796-1859) is only the most celebrated of the many educators and big thinkers who built our public schools with idealistic and not reactionary goals in mind...
...People who thought that public schools should push most children into vocational training, for instance, were locked into regular battle with those who wanted to open academic tracks to everyone...
...But the "Age of Consensus" he describes was more an "Age of Coercion...
...Some states passed laws saying kids had to go to schools only in their districts, and Oregon even passed a law, championed by the KKK, outlawing private schools—though it was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court...
...Walls three feet thick and as high as the plane flew overhead will frame the sky and offer the first view of the crash site and expanse of the Field of Honor...
...in 1906 they were around 17 percent and in 1850, 5 percent...
...Thankfully, none of this undermines Gelernter's ultimate point: that no consensus exists today about what public schools should teach...
...Among many other achievements, he became the first head of the path-breaking Massachusetts state board of education...
...To some extent this view reflects modern historians and intellectuals' dislike of the "great man" (or great Mann) view of history...
...As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls...
...By comparison, the rest of the state increased by 4.9 points...
...The walkway leads visitors through a variety of landscape features and culminates at the Sacred Ground...
...The tower features 40 wind chimes, which memorialize the passengers and crew, many of whom left their last memory through their voice...
...Today, Catholics are roughly a quarter of the U.S...
...Here the public will be able to approach the edge of the crash site (the temporary memorial, on the other hand, is a distant quarter mile away...
...While New Yorkers should demand continued improvement from their schools, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have made measurable progress...
...A population that is split down the middle on basic questions offers no purchase for any kind of consensus, progressive or reactionary...
...Siegel and Goodwin say that "student performance has been basically flat" except for reading gains at the elementary school level...
...In the 1800s, American public education was drenched in the unsavory politics of the nativist Know-Nothing movement, with anti-Catholics at the lead who sought to use the schools to blanch out threatening "papist" views brought over by Catholic immigrants...
...The counterpart to these gains is the city's climbing graduation rate, which has risen 9 points (to 60 percent) during the last five years, triple the increase of the five years preceding mayoral control...
...In seeking a design for the permanent memorial, Flight 93 partner organizations called for more than a single monument—rather, a memorial landscape...
...If one is looking for a monument, the Tower of Voices, nearly 100 feet tall, marks the gateway to the park...
...population...
...Yet in both 4th and 8th grade—the two grades the state has tested throughout the Bloomberg administration—New York City students since 2002 have made substantially larger reading and math gains than the rest of the state...
...Tommy Franks (ret...
...Of course, it would be foolish to believe that our public schools at the brink of the Cultural Revolution of modern decades were solely, even mainly, the result of nativist prejudice...
...It is intimate, heartfelt, and personal, but it is not for those who "prefer their monuments to be monumental...
...Trees encircle the bowl to formally sanctify the field as "A common field one day...
...We do agree with Last that the temporary memorial is a moving place...
...Tom Ridge Honorary Co-Chairmen Flight 93 National Memorial Campaign Bloomberg Report Card In "The Mystery of Michael Bloomberg" (May 14), Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin mistakenly claim that "math scores in middle schools have declined" since Mayor Bloomberg won control of New York City's public schools in 2002 and installed Chancellor Joel Klein...
...Neal McCdjskey Washington, D.C...
...More than half the math gains Bloomberg cites occurred before his policies were put into place...
...The Hon...
...Here is what really matters: Although Protestants, Catholics, and Jews differed on fundamental religious and moral questions (and still do), there's no reason to doubt that most Americans during the Age of Consensus, Protestants and Catholics and Jews, would have agreed with Teddy Roosevelt when he described his ideal (which happened to be his father): "He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness and great unselfishness...
...Not through "obelisks or domes" but in forms unique to the event and its place, the permanent memorial will pay tribute to 40 selfless patriots who saved our nation's Capitol...
...Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin respond: After six and a half years in office, sole control of the schools, and an additional $4 billion in school spending, Mayor Bloomberg still has little to show in the way of educational reform...
...The Visitor Center will also offer such opportunities...
...Additionally, a tree-lined walkway and 40 memorial groves extend a mile around the field...
...To impose a monument at the Sacred Ground, where the plane crashed, would be disrespectful, preempting its primary significance as the final resting place of the Flight 93 victims and as the focal point of the 2,200-acre national park...
...No such golden age ever existed...
...He cites a 5.2 point jump in reading scores, but state scores, bereft of Bloomberg's billions in spending, went up 7.7 points...
...These "reformers" tried to channel children into their public but nondenomi-national (or "nonsectarian" as the word was defined then) Christian schools by making those institutions the only ones that were free...
...School's Out Forever There was a lot to agree with in David Gelernter's "A World Without Public Schools" (June 4...
...This Age of Coercion still haunts us today, as a new breed of reformers has to fight voucher battles in the courts as well as in the public square in an effort to attain the future that Gelernter envi-sions—where public education is redefined as the public's responsibility to fund children's education, at the schools of their parents' choice...
...I also want to deny Gelernter's assertion that public schooling enjoyed an Age of Consensus from roughly 1820 to 1970...
...Better face that fact and make the best of it (while hoping for its eventual return) than ignore it and let our children suffer while we dream on...
...And now it's gone...
...He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruth-fulness...
...David Cantor Press Secretary NYC Department of Education New York, NY...
...Honesty, courage, discipline, absolute moral standards based ultimately on the Bible and Judeo-Christian tradition—these were widely agreed throughout America, in outline if not in detail, during my so-called Age of Consensus...
...And through the Flight 93 National Memorial, such heroism will be appropriately and enduringly remembered...
...And Catholics were not alone in being left out of the public school consensus...
...These figures represent huge numbers of human beings and great scope for bigotry and conflict...
...Iwant to praise David Gelernter for having the guts to make an eminently logical—but politically deadly—proposal: Give public education money to parents instead of government-run, conflict-ridden public schools...
...Indeed, knowing the full, strife-laden history of American public education only solidifies Gelernter's point, demonstrating that far from forging consensus, public schooling is inherently divisive...
...Libby Sternberg Lancaster, Pa...
...It's also true that even if every last American Catholic agreed on education during my Age of Consensus, and everyone else agreed in opposing the Catholic view, nothing remotely approaching today's split down the middle would have been possible...
...therefore, it makes much more sense to base public education on parental choice than government control...
...In this year's reading results, released two weeks ago, 8th-grade scores rose 5.2 points, the largest increase for city middle-school students since the state implemented standards-based testing in 1999...
...Contrary to the assertion that it won't allow left-behind tributes, the walls at the Sacred Ground are designed to accommodate public tributes at the heart of the memorial and where the names of the 40 heroes will be inscribed...
...Gelernter's age of consensus also saw regular grappling over nonreligious issues...
...Elsewhere TR commends "ordered discipline" as good for moral and physical culture...
...The pace of improvements has been so slow as to fall within the range of statistical error...
...Mann fought for universal, nonsectarian public schools his whole life...
...Sacred Soil Having read Jonathan V. Last's, "The Memorials We Deserve" (May 28), we would like to provide a more accurate description of the Flight 93 National Memorial design, which incorporates a great diversity of input, including that of the Families of Flight 93, community members, design professionals, and the National Park Service...
...The 19th century was wracked by battles between Protestants and Roman Catholics, conflicts that ultimately produced not a consensus within public education, but a separate Catholic school system that by 1965 enrolled almost 5.5 million students...
...Visitors will leave a long road from the tower to enter the bowl area along a walkway that marks the flight path of United Flight 93...
...Gen...
...There were also widespread debates over whether some groups, including African Americans and Asians, should be permitted to get any public education at all...
...But the numbers are a side issue...
...Such heroism is "monumental...
...And as for graduation rates, leaving aside dumbed-down standards, according to the state only 50 percent graduate—not the 60 percent Bloomberg claims...
...But today the story is different...
...A field of honor forever...
...David Gelernter responds: Libby Sternberg and Neal McCluskey raise valid objections centering on the anti-Catholic prejudice that infected the American public during the period I call the Age of Consensus...
...pro- or anti-anything...
Vol. 12 • June 2007 • No. 38
