Correspondence
Correspondence IDENTITY CRISIS IN "LET'S SEE SOME ID, PLEASE" (September 9), Fred Barnes doesn't mention the main objection to a supposedly secure national ID card: It would make life easier for...
...Of course, the 2 + 2 = 5 example is intentional hyperbole...
...The purveyors of progressive ideas circumvent the need to persuade rational adults by teaching their values directly to our children, knowing full well the kids are not yet intellectually equipped to arbitrate between values they learn at school and values they learn at home...
...Whenever there's a gold-standard ID you can be sure that terrorists and other enemies will have one obtained legitimately, by fraud, or through their own manufacture...
...There will be nearly 300,000,000 applicants, and it will require much greater skill to evaluate paper "evidence" than to spot a knife on an X-ray screen...
...NORRIS HOYT Norwich, VT THE ONLY LEGITIMATE PURPOSE of a national ID card is to identify who is a citizen and who is not...
...Their cards could contain additional information such as an expiration date for visitors...
...Competition means two things for educators: They'll have to work harder, and their monopoly on education will be destroyed...
...To demonstrate why this type of measurement is not reliable, let's say a certain curriculum teaches that 2 + 2 = 5. When the test is given, 95 percent of students regurgitate that teaching, answering that 2 + 2 = 5. By viewing only the number of "correct" answers to that question, and not the validity of the question itself, we would determine that the school system was 95 percent effective in transferring that knowledge...
...With this in mind, we must realize that the educational establishment will not do this on its own...
...Any other form of national ID card is just a step on the road to totalitarianism...
...When students parrot this theme in response to test questions, they are scored "correct" even though such an "education" is a far cry from what most parents want for their kids...
...All parents must get involved and force their state legislatures to make vouchers available on demand to all parents, regardless of circumstance...
...School choice is not only about parents saving their children from systems where delivery is poor (low test scores), but also letting them choose what is being delivered...
...Over the past 30 years or so, our educational system has slowly but surely been corrupted, putting things like "self-esteem" and "outcomes" over the rock-solid concepts of reading, writing, and arithmetic...
...But 2 + 2 does not equal 5, and therefore our children would not have been educated properly, test scores notwithstanding...
...WIL JENSEN...
...No name, no address, no social security number...
...Correspondence IDENTITY CRISIS IN "LET'S SEE SOME ID, PLEASE" (September 9), Fred Barnes doesn't mention the main objection to a supposedly secure national ID card: It would make life easier for terrorists...
...A simple red, white, and blue card with the words "American Citizen" emblazoned across it and some biometric data encoded on it, such as a fingerprint, would be acceptable as long as there was no other information on it...
...Immigrants and visitors could obtain their card from the INS...
...If the data on the card matches mine, then I am a citizen and that is all anyone needs to know...
...The so-called "standards" that are used, such as group test scores, only gauge the effectiveness of the school in terms of the children retaining what they were taught...
...And if you think airport bag checkers are incompetent, consider those who will be assigned to decide whether any applicant's "secure evidence" is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a card...
...The sight of this ID will stop all thought processes and alertness on the part of our guardians—they'll assume the bearer of the card is okay and not take a closer look at him...
...While school performance is a critical issue, accepting what the education establishment defines for itself as what's good performance and what's not is pure folly...
...The education establishment, however, would still be able to say, "We are performing effectively, therefore no one from this school district needs a voucher...
...Yes, this will threaten the current educational establish-ment—that's the point...
...Vouchers are appropriate, so the false premise goes, only for poor children and then only in cases where an education-establishment-mandated performance rating has not been met by a "failing" school...
...In other words, how well the faculty is doing in terms of delivery...
...There's no such thing as a counterfeit-proof ID today, especially for foreign or terrorist intelligence agencies...
...ERRECA STORY Mesa, AZ "V" IS FOR VOUCHERS I do not wish to detract from Chester E. Finn's "Leaving Many Children Behind" (August 26/September 2), but I am concerned that, unless he's choosing his battles by omission, Finn has gotten sucked into a false premise that is left unchallenged far too often in almost every mainstream article on the subject of school vouchers and school choice since the Supreme Court ruling (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris) that vouchers do not violate the Establishment Clause...
...But substitute "America was formed by conquest and murder of indigenous peoples," and you get the idea...
...However, such standards do not address the subject matter itself...
...Believe me, my dog will get his own ID without difficulty...
...Many families have two working parents, and it is important that parents be able to place their children in schools that reflect their own values, not those of the elite intelligentsia...
...Any parent in any financial circumstance should be allowed to opt their child out of the public school system for any reason they choose, without suffering a financial penalty (which a voucher alleviates in large part...
...If educators know that parents are empowered to yank their kids out of schools in response to unacceptable material, such material will disappear from curriculums all over the map as schools compete for students...
...The card need have no other data on it...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 2
