Letters
Letters The Right Is Wrong Greig M. O’Brien and Charles Peters’s piece, “Why the Right May be Right” (April 1997), did nothing to change niy long-held belief that the right is, and always...
...Back in 1956, my first year of teaching, I had a class of 39 seventh graders and was shocked when it became clear that only 12 of them could read and write at or near grade level...
...That would make me an appropriate candidate to evaluate the San Francisco rapid transit system or ski conditions in the Ukraine (two subjects I have never experienced and know nothing about...
...This would be a powerful tool for measuring schools’ performance and holding them accountable for results...
...These tests would allow parents and educators to compare the performance of their students with students anywhere else in the nation or the world...
...DANIEL BORREGARD Pitman, NJ Greig O’Brien and Charles Peters have gotten the movement for critical appraisal of the purpose and performance of government institutions off to a very shaky start...
...As a monitor of cabinet departments, the Monthly surely knows that the Department of Education runs no schools, has no authority over state and local education agencies, and is narrowly restricted by Congress in how it may interact with public education...
...you get the picture...
...At least then they won’t be victimized by the vicious profiteering of inanaged care...
...It would also help to identify schools that need help to make the grade...
...DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Washington, D.C...
...Greider’s book (April 1997) includes clichC: “...as resources become more scarce, their prices rise-stimulating more exploration and production (and development of substitutes), with the new supplies eventually lowering prices again,” and error: “That isn’t a hypothetical textbook example...
...Our initiatives to bring educational technology to every school could transform education, particularly in inner-city and rural areas...
...Like most federal agencies, ED is no world-beater...
...While promoting this goal, the feds have carefully avoided seeming to force states to buy in...
...It is also dangerous-and wrong-for the Monthly to excoriate an organization that has no control over the social and economic conditions that have caused so much of the disarray that American public education is experiencing...
...In no way is the right right about ED...
...It is not responsible, even indirectly, for the sorry performance of the District of Columbia’s schools, unqualified teachers, “grotesquely” feather-bedded bureaucracies, dropout rates, or any of a dozen other problems cited in the O’Brien-Peters outburst...
...But the hard right, as personified by Pat Robertson and his ideological soul mates, views any federal presence in education as an abomination, nothing less than a blatant attempt to poison children’s minds by loading their curricula with secular humanism and Satanism...
...But blaming it for the problems of public education is neither accurate nor fair...
...Letters The Right Is Wrong Greig M. O’Brien and Charles Peters’s piece, “Why the Right May be Right” (April 1997), did nothing to change niy long-held belief that the right is, and always has been, wrong...
...I do not, however, think it’s the department’s fault...
...Viva la VA I am writing to respond to Adam Piore’s article about the VA Health Care System in the April 1997 issue...
...Much worse, of course, is the abundance of remarks suitable only for taxicab chatter (e.g., “many” inept teachers...
...It would be interesting to know if independent hospital evaluations, like JCAHO, find VA hospitals to be deficient, but Piore fails to tell us that...
...America’s most serious problems began when he says they ended...
...And the department has been one of the most powerful voices calling for more rigorous academic standards in our schools...
...But nearly all have done so...
...And when did it become a nearcriminal act to staff an organization with people who know something about the field...
...The few programs that it does oversee are closely focused on those areas that states and localities traditionally shortchange-children with disabilities, kids from low-income families, vocational education, and the like...
...Your article on the U. S. Department of Education painted a picture of an organization that does little to challenge the status quo...
...What ED does do, and rather well at that, is exploit the bully pulpit of cabinet status, a mission that Secretary Richard Riley has performed with distinction in his quietly effective fashion, to call attention to national needs and help out when asked...
...Yet in the same issue, you run another article (“Guaranteed Rip-off”) that describes President Clinton’s-and the Department’s-efforts to overhaul the student loan system by battling the system’s middlemen, whom you call a “powerful foe...
...So to me, faulting the department for not being a leader when its mission isn’t considered all that important seems rather pointless...
...Most of all, the department’s proposals for voluntary national fourthgrade reading and eighth-grade math tests would be a catalyst for state and community efforts to raise standards...
...It actually happened in the 1970s and 1980s, with oil...
...I suspect he does so because no such data exists...
...GERALD SROUFE Washington, DC “Why the Right May be Right” takes the Monthly’s anti-bureaucratic bias to illogical and undeserved extremes...
...to support ad hominem arguments...
...We give the cause a lot of lip service and money, but when it comes to the really big bucks required to achieve genuine reform, other things take priority...
...MICHAEL WEBB Chelmsford, MA An Oily Argument David Ignatius’s review of Mr...
...JACK BROWN Jacksonville, IL...
...And a good thing it might have been had education been our top priority at the time...
...it is dangerous...
...Secondly, given the inefficiencies of any hierarchy-governmental or otherwise-I would still rather safeguard the care of our nation’s veterans to the VA...
...How veterans who avoid the VA system are the best judges of its quality is beyond me...
...The Cartel developed price/volunie relationships, and domestic oil producers base their prices on the Cartel’s prices...
...There is no “free market” in oil and never was...
...When the NEA pushed President Carter to establish a federal department of education, it did so because its members felt (perhaps naively) that such a department-especially one with cabinet status-would be a good thing for education in America...
...The DOE and the rest of the education establishment can in no way remedy this situation unless the rest of the country gets behind them and works with them...
...With it went the cost of everything, and it never came down...
...MARSHALL S. SMITH, ACTING DEPUTY SECRETARY, U.S...
...Strip ED of its expertise, and you should logically kick the generals and admirals out of Defense, business people from Commerce, conservationists from Interior...
...The good news is that O’Brien and Peters leave the field wide open for the strong critique of the Department of Education called for in the editorial header...
...In 1973, OPEC confiscated oil production of American companies and shot the price through the ceiling...
...The right is not merely wrong here...
...GEORGE R. KAPLAN Bethesda, MD After reading your April issue, I was left wondering if you folks at The Wa~hingtonM onthly talk to one another enough...
...Although responsible conservatives have spent many years in senior posts there, they nevertheless worry about potentially intrusive federal control of schools-a legitimate concern in any administration...
...In conclusion, I suggest that Mr...
...We are supporting better teaching with a plan to help 100,000 teachers become nationally board-certified and to put at least one of these master teachers in every school in the nation...
...The push for national standards is a classic example...
...Perhaps they would like a second chance...
...schools, described at some length in the article, to the Department of Education, is akin to blaming the Pentagon for local street crime: Congress sees to it that we don’t have the military in our streets or the Department of Education officials in our local schools...
...It did, however, convince me that the Department of Education is ineffective as a leader in education reform...
...The fact is, the department has been a leading agent of change and improvement in American education: The Department’s Direct Lending program took on the special interests, as you acknowledge...
...Ignatius can compare prices and costs of things and people before and after 1973, and learn how wrong his appraisal of reality is...
...First of all, when Piore says, ‘Veterans who avoid the system have consistently stated in government studies that they do so, in large part, because they believe the care is poor,” I hope he was kidding...
...Piore try using actual facts in making his conclusions, rather than syllogism and nonsense...
...administrative bureaucracies “tend to be featherbedded’’), and the use of unnamed and spectacularly weak-credentialed sources (e.g., “one official with a federal agency that works closely with DOE notes...
...Finally, assigning responsibility for the numerous failures of D.C...
...Their effort at a substantive critique of the Department of Education is fraught with sloppy reporting and thinking from the very first sentence, in which they use the incorrect acronym-DOE-to refer to the Department of Education, when it actually belongs to the Department of Energy...
...When I retired in 1982, things hadn’t changed very much...
...Our strong support for public charter schools is helping innovative teachers and parents to work outside the established system in many communities...
...The fact that education has never enjoyed such status in this country is the greatest cause of its problems...
...And when I talk with teachers today, it’s still the same old story: Too many kids lack the basic skills necessary for learning, and too many don’t care about the stuff they’re supposed to learn...
Vol. 29 • June 1997 • No. 6
