“Would the people who dreamed up busing please come forward with a transportation plan for the parents?”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
SCHOOLS REFLECT SOCIETY
The best known of the blame-the-school documents is A Nation at Risk, from 1983, and it serves as an exemplar of the genre. That inane booklet listed fourteen indicators of education decline, thirteen directly related to test scores. The other one was indirectly related to test scores—the complaints from business and industry about the great sums they have to spend on remedial training.
These indicators proved, the authors wrote, that we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system. Yeah, right!
The schools bore the brunt of criticism over the years of a small variation in test-score decline. However, test scores started increasing, reaching record high levels by 1990. Did the schools get credit for the turnaround?
No! The peak tests scores went totally unnoticed.
This is common. Schools were blamed for letting the Russians get into space first when the USSR launched Sputnik I in 1957. No one mentioned the schools in 1969 when the US put humans on the moon and got them back safely. Russian rockets never managed to even get to the moon.
A Nation at Risk blamed schools for our apparent lack of global competitiveness. A decade later, when headlines such as “The US Economy Back on Top” started appearing in newspapers, no one credited the schools. Many said, “Our schools are failing.”
Just in case you forgot some history, let’s consider test-score declines in context. The decade of 1965–75 opened with the Watts riots in Los Angeles, which were followed by urban violence all over the nation. The free-speech movement exploded onto the streets of Berkeley, California, barely one year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
This was the decade that gave rise to the aphorism, “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.” It was the time of acid rock, Woodstock and Altamont, the Summer of Love, the Beatles, the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1965 came Timothy Leary’s book and slogan Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Not exactly a mantra designed to produce high test scores.
It was a decade when 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam while Country Joe and the Fish sang, “Ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee, we’re all going to die.” It witnessed the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, the Chicago police riot, Watergate, and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.
All of which is an extended way to point out, once again, that schools don’t exist in a vacuum. Everyone knows this, but many forget it when they start thinking about global competitiveness or the information society or the test scores of other nations.
The principle of data-smog interpretation is “Beware of simple explanations of complex phenomena.” This principle might be considered a corollary of a law formulated some seventy years ago by H. L. Mencken: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
My thirty-eight years of teaching experience makes me conclude that schools reflect society; society does not reflect schools.
David A. Hancock
Chester
Write on Preschool Levies
As a proud real estate–tax paying resident and citizen of our community for thirty-five years, I was ruminating and lamenting about our No-No-No voters who chose and decided not to financially support our excellent public school system. Leave no child behind—right!
We are leaving many children behind in my opinion. Oh yes, the war on children is going well in our community, which I’ll call “educational terrorism.”
It appears that the no voters are a morose coterie of avarice, pecuniary, parsimonious mercenaries in their attitude in regard to school finance and funding. Obviously, the panacea would be to rescind the quagmire debacle of Ohio HB920.
We do not want Saddam–spider hole school facilities for our children to try and learn in, do we? We need a safe home away from home for our children with adequate equipment, supplies, well-compensated professional educators, etc., in order to educate our children for a diverse world.
An average of $0.32/day? Big deal! I’m sure many of us spend much more on Starbucks (overrated, phony-facade elitism), alcohol, tobacco, junk food, music, sporting events, entertainment, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Are we getting our money’s worth? I doubt it!
Believe me, we are getting our money’s worth and more in terms of our children’s education.
Are we getting our money’s worth from doctors, lawyers, hospitals, politicians, entertainers, athletes? I doubt it. We are just adding megabucks to their egregious bank accounts.
Remember, if you are not satisfied here, then move to Vegas, Bainbridge, Beachwood, Chagrin Falls, Shaker Heights, etc., and take your child with you. Better yet, go to infant school in France, preschool in Italy, primary school in Japan, secondary school in Germany, and college in the United States.
Let us remember the wit and wisdom of the literary legend Mark Twain: “The greatness of the Nation lies in our Public Schools.” And don’t forget the homeschooling option of isolation.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Write On
Editor:
Intolerant and antagonistic are two words to describe Mr. David Hancock’s 4/18 editorial.
Besides being intolerant to any voter who would dare to vote no on a school levy, he makes an antagonistic remark toward homeschoolers. He mistakenly labels homeschooling an option of isolation.
I wonder if Mr. Hancock is aware that most education took place in American homes with either the parents or a tutor (usually a pastor) providing instruction from the time of the Pilgrims in 1620 into the late 1800s.
Those early Americans were such educational extremists! They actually had the gall to use the family Bible to help the youngsters learn to read by mastering the letters and phonics of the scriptures being repeatedly read to them. Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels throughout the colonies and frontier found a Bible to be in nearly every household.
Were these people very literate? The success of homeschooling was the ability of the average citizen to read and understand the Federalist Papers, which was
