School vouchers staunchly defended

School vouchers staunchly defended

I read with amusement the lamentations of Superintendent Gary Richards and then The Acorn’s whining editorial about the unfairness of how test results have belittled our schools’ reputations and will provide ammunition for supporters of vouchers.

Were the schools and their administrators unaware of the 95 percent threshold? If so, why was that, Mr. Richards? Aren’t you responsible for this information getting to the schools? How is it the Department of Education’s fault? Somehow it’s hard to imagine that our illustrious "educators" and their incessant layers of bureaucratic buck-passers, i.e., administrators, were unaware of the test’s 95 percent requirement. The excuse at Oak Park that 17 sophomores were absent one day of the test sounds like the "dog-ate-my-homework" excuse.

The editorialist belches forth Richards’ politically motivated leap to the voucher issue. It’s pathetic to read such editorials that are merely regurgitations of someone else’s political dogma. Both are guilty of using the distract-the-audience trick from where the sleight of hand is really occurring. It’s unfortunate that your knowledge of vouchers is limited to repeating only the garbage dumped in your memory banks by those in opposition. If you delved into the issue, you would discover that our area’s high schools are not the problem. I wonder, though, how many parents in our communities would quietly sit at Back to School nights while union representatives threaten increased class sizes, decreasing arts, etc. unless we vote for a parcel tax to give them more money, if we had to send our children to the dangerous, low-quality and ineffective schools that exist in most inner cities. Imagine sending your child each day to one of these dead-end places where the teachers’ expectations of their students are low, if they have any at all, and the results they achieve fulfill their low expectations? Would you not want to have a choice where to send your child?

Vouchers have been working for years in cities like Cleveland and Milwaukee and are spreading to areas where the schools are nothing more than the illusion of education. Those of you that are willing to sacrifice yet another generation of inner city kids in order to protect a "system" should be ashamed of yourselves for not learning more about this issue instead of just mouthing the teacher union mantra.

Why does the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C. want vouchers for his school district? Why do a large percentage of public school teachers send their children to private/parochial schools?

We all want our public schools to succeed. Where competition for students has been implemented in the inner cities with the use of vouchers, the public schools are improving to meet the competition. Don’t take my word for it; check it out yourself. Get some information to back up your opinion or forever be a blithering idiot mouthing words you know nothing about.

Now back to the question at hand: Whom did we taxpayers pay to make sure the details like the 95 percent participation were understood? Will they be fired for failing? Or are they protected against real world consequences because they live in the unreal world of the public school monopoly?

Bruce Blumenthal

Agoura Hills