Letter to the Editor 1/12

To the Editor,

Your editorial on President Obama’s education proposals demonstrates the… To the Editor,

Your editorial on President Obama’s education proposals demonstrates the same naïve optimism that propelled the junior senator from Illinois to the White House.

In place of dealing with the real concerns, Obama is attempting to “hope” us to a better education system.

Universities pledge to broaden enrollment in their education programs — wonderful, except that it is a quantitative solution in place of a qualitative one. It’s reminiscent of a joke from Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” in which two women are conversing at a resort: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible,” says one. The other one replies, “Yeah, I know, and such small portions.”

President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have demonstrated a complete unwillingness to address a major factor in the poor performance of America’s’ education system — teachers’ unions.

An article in the American Journal of Political Science by Terry Moe concluded, “Collective bargaining appears to have a strongly negative impact [on children’s education] in the larger [school] districts,” particularly noting the effects on minority populations.

Instead of taking these conclusions to heart, Congressional Democrats, beholden to the teachers’ unions, killed the funding for the D.C. Voucher program. The program had marked success in improving children’s safety and parental satisfaction with the education of their offspring.

If Barack Obama really wants to improve our education system, he’ll stop catering to the destructive teachers’ unions, devise ways of helping schools reward good teachers while expurgating bad ones from the system and foster an environment in which charter school programs, such as the one in Washington, can flourish.

In the meantime, all we have is “hope” that we can create better teachers without a system of proper rewards. Why don’t we just start up the backyard furnaces and band together for a Great Leap Forward while we’re at it?

Steve Kaszycki

School of Information Sciences