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Letter on Aurora East Schools
Aurora Beacon News I read with sadness but not surprise that Aurora East's middle schools have failed their NCLB requirements and are being restructured. How predictable, and how pointless. The restructuring will apparently involve intensifying students' reading and math instruction. Has it occurred to anyone that there must be something horribly wrong with Aurora East's elementary schools if they produce students who need this kind of remedial intensity in sixth grade? Our public school administration has been nationally and systematically gutting our elementary school curricula of phonics and basic arithmetic for a hundred years now. It is no wonder that our middle schools cannot make much of children who have spent the last six years guessing at words during reading class and playing with blocks in math class. Asking the unionized public school monopoly to reform itself is like asking the fox to reform the chicken house. We cannot fix the monster; we must replace it, with a privatized solution that fosters competition and that has a motivation to serve its customers rather than just itself. How many more decades will we put up with this perennial failure? We can change things only by voting out the elected representatives who owe their political existence to the teachers' unions (NEA and AFT), and by voting in people who have the guts to throw the public school administration out. Until we develop the collective will to do this, our children will continue suffering the pathetic mediocrity that we adults keep inflicting upon them.
David Ziffer |
