Schools Had Their Chance: Give Us Vouchers

* The battle against vouchers is starting already with the publication of “The Voucher System: Simply Un-American” in your Orange County Voices column June 25.

The author, Frank Spittle, a former educator, writes that “It’s time to listen to people in the front-line trenches directing our classrooms.” Who else have we been listening to all these years as the schools deteriorated nationwide?

The teachers unions bear a lot of responsibility for the plight of American education.

I can afford to send my children to private schools and I have done so after a series of experiences with Saddleback Unified schools in the early 1980s.

The people who need vouchers are the inner-city parents who are trapped in hellish schools with no alternative.

My old high school in Chicago would have closed like so many parochial schools in the older cities but for a group of dedicated alumni. It has become a prep school for black children of blue-collar parents. It sends 96% of its graduates to college.

While it has survived, most of the other Roman Catholic schools in Chicago have closed. Vouchers would save them and the children who need what the abysmal public schools in the inner city do not provide.

The highest level of support for vouchers comes from black inner-city parents. I wonder how many teachers and politicians there send their children to public schools? Not the Gores and the Clintons.

We don’t need vouchers here in Orange County. We need them for the inner-city schools, which are failing the children of minorities just at the time when education is more important than ever in finding a job.

We just cannot afford to lose a whole generation of children so that Spittle’s union can cling to its power.

MICHAEL T. KENNEDY

Mission Viejo

* Reading Frank Spittle’s opinion, I was expecting the usual boilerplate protecting the public educators’ monopoly. I was not disappointed.

But then one paragraph did seem notable: “As a teacher, I’m particularly concerned that vouchers would skim many of the best students from public schools.”

What does that say about public schools? Spittle’s concern that public schools might thus lose role models is revealing.

It is the collective bargaining mentality, that no teacher deserves more or fewer rewards based on performance, which runs headlong into the “unfair” differences in IQ of the students.

If only they were all the same. Meanwhile, to mitigate this circumstance, why not sacrifice some of the best to help the less fortunate? In reality this is exactly what is happening.

The students with the highest IQs get bored early with the mediocre curriculum; by the time they reach some of the offerings called honors classes, they have already learned to get along without doing the work it takes the average student to get ahead.

The sport becomes to see how little it takes to get the required grades. Those then are the role models, not the ones the writer expects. “Work is for suckers” might sum it up.

And the less fortunate? Well, they are smart enough to notice. The result, as with any enterprise without a bottom line, is waste--waste of many of the brightest.

Who would have thought that we would have to go to India to find the intellectual talent to fill the high-paying jobs that are open all over the country?

What it takes to change this system is vouchers.

H.R. RICHNER

Costa Mesa

* There is a close correlation between the U.S. Postal Service and the public school system. Both are semi-monopolistic. In fact, competition with the postal service was forbidden for most of this country’s history.

Both are ineffectual bureaucracies hamstrung by politically powerful unions that consistently take the Luddite position that innovation threatens their members.

Both are further hampered by a hodgepodge of legislation, regulation and legal rulings, the combination of which produces a whole panoply of unintended, injurious consequences that cannot be corrected.

When Congress finally allowed private companies to compete aggressively with the Postal Service, a whole new industry arose, typified by companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service.

The Postal Service, faced with competition, was released from most legislative oversight, which diminished the political influence of the postal workers union, allowing greater innovation. The results were the service got its act together, and overall mail service was vastly improved by the combination of private and public mail service.

Spittle correctly states that attitude and behavior are the paramount issues influencing successful learning outcomes. He admits that private schools achieve better results than public schools, but argues that this is only because they’re not required by law to accept all children.

But parents aren’t concerned about children in the aggregate. They’re concerned about their own child’s education.

If their child’s grades improve significantly as a result of a change from public to private schooling, and the change is attributable to improved attitude and behavior, then the cause of the problem must have been motivational deficiencies in the public school environment.

DAN EMORY

Huntington Beach