Letters: Teaching Tolerance

Credit: Edutopia

While reading your April/May issue, I noticed an announcement for a civil rights curriculum in "Extra Credit: Goodies for the Teacher and Student." [1] This stimulated a recollection that the Southern Poverty Law Center offers a civil rights curriculum along with an award-winning documentary on Rosa Parks as part of its Teaching Tolerance materials. You can find more information on many programs at the project's Web site, at www.teachingtolerance.org. The kicker? It is all free to educators!

Richard Westberry, PhD

Scores Don't Power Economy

Every few years some group creates a "crisis" about America's future, a future threatened by the poor performance of our schools.

In your article about the current crisis being manufactured over dropouts ("Risky Business: Industry Invests in Schools," [2] April/May 2006), you buy into the fear mongering. In popular culture, it is widely held that high schools graduate only 67 to 70 percent of all students, only half of blacks and other minorities, and only one out of four minorities in urban areas.

The method used for these calculations, though, is flawed. In studies that tracked individual students over time and verified their self-reported attainments by checking actual transcripts, the figures are higher. The on-time graduation rates found in the National Educational Longitudinal Study were 78.3 percent overall, including 82.4 percent for whites, 63.2 percent for blacks, 66.1 percent for Hispanics, and 93.4 percent for Asians.

For a variety of reasons, blacks and Hispanics are less likely to graduate on time, but two years later, the rate for them had risen to three-fourths. (Obviously, there is still room for improvement.) These figures include the 8 or so percent of students who earn a General Education Development certificate (GED), an inclusion some researchers reject.

In fact, the link between K-12 educational achievement, especially test scores, and the economic well-being of developed nations is weak -- and maybe nonexistent. The World Economic Forum's "Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005" shows why. It describes what the WEF calls "the twelve pillars of competitiveness," of which K-12 education is only one. Among the 114 nations ranked for competitiveness, the United States was first, a ranking it also holds in the 2005-2006 report.

Much of the fear mongering about dropout rates is driven by political agendas and ideology and is thus impervious to facts.

Gerald W. Bracey

In "Risky Business: Industry Invests in Schools," John Gage of Sun Microsystems nailed it when he said, "Other countries see education as an investment, but we see it as a cost." This is the same reason most of our cities lack decent public transportation.

What is so interesting about this quote is that it is followed by all the big names in business saying how much it's going to "cost" if we don't change the system. A Catch-22?

It comes down to one issue: money. As the article states, China is spending "billions of dollars to woo big-name scholars and build first-class research laboratories." We give billions to education, but compared to what our government lays out on outdated weapons systems, farm subsidies, and health care programs, it's a pittance.

Gage is again quoted at the end, saying education "must be the absolute center of everything we do." Another interesting idea, of course, but not even close to reality. We don't value education, because it "costs" too much.

As an elementary school computer teacher, I am disappointed by the small amount of time the students use computers. Of course, the classroom teachers are worried about how well students will do on their standardized tests. We don't test for tech savvy. Consequently, it isn't on the list of priorities.

One issue all your big business boys are right about is the quality of teachers. If you want to attract and keep high-quality teachers, you must pay them well. I have been teaching fifteen years, and I have bachelor's and master's degrees. My annual salary is less than $50,000, and I work during the summer to subsidize my pay. If I were king, I'd switch the education and Pentagon budgets for ten years. Then we could see how our education system stacks up against others in the world.

Jack Nolan

Oh, the Joy

Edutopia is a fantastic magazine (all my educator friends agree), so I was thrilled to be included in "The Daring Dozen: 2006" [3] (March 2006). It's fine company. Thanks so much.

In Wheaton, Illinois, some teachers recently staged a protest and got the school authorities to adopt my book A History of US. Amazingly, the superintendent, when pressed, actually agreed to read the text. But a whole lot of parents aren't happy unless their kids come home with a standard textbook.

Joy Hakim

Correction

In "Candor in the Class: Looking Back to Go Forward" [4] (April/May 2006), the captions identifying guidance counselor Jaime Poris and teacher Kristina Wylie were reversed.

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