Education showdown.

AuthorMerriman, Allen
PositionLetters - Letter to the editor

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I found Katherine Mangu-Ward's "Education Showdown" (May) to be a very informative and even hopeful review of the status of education reform. There was, however, one quote in the article that raised a major point she may have overlooked: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers stated that "when education reform is done without teachers' input, it is doomed to failure."

There is no reasonable expectation that such teacher input can be constructively provided by or through teachers' unions. That source has only the interest of the union itself in mind and is not interested in representing valid classroom concerns. Union input simply does not equal teachers' input.

Allen Merriman

Amherst, NH

As a longtime teacher and teacher educator, I found that "Education Showdown" failed to deal with the most obvious reason for the failure of public schools to successfully educate low-income students. This is not basically the fault of teachers and their unions, as is claimed. The problem lies in the attitudes of the single mothers of these youngsters (their fathers are conspicuously absent). By and large, these women care very little about how much their children learn in school. Thus it is useless to argue that if these welfare females simply had "some say...

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