Readers respond to the 'save our schools' December/January issue.

• Author: Doerr, Edd
• Position: WE HEAR YOU - Letter to the editor

The Progressive's special issue on saving public education is superb, setting an example that should be emulated by other journals and newspapers. We simply must stop the drives by the pseudo-reformers, plutocrat non-educators, and would-be theocrats to wreck and privatize our public schools.

--Edd Doerr

President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Silver Spring, MD

Reading your excellent education issue reminded me of the one terrible year I spent as an employee of a test scoring company in the Twin Cities area. The main purpose was to ensure a steady flow of testing contracts, no matter the effects on the tested students and their teachers. I urge the readers of The Progressive to weigh in on the shortcomings of unscrupulous test scoring companies and their effects on real education.

--Willard B. Shapira

Roseville, MN

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Obama both support charter schools, as do a large fraction of Americans. If progressives and the political left don't start moving with the times, the times will move without 'em. That means you guys!

--Francisco Velasco

I just finished your blockbuster double issue on education. I found it over the top, which perhaps is a danger of single-issue magazines. With a couple of exceptions, particularly Ruth Conniffs "Progressive Vision for Education," which at least presents an alternative, it's eighty-plus pages of attacks on charter schools. Do charters ever do anything right? Is the "progressive" model for education the traditional public school, with all of its flaws? Is school choice anathema to progressive thinking? I would hope not.

I know whereof I speak. I'm on the school board of one of the nation's largest urban-suburban school systems. We dropped our only charter this year and now can proudly boast that not one of our 174 schools is a charter. I opposed the closing. Those parents had chosen the school because they thought it was best for their kids. To me, that's a progressive concept.

--Mike Bowler

Catonsville, MD

As a lifelong resident of New Orleans, education advocate, and former member of the Orleans Parish School Board and Louisiana state school board, I know public schools in New Orleans have improved significantly since Hurricane Katrina devastated our city ("Charter Schools Flood New Orleans" by Kristen Buras). We all needed to make tough decisions on behalf of our children, and while I may not agree with all of them, I do know the facts.

* Teach For America did not...