Submitted by John Dewey, Feb 12, 2008 05:18

Quinn's plan won't work. Money is not as important as one's mental health. I am a retired teacher and I taught in a high school dubbed by its staff as Prostitute Heights ( the school has now been 'reorganized', whatever that means.) The issue is kids whose parents are 15 years older than themselves, kids most of whom weren't properly raised. That's one aspect; the other is a lack of responsibility: we are all for everyone's rights. There needs to be, as they put it today, a paradigm shift, as relevant as Einstein's views replaced Newton's in physics, and that is that rights need to be rethought of as rights and responsibilities. These kids need to know the consequences of their disruptive acts so that those kids who really want to learn but can't because of the actions of so many of their peers can learn. Discipline, in other words, is paramount in education. And, on other side of the teacher's desk, teachers need to be taught in universities that have to stop revising our history as America, the land of repression and all sorts of bad things. In the current issue of "City Journal" is an article by Ibn Warraq, entitled "The West is the Best." I would suggest that all schools of education read it. Of course, my little comment seems wishful thinking because the real issue is why the vast majority of our school population is minority and poor: why have the middle class, both black and white, fled the public school system? The answer is obvious. Just ask any teacher who's been around for a while. As one of my colleagues has so succinctly put it, there is a lack of institutional memory -- of how things used to be done.

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