Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘The UFT’s Oasis’
As a result of an exchange with the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, the editor of the Sun holds out hope that she and the union may come to see it in their interest to support school vouchers [“The UFT’s Oasis,” Opinion, September 12, 2005].
However, my own recent encounter with Ms. Weingarten and other UFT leaders suggests they lack the rudimentary courage to stand up and blaze a path for school choice or other fundamental educational reforms.
I refer to a February briefing of the SUNY Board’s Charter School Committee, on which I serve, about the UFT’s application to open a charter school. Among other objections raised at this meeting, I criticized the UFT’s choice of an ineffective program called Everyday Mathematics, which teaches what reputable critics call “fuzzy math” because of its failure to build solid computational skills. Auspiciously – and surprisingly, given the reigning educracy’s usually lockstep public defense of its actions – Ms. Weingarten concurred, indicating she too was “not comfortable” with the program and suggesting that this and other of the proposed curricular decisions might eventually be reconsidered.
But in the end, the UFT retained Everyday Mathematics for use in its (eventually approved) new charter school, pledging vaguely only to “supplement and enrich” it. That is, although Ms. Weingarten’s “heart was in the right place,” she and her colleagues would not brave openly admitting this pedagogical error – one of many that in fact subvert student achievement.
In actual practice, though, according to several sources, the UFT intends to employ a different, more solid math program in its charter school, thus helping to make of it what Ms. Weingarten dubs, apparently without irony, an “oasis.”
In other words, the UFT charter school may well succeed by adopting best practices – but “under cover,” so as not to rile the phalanx of special interests (namely, teachers, education school professors and administrators, State Education Department employees, textbook publishers, test writers, consultants, and others) that benefits from the status quo.
Ms. Weingarten, in all fairness, deserves at least some credit for taking even these sub rosa steps toward school reform. But it will take far more intrepid truth-saying by educators and politicians before the 1,200 regular union-dominated public schools get their chance at becoming “oases.”
CANDACE DE RUSSY
Bronxville, N.Y.
Ms. de Russy is a trustee of the State University of New York Board and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
If Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare [“The Impossibility of Biography,” Carl Rollyson, Arts & Letters, August 24, 2005], and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he did – then we have before us one of the most extraordinary coincidences of all time:
Someone with the very same name, living in the very same place at the very same time as Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
EDWARD R. MICCA
Bayport, N.Y.
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