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.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

‘Graduation at Sixteen’

As a teacher in the New York City schools for the past 38 years I was very unimpressed with Mike Gravel’s simplistic and naïve oped piece of fixing our schools [Oped, “Graduation at Sixteen,” August 30, 2007].

For example, he reiterates the well-known fact that Japanese and European students turn in academic performances that are light years ahead of American children. He attributes this educational success to the fact that in Europe and Asia, kids spend more days in the classrooms than our American counterparts.

Therefore, if we instituted year-round schooling our kids would magically catch up to the foreign youngsters. This is akin to the old Southern folk tale of the jumping frog. When a farmer tells his frog to jump, it jumps. One day the farmer cuts off the frog’s legs and yells, “Jump!” The frog does not jump. The farmer comments, “You see when you cut off a frog’s legs it makes them deaf.”

Foreign students out pace us for many reasons not mentioned in the article. They have more parental involvement with children, they have cultures that value education and learning, they have higher social status for teachers, they have more qualified educators, they have zero tolerance for violent students. The list is endless.

In Japan they do not staff their schools with warm bodies the way we do here in New York City. Moreover, Japanese teachers are looked up to as professionals — they are respected on a par with doctors and chief executive officers and are highly paid. Mr. Gravel merely cherry picks minor aspects of the European and Asian educational systems to support the anti-teacher and anti-union agenda of the press.

This is why he goes on to talk about why merit pay, ending tenure, and distributing vouchers will morph our education system into an academic utopia.

Maybe he could explain to us why foreign school systems work so well with neither merit pay nor vouchers, but with job security for teachers.

ROBERT GRANDT
Teacher of Library
Brooklyn Technical High School
New York, N.Y.


Please address letters intended for publication to the Editor of The New York Sun. Letters may be sent by e-mail to editor@nysun.com, by facsimile to 212-608-7348, or post to 105 Chambers Street, New York City 10007. Please include a return address and daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

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.


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