11/01/2006
Dear Editor:
In your September article “Educational Entrepreneurs” (September 2006) , I am listed as founder of Girls Preparatory School in Manhattan. While nothing would make me prouder, I am, in fact, one of many. The effort was actually started by my friends Bryan Lawrence, Eric Grannis and Miriam Lewis Raccah, who recruited me and the rest of the founding board members to help get the school off the ground.
On another note, the article concludes that
the wide charter school effort could be in vain because “based on test scores,
charter schools’ average performance is no higher than that of public schools,”
and some charter schools end up closing. The problem with this analysis is
two-fold:First, state-run schools in the study received nearly twice as much government funding as the charter schools. New York Times columnist John Tierney notes that if GM bragged that its $40,000 cars ran as well as Toyota’s $25,000 cars, people would find it ludicrous. Yet the educational establishment sees validation from the fact that charter schools can’t do better than match their schools at half the cost. Imagine what the results would be if charter schools received equivalent funding.
Of course, parity is not the goal. It is more important to realize that even if the average charter school is only equivalent to the average state-run school, over time, charter schools will be better, because the worst charter schools are constantly being closed and the most excellent ones are growing and being replicated. This free-market dynamic is absent for most stagnant inner-city school systems.
Airline deregulation spawned the uncomfortable People’s Express and luxurious Jet Blue, but market competition ensured that only one survived. As a result, someone who works as a clerk at Costco today can afford to fly comfortably from New York to Los Angeles for a holiday—something that was unthinkable in the pre-deregulation 1970s.
Great education for children is surely more important than a better air travel experience, but the defense of an antiquated, monopoly system is vigorous.
Boykin Curry, New YorkHeated Disagreements
Dear Editor:
I attended a weeklong discussion of climate issues, where evidence given by a multitude of well-credentialed experts support Mr. Gore’s claims, so I was surprised to read the letter from James Martin in your September issue (page 22).
I refer Mr. Martin to Sourcewatch.org (part of the nonprofit Center for Media & Democracy that investigates public relations spin and propaganda) for an illuminating history and description of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, headed by Arthur B. Robinson, “an eccentric scientist who has a long history of controversial entanglements with figures on the fringe of accepted research.”
The petition Mr. Martin cited dates back to April 1998, and the National Academy of Sciences issued an unusually blunt formal response to it: “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.” Sourcewatch.org also states that when questioned in 1998, Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists or meteorologists, “and only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science—such as meteorology, oceanography and glaciology—and almost none were climate specialists.”
A recent study (Oreskes—Science, December 3, 2004) of 928 peer-reviewed papers on global warming in scientific journals found evidence of human-induced warming in all 928; zero showed otherwise.
Judith Kolata, Chicago
Realpoli-Critique
Dear Editor:
In “Err America” (August 2006)
Julia Sweig begins her piece: “Resentment of the U.S. . . . especially among our
allies . . .” This illuminates her false premise.
With a few exceptions, we
do not have, and have not had, allies. What we had are nations that assumed they
might some day need us to defend them against the Soviet Union. Lacking that
threat, they feel they can afford to be as hostile to us as their national and
commercial interests require.
Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s foreign
minister, was correct, if undiplomatic, when he noted that nations do not have
friends, but merely interests.
Len Winner, Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.