Public schools let down learning disabled student

To the teacher who will support private schools with her tax dollars only when they adhere to all the regulations of public schools, I say consider the following: My wife and I worked our way to undergraduate and advanced college degrees. That and years of hard work have given us respectable incomes.

Part of our reward is that we have no choice but to pay large amounts of taxes to support public schools that did not help our learning disabled child.

During three years with one of the best public schools in Georgia, we were alternately stonewalled, lied to and ignored. We experienced the patronizing of a self-styled education elite that thinks that only they know what is good for our children, that benighted parents seeking private sector help will fall into the hands of charlatans, and that the problems with education today can be solved if the public would “just send us better students.”

I went from being a strong supporter of public education to being sadly disillusioned. Most parents of learning disabled children must struggle financially to keep a child in private school, and sometimes must make the painful choice of which of two or more children will get that help.

Public school at its best is an institution that teaches children their place in the social hierarchy. For learning disabled kids, it is a nightmare that steadily erodes their self confidence, frustrates their attempts at learning, and undermines their ego. The Individual Education Plans —- the IEPs —- designed for these children range from being inadequate to being mere Band-Aids.

I know of a Cobb instance where an autistic child was “helped” by watching Barney videos. If education in Georgia is underfunded, special education is scandalously so.

Lastly, I consider it idiotic to say that parents should not abandon but support public education to make it better for their children.

Even minor improvements to this stone colossus take years of large-scale, concerted effort. Our children do not have that kind of time. Would you seriously expect loving parents to keep a learning disabled child in public school for “the common good” if they can afford private school?

I don’t support the voucher legislation now under consideration in the General Assembly because it excludes parents with children already in private schools by limiting the vouchers to those now enrolled in public schools.

What parent wants to remove a special needs child from a helpful educational environment to re-enroll the child in public school for a year of lost ground and unhappiness, and then try to get re-accepted in a good private school according to the timing requirements of current legislation?

Parents of special needs kids in Georgia have the right to be angry with both public education and our exalted Legislature.

TOM WALKER

Roswell

Voucher evidence is not convincing —- yet

As a free market advocate, I hate to side with the AJC, but they’re right —- the evidence on private school vouchers is weak. I read the studies on Milwaukee and Washington and the results underwhelmed me, particularly in Milwaukee which has had vouchers for many, many years. In Washington where public school students had the higher scores overall, the only voucher students who did better came to private schools with high performance already or who came from decent public schools. To my thinking, their stronger scores could be credited to their original public schools. We have to see bigger improvements to win public support of vouchers. We don’t seem to be there yet.

BARBARA TOWNSEND

Atlanta

Students graded on too gentle a curve

As a recently retired high school teacher from DeKalb schools, I read with amusement about the discrepancy between the End of Course Test scores and the grades on report cards. That “A” students can fail the EOCT does not surprise me since report cards and the EOCTs do not measure the same thing. The EOCTs try to measure only one thing —- achievement.

In the grades on report cards, teachers must include tests and quizzes; they must also include “effort,” grades on homework and class work, along with the averages of vague evaluations of projects and participation. Before I retired, I had to reduce the amount of “achievement” in my grading formula from 70 to 50 percent so I could award more points for these other measures. Now, report cards merely measure the extent to which students go through the motions. Students no longer have to learn as much to pass a course.

PATRICK WELSH

Chamblee

Vouchers subsidize families with means

A recent letter writer complained about the lack of competition with public schools, saying they would be better with more competition. But there are many private schools that compete with public schools.

I sent my daughter to a private school. I neither expected nor wanted a voucher.

Anyone can choose to send their child to a private school. Giving school vouchers is just a way to offset part of the cost of private schools for better-off citizens who can afford private schools. The difference between the voucher amount and the actual costs of private schools is more than the average middle-class person can afford.

All vouchers would do is reduce the funding of public schools and make it that much harder to receive a quality education. The historical ability to acquire a quality public education has enabled our country to achieve a level of unmatched prosperity.

I am not an educational expert. Therefore, I don’t know why our public schools are not performing as well as they did in my youth. And, I don’t know how to fix them. I have opinions, but you know what they say about opinions. They are like noses. Everyone has one and some are bigger than others.

However, I do know that taking funding away and giving it to well-off people to subsidize their cost of sending their children to an expensive private school is not going to help improve the quality of education for the majority unable to afford private schools.

PETER BANCHERI

Atlanta