Public Schools and Isolationists

* Alex Caputo-Pearl, a sixth-grade teacher in one of California’s “100 worst” schools (“How the Stanford 9 Test Institutionalizes Unequal Education,” Opinion, May 2), rightly fears that the state may “forcefully remove all staff” at John Muir Middle School. Caputo-Pearl offers a litany of excuses for the school’s poor performance--the recent ending of bilingual education and affirmative action, government cutbacks in social spending, unfair standardized tests, classrooms with 35 students of immigrant background, a “society of racial segregation” and “a political system that scapegoats the victims,” to name but a few.

Notably left out in Caputo-Pearl’s litany is any self-responsibility for his students’ poor performance. The sooner the state replaces all excuse-minded teachers in favor of those motivated enough--and paid enough--to lead disadvantaged students of low-income background to academic excellence, the sooner we can achieve our ultimate aim of a just and diverse society.

GREGORY WIRZBICKI

Yorba Linda

* I was struck by the connections between two May 2 Opinion articles. Caputo-Pearl points out that we continue to create hollow but crowd-pleasing solutions to the problem of substandard, inner-city schools--solutions that, like the Stanford 9 test, are of no benefit to the students and teachers in question--then punish the students and teachers when these ill-conceived strategies fail. Clearly what is needed is not more heavy-handedness from the state, but, as Caputo-Pearl suggests, cooperation among teachers, parents and elected leaders.

There’s one big obstacle to this, however, and it’s the subject of Thomas Bender’s “The New Isolationists”: Our middle-class elites are flying away from a sense of community and into the self-absorbed isolation and anonymity of tract-home suburbs.

Public schools do more than educate. By bringing together students and parents from all walks of life, they instill a feeling of community. They are the community’s responsibility. We should not have to legislate and mandate for their care and success. If we care about our schools, we must care enough to act on our own to restore our feeling of community. As much as so many of us would like it to, it will never be legislated down onto us from above.

MARK LOWE

Anaheim