Michael Mayo The Sun-Sentinel

March 19, 2011

Michael Mayo
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: “Everybody talks about education…” – Some comments on your column today about education and the teaching profession.

Mr. Mayo,

“…but nobody ever does anything about it.” Education and the teaching profession are like law and justice. In both instances no good can come from assuming that the words mean the same thing.

My major premise is in the form of a question.

“Why can’t Johnny read?”

Lest I have the dreaded word police on me Johnny means Juanita, Etienne, Fatima, and Vlad.

“We’re #1” cheers roared through the air this morning. Florida leads the nation in prisoner tax scams. If it weren’t for Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas we would be in a dead heat with Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Pitcairn Island on the Educational Richter Scale.

My first Pie in the Sky Solution: All elected officials, all educational apparatchiks, from the President of the United States to the Secretary of Education to the Diversity Expert employed by the Broward County Board of Education shall enroll all their school age children in the nearest public school. No exceptions.

If spending per student is the gold standard of public education why isn’t the Washington, DC school system the best in the world? No place spends more per child. Forget about National Merit Scholars. Pulitzer Prizes and the occasional Nobel Prize should be announced at every PTA meeting.

My second Pie in the Sky solution: Shouldn’t the 10th grade math teacher be held to the same standard as the football coach?

“No child left behind” is ending its first decade. The Department of Education was “created” in 1978. Big Bird has been trying to teach inner city [“inner city”? – that’s a euphemism, isn’t it?] children to read since 1970. Head Start has been around since 1964. Am I the only one to see a pattern here? Although they are not as old as the Federal Housing Authority they are on the same successful pattern that was set down by it..

The only entity with a worse record is the Syrian and Egyptian air forces whenever they go nose to nose with the Israelis.

If a patient enters a hospital with a stomach ache and fails to respond to treatment would not Logic and the Scientific Method demand that the course of treatment be changed? Whatever is dripping through the IV bag ain’t working. Maybe it’s time for leeches. Maybe it’s time for alchemy. Maybe it’s time to bring back canings. Maybe it’s time to make pi 3.0. Lord knows that the evidence of our own eyes shouts that it can’t be worse.

The private/public debate over salaries and benefits comes down to one thing. Public entities have no accountability to anyone but themselves. Thus, when a state grand jury says that if the Broward County School System were a horse it would be shot, the Superintendent says, “We’ll do better. I promise” and no one says boo.

The best thing that can be said about the whole thing is that there appears to be more horse’s asses than crooks. Having said that it is well to note that not even a hot stove would be safe from those grifters. The really vile ones begin every sentence with “It’s for the children”. At least kids could learn a trade from crooks. What the Hell can they learn from people with degrees in education? Talk about damning with faint praise.

Why not have Charley Sheen run the damn thing? He could earn his keep by being a constant negative example.

One of my favorite print ads read “Ears Pierced – While You Wait”. At least it had the advantage of clarity.

Your quoting a typical unintelligible ukase constructed from deep in the bowels of the educational leviathan suggests several things:

1 – The sentence quoted is the result of an accidental sister/brother mating of an Alpha female pole dancer and an Alpha male persiflage producer. Think of the elite of the Post Office and the best of Motor Vehicle bureau contributing to the educational gene pool.



#2 - Strunck & White, Jacques Barzun, Russell Kirk, James Jackson Kilpatrick. Do any of these names ring a bell? Have they been struck from the rolls of literate, engaging teachers of grammar, composition, and style? You used to be a sports writer. Why not have Grantland Rice, Arthur Daley, Red Smith, and Jim Murray in the English curriculum? The possibilities are endless. Nouns, verbs, sentences, syntax, prose – Be still my heart.

#3 – As to the bill being incomprehensibly unreadable I suggest that there is a paradigmatic template for both embracing it and passing it and then embracing it yet again. Did not the head Hecate, the harridan in chief, the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, tell us in re ObamaCare?

“We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”




Kevin Smith




PS – Tell me again why a “bad” teacher is paid as much as a “good” teacher. Tell me again why a “bad” teacher is paid at all. Tell me why the Broward County School System still has “diversity experts”, the last one having gone to jail. I remember the first time we had a “teachable moment” in the American educational system. The Russians launched Sputnik because Americans did not study hard enough. Less than 12 years later we bitch slapped gravity and got to the moon without benefit of PCs, microprocessors, or even calculators. We didn’t even use the metric system.We walked around and flew home with a bag filled with souvenirs. Go Governor Scott! Next stop, Mars!